The Post-COVID Plateau of The Episcopal Church

But It Could Be The Calm Before the Storm

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Here’s what I love about my “job” now — people actually go out of their way to send me updated denominational statistics. I used to have to hunt for them across all kinds of websites and online resources. Let me just make this point one more time: I wish there were an online repository that kept these statistics in a clear and organized way. Then all these denominations could just upload their data to that central place. This sounds like a great project to be grant-funded. But I digress.

What we’re here for today is a deep dive into The Episcopal Church (TEC). It’s a denomination I’ve been tracking for a long time because they’re so good at publishing their numbers. On October 24, they uploaded their 2024 Parochial Report, which came in a PDF file that’s more for public consumption than for data nerds like me. But with a lot of brute force, I’ve managed to pull it into a spreadsheet that can help paint a clearer picture of TEC in 2024.

First things first — they don’t have any membership data in this update. Their rationale is: “The committee experimented with new ways to ask about and count total churchwide membership, and the data collected revealed confusion in how churches understood and reported this topline number. The presiding officers are collaborating to devise a process that provides clearer data on total membership in future years.” So, I can’t really give you the “headline” number.

But take heart, dear readers. There’s still plenty of analysis to dive into — including several province-level maps that I’m super proud of. However, before we move on to the geospatial stuff, let’s start by looking at trends in in-person worship attendance over the last 15 years.

Okay, so anyone who has read my work for a while knows that TEC was in an attendance free fall well before COVID-19. Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) was 724,845 in 2009 and had dropped to just 547,107 a decade later. In percentage terms, that’s a 24.5% decline — certainly not a good direction. But then the lockdowns in 2020 threw a wrench into all attendance-related statistics, which is clear in this data.

By 2021, ASA had fallen to 292,851. But that was undoubtedly the low-water mark. There’s been a nice rebound in attendance over the last couple of years. Of course, there was a big recovery in 2022 as people began returning to normal rhythms of life, and attendance has crept up since then. It was 410,912 in 2023, and the most recent figure is 413,034.

I think it’s more than fair to say that any type of “COVID bounce” is now over. Overall ASA was up just half a percentage point — a little over 2,000 attendees — across the United States. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if attendance doesn’t move much over the next couple of years. It could even begin to decline again in the 2025 data.

I also wanted to do a bit of analysis on whether denominations have been able to recover all their losses from the pandemic lockdowns. To sort that out, I did some simple math: using the data from 2009 through 2019, I generated a linear model to estimate what ASA would look like in 2024 if that pre-COVID trajectory had continued.