A158 Addressing Church Decline and Fostering Church Revitalization
The Episcopal Church has been in free-fall decline for some time. It’s also true there are multiple causes for the decline and The Episcopal Church is far from the only church experiencing it. The fact remains however that we are shrinking. A straight-line forecast would show us having 0 worshippers in our pews within the next few decades.[1] Besides being a failure to follow the risen Jesus’s great commission to us, decline makes everything else we try to do as a church much more difficult.
But a forecast is not a promise. Only God knows the future and the Holy Spirit empowers us to discern and make different decisions. A good place to start is to stop denying the truth or trying to minimize it with euphemisms of “change.”
Addressing our decline, most exemplified by the 43.2% churchwide loss in Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) from 2013-2022[2] is an “adaptive challenge” that requires us to make a fundamental shift in our mindsets, values, and behaviors, not a “technical problem” that can be solved with the “right” solution or expert knowledge.[3] Foremost, to halt, let alone reverse, our losses, we need to daily turn away from the many idols and false gods that distract us and turn back towards the God who made and liberated us in Christ, as did generations of the faithful before us.
Beyond that, we don’t have a churchwide understanding of how to deal with decline and thus, our desire is to hear from every diocese, the basic unit of our church, how they are addressing it in their own contexts with the required reports. We also intend for the reports to generate useful resources of which not every diocese, parish, or individual leader might be aware. Hence, we call for a clearing-house of collated resources available to the entire church, as SCLM did with www.episcopalcommonprayer.org.
Finally, as the 2021 Racial Justice Audit proved,[4] there is valuable information to be gleaned when experts can guide questions, dive deeper into promising avenues of renewal and resurrection provided by the diocesan reports, analyze data, and provide concise summaries to the church. Thus, we respectfully request $100,000 to fund the audit.
It is this committee’s hope that with these efforts, we can have a “whole-of-church” approach to better define the challenge, identify its causes and obstacles to change, discern new experiments, and discover ways to get promising solutions into the hands of all Episcopalians as quickly as possible.
[1] https://religioninpublic.blog/2021/07/06/the-death-of-the-episcopal-church-is-near/
[2] https://extranet.generalconvention.org/staff/files/download/32265
[3] For more information, see The Practice of Adaptive Leadership by Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky
[4] https://www.episcopalchurch.org/ministries/racial-reconciliation/racial-justice-audit/
Note: this resolution and/or its explanation contains external references, such as URLs of websites, that may not be in the required languages of General Convention. Because of copyright restrictions, the General Convention cannot provide translations. However, your web browser may be able to provide a machine translation into another language. If you need assistance with this, please contact gc.support@episcopalchurch.org.
Explanation
The Episcopal Church has been in free-fall decline for some time. It’s also true there are multiple causes for the decline and The Episcopal Church is far from the only church experiencing it. The fact remains however that we are shrinking. A straight-line forecast would show us having 0 worshippers in our pews within the next few decades.[1] Besides being a failure to follow the risen Jesus’s great commission to us, decline makes everything else we try to do as a church much more difficult.
But a forecast is not a promise. Only God knows the future and the Holy Spirit empowers us to discern and make different decisions. A good place to start is to stop denying the truth or trying to minimize it with euphemisms of “change.”
Addressing our decline, most exemplified by the 43.2% churchwide loss in Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) from 2013-2022[2] is an “adaptive challenge” that requires us to make a fundamental shift in our mindsets, values, and behaviors, not a “technical problem” that can be solved with the “right” solution or expert knowledge.[3] Foremost, to halt, let alone reverse, our losses, we need to daily turn away from the many idols and false gods that distract us and turn back towards the God who made and liberated us in Christ, as did generations of the faithful before us.
Beyond that, we don’t have a churchwide understanding of how to deal with decline and thus, our desire is to hear from every diocese, the basic unit of our church, how they are addressing it in their own contexts with the required reports. We also intend for the reports to generate useful resources of which not every diocese, parish, or individual leader might be aware. Hence, we call for a clearing-house of collated resources available to the entire church, as SCLM did with www.episcopalcommonprayer.org.
Finally, as the 2021 Racial Justice Audit proved,[4] there is valuable information to be gleaned when experts can guide questions, dive deeper into promising avenues of renewal and resurrection provided by the diocesan reports, analyze data, and provide concise summaries to the church. Thus, we respectfully request $100,000 to fund the audit.
It is this committee’s hope that with these efforts, we can have a “whole-of-church” approach to better define the challenge, identify its causes and obstacles to change, discern new experiments, and discover ways to get promising solutions into the hands of all Episcopalians as quickly as possible.
[1] https://religioninpublic.blog/2021/07/06/the-death-of-the-episcopal-church-is-near/
[2] https://extranet.generalconvention.org/staff/files/download/32265
[3] For more information, see The Practice of Adaptive Leadership by Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky
[4] https://www.episcopalchurch.org/ministries/racial-reconciliation/racial-justice-audit/
Note: this resolution and/or its explanation contains external references, such as URLs of websites, that may not be in the required languages of General Convention. Because of copyright restrictions, the General Convention cannot provide translations. However, your web browser may be able to provide a machine translation into another language. If you need assistance with this, please contact gc.support@episcopalchurch.org.