Did The Episcopal Church Experience Growth in 2023?

Don’t forget that I am offering a discount on subscriptions through December 25th - $40 for the year. You can take advantage through this link.

---

I need your help, readers! If you're poking around online and see that a major denomination has posted updated statistics about membership, attendance, giving, or anything similar, please send me an email and point me to the data. I've become somewhat of the unofficial "keeper of the records" when it comes to a lot of denominations, but I don’t get press releases or notifications when new data is posted. That means I sometimes miss things.

Well, I had a great supporter of my work shoot me a message that The Episcopal Church had posted some new data related to the life of their church in 2023. From a purely quantitative perspective, no denomination is better than the Episcopalians. They release all kinds of data beyond just membership. Being able to triangulate a variety of trends—like baptisms, marriages, confirmations, giving, attendance, and membership—is the ideal way to get a complete picture of what’s happening in those churches across the United States.

Let’s start with membership and work our way down to more granular metrics.

The high-water mark for The Episcopal Church was in 1959, with a reported total of 3.44 million members. Membership hovered around that number for the next dozen years, then began to decline, dipping below three million by 1973 and continuing a slow and steady drop over the decades. However, it was still around two million a decade ago.

Since 2012, the average yearly decline in Episcopal Church membership has been approximately 40,000. In 2020, it was about 55,000; the following year, it was 57,000; and between 2021 and 2022, it was 93,256—the largest single-year decline in the past 25 years. In 2023, the total reported membership of TEC was 1,547,779, down about 37,000 from the prior year (or 2.3%). So, not great news, but nothing unexpected.

The attendance numbers are sure to raise some eyebrows, though.

If you were to describe Episcopal attendance between 2009 and 2019, it would be a slow, steady decline. Average attendance began at around 725,000, decreasing by about 3% each year, reaching 547,000 by 2019. However, the pandemic clearly impacted TEC’s Sunday attendance.

Weekly attendance dropped by 11% between 2019 and 2020, then plummeted an astonishing 40% between 2020 and 2021. By 2021, the average Sunday attendance in The Episcopal Church was just 293,000. It did rebound nicely in 2022 to 373,000, and the church's statistics indicate a continued surge in attendance, reaching about 411,000 on an average weekend in 2023—a 10-point increase from the previous year. In total, attendance increased by 40% between 2021 and 2023.

I had a theory about this: perhaps many Episcopalians took a while to return to worship after COVID due to infection concerns, which would make sense given the age distribution of the church. According to their records, half of their members are over 65.

I wanted to dig a bit deeper on this topic, so I took attendance data points from 2009 through 2019 and extended a trend line through 2023. The purpose was to answer the question: How many should have attended TEC if COVID hadn’t happened?

According to that trend line, about 475,000 Episcopalians should have attended in 2023. The reported attendance was 411,000, indicating that while attendance has increased recently, it’s still well below where the trend line would suggest.

What about giving metrics? The Episcopal Church calls this, “plate and pledge.”

This is a reliable indicator for Episcopalians. Despite membership declines and attendance drops, year-to-year plate and pledge totals are incredibly steady. In 2014, giving was around $1.3 billion, and it stayed close to that number through 2020. In 2021, it actually increased by $40 million, reaching $1.38 billion in 2023. Average giving per weekly attender was about $2,000 in 2014. By 2021, it had risen to $4,561, and in 2023 it was $3,370 per attendee—a more than 50% increase since 2014. Those in the pews are giving at higher rates than ever before.

Let’s explore other reported metrics—baptisms, confirmations, burials, and marriages. I’ll compare the numbers from just before COVID (2019) with the past couple of years to show the baseline before the pandemic and how much TEC has recovered.

In 2019, TEC reported 17,713 baptisms. This was halved in the first year of the pandemic, but numbers began to recover quickly. By 2021, nearly 17,000 baptisms were performed, just shy of the 2019 pace. In the last two years, baptisms exceeded 20,000, showing a solid rebound. For context, however, TEC conducted more than 30,000 baptisms in 2015, so it’s still a 50% decline from a decade ago.

Burials are an interesting metric because I don’t know exactly how to interpret these trends. Burials did drop by nearly 8,000 during the first year of the pandemic. We know that there were a lot of excess deaths in 2020, but it’s likely that a lot of those didn’t have a proper Christian burial. That’s my best guess about how it unfolded. Now, the church is conducting about 25,000 per year. That’s actually down about 5,000 per year from a decade ago.

Confirmations fell drastically in the pandemic's first year, dropping from over 15,000 in 2019 to just 3,700 a year later. They’ve since recovered, reaching nearly 15,000 in 2023, though pre-COVID numbers haven’t been matched. For context, TEC conducted around 22,000 confirmations a decade ago.

Marriages have always been lower in number, but it’s stark now. In 2014, nearly 11,000 weddings were performed by TEC, compared to less than 5,000 annually now. For every wedding in TEC, there are about 5 burials—not a promising trend.

Speaking of trends, I wanted to better understand how the pandemic impacted these other aspects of church life. So, I used the prior decade of data to project how many baptisms, burials, confirmations and marriages that the church should have done in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 if the pandemic hadn’t occurred. I get asked a lot if COVID had some sort of major impact on religion and this is a great opportunity to explore that question in detail.

For baptisms, the data suggests that TEC could have expected about 61,000 from 2020–2023, based on previous trends. Instead, there were nearly 67,000. That’s some good evidence that the church may have slowed down their decline just a bit in the last few years. This trend appears in burials as well: projections suggested 101,000, while the actual number was 93,000. This may relate to the lack of church funerals for some pandemic deaths.

The data on confirmations, however, is less optimistic. Projections indicated about 50,000 confirmations for the last four years, but the church confirmed only 41,000—a concerning sign for TEC’s future. Marriages were slightly above projections (18,800 vs. 18,200).

In summary, it’s hard to draw a clear conclusion about where TEC stands at the end of 2023. Membership has dipped slightly, while attendance has jumped significantly. Yet the overall attendance decline remains steep (from 725,000 in 2009 to just 411,000 in 2023). Other metrics are mixed: baptisms are up, confirmations are down, and burials have slowed slightly.

Anyone claiming these numbers as evidence of a mainline revival isn’t seeing the full picture. Yes, attendance increased, but the deeper analysis reveals a mixed reality. The Episcopal Church appears to be lurching towards its decline, and there’s little here to challenge that statistical trajectory.

Code for this post can be found here.