Rising from the Ashes: The New Anglican Church

Warren Cole Smith
December 24, 2009

According to numbers released in December by the Episcopal Church, that denomination's membership dropped by 3 percent in 2008. That doesn't sound like much, but I am a bit of a demographics junkie, plus I researched and examined a lot of church membership and growth data in writing my book A Lover's Quarrel With The Evangelical Church. I can tell you that I have never heard of a major denomination that has ever lost 3 percent of its membership in a single year.

What's even more interesting about these numbers is that the Episcopal Church now says it has only about 2 million members in its 7,000-some parishes in the United States. That's particularly astounding when you consider that the Episcopal Church had 3.5 million on its rolls in 1965—that's a 43 percent drop from a year when the United States had about half as many people as it does today.

To make these numbers even more troubling (at least, if you're a leader in the Episcopal Church), is the fact that while there may be 2 million on the rolls, it's likely that only about 800,000 people actually attend Episcopal Churches on any given Sunday. the rest