CONFUSION over a parish questionnaire has resulted in the omission of the annual membership count from the 2024 annual report of the Episcopal Church in the United States.
Other data suggest that numbers have continued to recover from the pandemic; but the membership number — which in 2023 was 1.5 million — is absent.
Questions were rewritten in the light of the pandemic, and also to take a broader account of numbers attending and participating, even if they were not baptised. Baptism was previously treated as the determinant for membership. The new figure for total members and participants has been omitted.
Those who composed the questionnaire had experimented with new ways of counting church membership, the Church’s Public Affairs Office said, and the results “revealed confusion in how churches understood and reported this topline number”.
Sunday-attendance data were collected, however, and the figure of 413,000 is similar to that for 2023.
For the first time in a decade, church income fell short of expenditure — more than $2.517 billion versus more than $2.545 billion — though parish plate offerings rose slightly.
The average age of a worshipper is now 60, and 95 per cent of members and participants were white, the parishes reported.
As with the Church of England, the Episcopal Church has experienced steady decline across the past few decades. Membership numbers first fell below two million in 2010.
The parish questionnaire will now be refined in time for the collection of this year’s data, the office of the Presiding Bishop, Dr Sean Rowe, said.
A spokesman for Dr Rowe said: “It often takes more than one try to get change right, and that is the case this time. Despite the anomaly in the data on overall membership, the 2024 report yielded a significant amount of useful data to inform our planning and strategic thinking, and we are grateful to all of the congregations and leaders who took the time to fill it out.”
Other questions put for the first time included how parishes were reducing their carbon footprint and what one initiative or project of the church was giving people hope. More than half the 4444 responses to the latter question mentioned work for social justice. Other areas included young people’s ministry, music, and discipleship programmes.