wfn.org | Episcopalians: Small congregations are backbone of Episcopal Church, study finds

[dmack@episcopalchurch.org]

May 5, 2003

2003-094

Episcopalians: Small congregations are backbone of Episcopal 
Church, study finds

by James Solheim

(ENS) "The relationship between congregation size and church 
growth is surprisingly tricky to measure," says C. Kirk Hadaway, 
the Episcopal Church's new director of research, in a new study 
just released by his office.

The study seeks to provide a more balanced perspective and 
combat what he calls "misinformation being circulated around the 
church using inadequate research procedures that gave an 
erroneous picture of the relationship between church size and 
growth, denigrating smaller churches and over-emphasizing the 
contribution of larger churches to the growth of the Episcopal 
Church."

"Unlike other mainline Protestant denominations, the Episcopal 
Church grew rather than declined in overall worship attendance 
during the last five years," according to the study. "Not 
counting new congregations, the Episcopal Church increased by 
nearly 17,000 attendees from 1995 to 2000."

Most of that growth was added by churches in the two smallest 
size categories. "Very large churches added substantially to the 
overall growth of the denomination but not as much as churches 
with average Sunday attendance of 100 or less. Clearly, smaller 
churches are the major source of growth in the Episcopal 
Church."

Sources of growth

Yet smaller churches are more "volatile" than larger churches, 
more likely to grow but also more likely to decline and die, 
according to the study.

"So what is the relationship between size and growth in the 
Episcopal Church? Actually, there is not a strong relationship, 
but to the extent that a relationship exists, it is the smaller 
churches and the largest churches that are most likely to grow," 
the study concludes.

"But the fact that small churches are more likely to grow is not 
the whole story. Smaller churches are also more likely to 
decline than churches in larger size categories," for a number 
of reasons. They don't have the people, money, staff and 
programs that would help them grow and "often have great 
difficulty paying a full-time priest. "And the condition of 
smaller churches seems all the more dire because many of the 
churches that are smaller now have declined into their current 
size category. Thus the presence of very weak, declining 
churches among the current set of small churches obscures the 
fact that many small churches have great potential for growth."

The study found, for example, that "the typical Episcopal 
congregation has an average Sunday attendance of 80 persons--and 
it is the typical Episcopal church that has been our primary 
source of growth during the last decade," according to Hadaway.

He said that bishops in dioceses with many small churches "found 
the emphasis on large churches and the impression that most 
small churches were dying to be demoralizing. These wrong 
impressions had to be corrected before they came to be reflected 
in program and policy decisions."

"The point is that any church can grow or decline, depending 
where it is on the growth cycle," said the Rev. Charles Fulton, 
director of congregational growth and development. "But lots of 
people are confused about why and how that happens."

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The study is available on the church's web site at 
http://www.episcopalchurch.org/congdev/.

--James Solheim is director of the Episcopal News Service.