Is our church failing? Have we failed? Is the church as we know it done? It’s all over the headlines. Membership is down. Fewer and fewer people identify with a church. The rise of the “nones.” Let me begin with a disclaimer. The intent of this article is not to upset or offend anyone because I know the health of a congregation can rarely be determined by numbers alone. I see and hear of congregations all over Southern Ohio who are struggling to keep their doors open, but are also working very hard and are successfully being the presence of Christ in their community. I realize that very little about the Parochial Report actually reflects the Kingdom of God. With that being said, we do track data the same way Best Buy, Target, and Starbucks do. The difference is that our data is self-reported rather than being derived from sales transactions. Therefore, it may be less accurate than the above-named stores and may be more likely to be “skewed”. However, it’s what we have and is probably accurate enough for some broad generalizations. So, I downloaded all of the Parochial Reports for all of our congregations for five years, from 2012-2017 (2018 was still incomplete at the time of this writing). That’s over 20,600 pieces of data. I wondered what this data would really tell me and which pieces of data I should focus on. I chose to look at average Sunday attendance (ASA) versus membership numbers, because my gut tells me that that number could be radically inaccurate. Who knows how many dead people, people who moved to Florida or people who have left the church for other reasons are still on the membership records? So, instead of membership, I settled on looking at the columns marked “increases this year” and “decreases this year.” I think all congregations probably know how many new people walked in the door in any given year and most congregations have a good idea of how many people died or moved away in any given year.
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We have traditionally been very focused on how many congregations we have. This is all fine and good, but if we were Best Buy (again, I get that we’re not) then we would be more interested in customers (Episcopalians) than stores (congregations). In fact, in Best Buy’s opinion, stores are a
huge expense and they’d prefer to have fewer stores and more customers. What if we look at the number of Episcopalians instead of the number of congregations? If we do, then we see that 70% of our ASA attends one of 28 congregations. In other words, about 37% of our congregations have 70% of all active Episcopalians in Southern Ohio. So, what does this mean? It means that there can be value to looking at our diocese as a 70/30 split. What do our numbers tell us about where 70% of our parishioners go and what do our numbers tell us about where the other 30% go? If you look at 100% of our parishioners, then our ASA went from 7,195 in 2012 to 6,440 in 2017. That’s a loss of 10.5%. However, if you look only at the 28 churches where 70% of Episcopalians go, their ASA went from 4,757 to 4,501. With a loss of 5.4%, their ASA decreased at only half the rate of the whole. (For simplicity, I’m going to say top 70% and bottom 30%. I know this sounds judgmental, but please know that’s not my intent at all.) The bottom 30% of congregations went from 2,438 to 1,939 over five years, which is a 20.5% loss, or twice the total average and about four times the loss of the top 70%. Loss tracked in actual numbers rather than percentages is: • In 100% of the congregations, we saw a loss of 755 people, or an average of 151 people per year. • In the top 70% of congregations, we saw a loss of 256 people, or an average of 51 people per year. • In the bottom 30% of congregations, we saw a loss of 499 people, or an average of 100 people a year. Any percentage of loss isn’t sustainable over time but I’m not sure that any of these numbers are as bleak as the headlines would imply. I have no solid data to back this up, just my own observation, but it seems for many of our churches that there is a change in how we go to church. Traditionally, a “good” Episcopalian went to church every Sunday, but now it seems that more and more Episcopalians are going to church only two or three times a month. If this is, in fact, the current behavioral trend, then we still have Episcopalians. However, their new behavior will drive down ASA while not necessarily driving down the health of the church.
