Monday, June 22, 2009
Running the numbers on ACNA
As the new Anglican Church in North America holds its inaugural assembly this week in Bedford, Texas, it's been getting a lot of media attention. After all, it's not every day that 100,000 conservative Anglicans try to usurp the centuries-old Episcopal Church and Anglican Church of Canada.
But what about those 100,000 members that ACNA claims? Shortly after it launched last February, the group actually lowered that number to 81,311 people in the pews every Sunday. In June, ACNA lowered that number again to 69,197.
For some context, the Episcopal diocese with the largest average Sunday attendance in 2007 was Texas with about 27,000.
It's not unusual for membership numbers to be much higher than average Sunday attendance. But that usually happens in large, longstanding churches, like the Episcopal Church, which may have people on the membership rolls who stopped attending church long ago, or who are Easter-Christmas attenders only. One would assume that in a new church committed to orthodoxy, the gap between average Sunday attendance and membership would be quite a bit smaller.
As religion reporters know, we're often at the mercy of religious groups' self-reported membership numbers. And with a group like ACNA, which aims to unite almost a dozen small splinter groups, the task of counting is even harder. For instance, there are some congregations that ACNA counts as members that are still part of the Episcopal Church. So are they counted as part of ACNA's 100,000, or the Episcopal Church's 2.1 million?
Quite a few people have said ACNA is worth paying attention to because of that 100K figure. But does 69,000 have the same cachet?
Posted by Daniel Burke at 11:38 am
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