Understanding the Decline in Membership of the Episcopal Church of America

Since 1960 the Episcopal Church has lost about a third of its membership. In 2004 the church reported membership of about 2.2 million people, down from 3.4 million in 1960. It is not a wonder why the church is declining in membership. A discussion after our morning service offers some reason why the denomination is in trouble. Next weekend our diocese meets for its convention in Redding. Of the five major issues on the agenda for discussion - there are a mix of politically correct sentiments and attempts to affirm some things where there is a lot of disagreement. The organizers seems to think that sentiment is the driving force of leadership.

The five agenda items are marked by their banality. One is reminded of Hannah Arendt's phrase the "banality of evil" where ordinary people accepted the premises of their state (could also be the church) and thus participated in actions which were ultimately evil (in this case perhaps not evil in the traditional sense but evil in the sense of affirming important traditions of the church). Three are statements of political correctness - not offensive on their own right but perhaps not at the highest level of importance for the church to pray about. For example, the delegates to the convention will be asked to condemn slavery and to express regret at the church's "complicity" in slavery. Slavery still does exist outside the developed world and Christians should condemn the practice. But the wording of the resolution ignores completely the role of the church in abolishing slavery. William Wilberforce (who was British) was a Methodist, but the Anglicans played a role in helping to build consciousness of the need for abolishing slavery. The same was true in the US where all of the protestant denominations played a role in helping to build the forces against the institution. Harriet Beecher Stowe was afterall a Congregationalist minister's daughter and the wife of a professor at Lane Theological Seminary. A second resolution commits the diocese to paying out 0.7% of its resources in support of the Millennium Development Goals of the UN. (That would amount to a whopping $13,000 annually.) A third would encourage all of the congregations to enhance dialogue and reconciliation with "indigenous" people in the region. (One expect that means what others would call "Native Americans" although the term is not defined.) As noted above, none are especially troublesome but one wonders why these three issues are at the top of the business of the diocese in this year. If we had a real commitment to ending poverty, for example, we might contribute a bit more than $13,000 from the budget of the diocese. Each of these will make the delegates feel good but will they actually do anything of importance?

The last two resolutions are more troubling. The first would ask parishes to reaffirm that their property is "held in trust" by the denomination. All of the mainline protestant denominations have made the claim that like the Catholic Church, the national organization is the holder of the property of the parishes. In the Catholic Church that claim can be demonstrated fairly simply - but in churches less modeled on hierarchy that claim is dubious. Most parishes are build with local investment - in essence the congregation digs deep to put up a church building. In each case in the last couple of years where the Episcopal church has asserted the full and complete right of ownership, it has lost. A recent Pennsylvania ruling suggested that while the property of a Philadelphia church was held in trust for the Episcopal Church, the Bishop did not retain management power over the actual church. Clearly the relationship between the National Church and the Diocese is an evolving area of the law. My suspicion is that the courts will be ultimately unwilling to grant full ownership of church properties absent some real demonstration of actual financial ties. In the case of the parish I attend the diocese did absolutely nothing in helping our parish construct a new sanctuary.

The fifth one would ask churches in the diocese to bless same sex unions. This is an outgrowth of a resolution passed by the General Convention of the Episcopal Church held in Minneapolis a few years ago. The Episcopal Church has a wonderful way of deciding major issues called discernment. Discernment is the "intentional practice by which a community or an individual seeks, recognizes, and intentionally takes part in the activity of God in concrete situations." When the Church went through the sometimes painful decision to ordain women it went through this process. But when it decided to confirm the ordination of a gay bishop in New Hampshire and at the same time to begin a process of recognizing same sex unions, it did not take the time to allow the membership of the church to work through the issue.

The Anglican Communion has spent a lot of time in the recent years trying to deal with the decision made by the ECUSA. They asked the ECUSA to take a breath and to allow the rest of the church to join in the process of discerning what, if anything, should be done in relation to same sex unions. But in the last year, the leadership of the ECUSA has simply ignored its historic ties to the Anglican Communion and has forged full scale ahead regardless of the thoughts of the other parts of the communion.

So what is the leadership of the diocese being asked to express opinions on? From my view it is being asked to affirm three politically correct but meaningless statements and then to ratify the the willful and prideful leadership of the ECUSA is reasonable. From my perspective, I would wish that the church spend a bit more time in thinking carefully about its mission and a lot less time on its politics.