Episcopal Church (United States) - Membership

Membership

As of 2010, the Episcopal Church reports 2,125,012 baptized members. The majority of members are in the United States, where the Church has 1,951,907 members, a decrease of 54,436 persons (-2.7 percent) from 2009. Outside of the U.S. the Church has 173,105 members, an increase of 3,700 persons (2.2 percent) from 2009. Total average Sunday attendance (ASA) for 2010 was 697,880 a decrease of 3.7 percent from 2009. ASA in the U.S. was 657,831 and outside the U.S. was 40,049. According to data collected in 2000, the District of Columbia, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Virginia have the highest rates of adherents per capita, and states along the East Coast generally have a higher number of adherents per capita than in other parts of the country. New York was the state with the largest total number of adherents, over 200,000. In 2010, the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti was the largest single diocese, with 86,760 members baptized members. This diocese accounts for slightly over half of non-domestic diocesan membership. The Episcopal Church also has the highest number of graduate and post-graduate degrees per capita of any other Christian denomination in the United States.

The Episcopal Church experienced notable growth in the first half of the 20th century, but like many mainline churches, it has had a decline in membership in more recent decades. Membership grew from 1.1 million members in 1925 to a peak of over 3.4 million members in the mid-1960s. Between 1970 and 1990, membership declined from about 3.2 million to about 2.4 million. Once changes in how membership is counted are taken into consideration, the Episcopal Church's membership numbers were broadly flat throughout the 1990s, with a slight growth in the first years of the 21st century. A loss of 115,000 members was reported for the years 2003–05, which has been attributed in part to controversy concerning ordination of homosexuals to the priesthood and the election of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire, but is a similar rate of loss to that which prevailed in the period from 1967–69, when the church lost 113,000 members, which has been attributed in part to liberal policies in an age of racial tension. Other theories about the decline in membership include a failure to sufficiently reach beyond ethnic barriers in an increasingly diverse society, and the low fertility rates prevailing among the predominant ethnic groups traditionally belonging to the church. In 1965, there were 880,000 children in Episcopal Sunday School programs, by 2001 the number had declined to 297,000.