Attendance / membership / giving charts for 2005 and prior years, for the Episcopal Church’s (TEC) dioceses and parishes, are available here. I’m not smart enough to do any significant trend analysis, but here’s a couple of data points:
My very-large and very-conservative parish: Following a three-year drop in average Sunday attendance (ASA) in 2002-2004 (part of which was due to renovations of the main church in 2004), we got a modest uptick in 2005, but we’re not quite back up to the five-year plateau we experienced in 1998-2002. Our baptized membership and plate / pledge numbers are essentially flat or down just a bit for 2001 through 2005.
A comparable nearby "liberal" parish: They’re just a few miles away, right next door to Rice University and the Texas Medical Center, and are almost exactly half our size in both ASA and budget. Their ASA was essentially flat for 2001 through 2005, although their baptized membership and plate / pledge numbers were up a bit.
The nationwide numbers probably won’t be able to prove what I strongly suspect to be true: That TEC has wasted years of outreach opportunities among nonbelievers and doubters ("NBDs"). That this is due in large part because die-hard scripturalists, piously certain that they’re right and the rest of us are wrong, have forced everyone else to focus on their complaints of apostasy. We could be proselytizing the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law as the key to our serving God and each other, thereby playing our part in God’s ongoing work of creation. Instead, we in the church have been spending our time, talent, and treasure on theological debates whose very premises, let alone conclusions, are essentially sheer speculation.
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