Episcopal Church reports no baptized membership data for 2024, citing parochial report ‘confusion’

[Episcopal News Service] The Episcopal Church has many members. In most years, it can provide a specific count of its baptized members – 1.5 million in 2023 — based on data compiled from its congregations’ parochial reports.

Not for 2024.

When the church released its latest trove of parochial report data on Oct. 24, the official membership count was unavailable and unknown, though the annual data still included some of the church’s other closely watched metrics, including average Sunday attendance and plate and pledge revenue. The questionnaire for 2024 had experimented with new ways of counting church membership, the church’s news release said, and the results “revealed confusion in how churches understood and reported this topline number.”

To provide a fuller picture, Episcopal News Service reviewed governance documents and questioned church leaders about how changes to the parochial reports inadvertently upended the traditional member count. Those inquiries found that the churchwide member data, in addition to mixing old and new definitions, was rendered unusable by issues with the questionnaire’s wording and the guidance provided to the congregational leaders tasked with filling out the new forms.

Even so, the other more reliable numbers still paint a picture of a church moving beyond the disruptions of the early pandemic.  Sunday attendance appears to have stabilized at 413,000, nearly the same as in 2023. Churchwide income for 2024 also represented little annual change, at $2.5 billion.

Church leaders are now working to fix future data reporting on membership by pursuing new updates to the questionnaires in time for the 2025 data cycle. The report submission deadline is March 1, 2026.

“My hope is that we’ll build on the lessons learned from the most recent parochial report to ensure that our data offers an accurate and meaningful picture of church participation, while remaining consistent enough for an apples-to-apples comparison with previous reports,” House of Deputies President Julia Ayala Harris said in response to an ENS question about the revision process.

The House of Deputies State of the Church Committee will take the first steps. Church canons specify that it is responsible for considering and adopting parochial report changes, which also must be authorized by Executive Council, the church’s interim governing body. The State of the Church Committee is appointed each triennium, and Ayala Harris said she expects to name appointees to the new committee within the next few weeks.

“The committee and I will discern together how best to approach membership data going forward,” she said.

Church leaders have tried reimagining parts of the parochial report since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when limits on in-person worship attendance both disrupted traditional data trends and prompted experimentation with new metrics, such as online participation.

Even before the pandemic, the State of the Church Committee had been considering how to adjust the parochial report forms to collect more accurate and meaningful information about congregational vitality. For the 2020 report, the committee added new questions under the heading “Worship During the Pandemic.”

The church also began taking a broader look at membership. The canons say the church’s parochial reports must count “baptized members,” a category defined broadly as anyone whose baptism has been recorded by the church. But leaders wanted expanded categories.

In 2022, the 80th General Convention passed a resolution authorizing the creation of the Task Force on the State of Membership in The Episcopal Church, “charged with developing new and relevant membership definitions that reflect the experience, practices, and needs of congregations.” The task force consulted with the State of the Church Committee on its parochial report updates while also proposing canonical reforms.

In 2023, the membership task force surveyed about 80 church leaders from various dioceses. It found membership counts were often imprecise or based on inconsistent definitions. Some congregations admitted they resorted to educated guesswork in filling out the membership section of the parochial report questionnaire.

“I’m making informed guesses every year. I know I’m close, but I also know I’m uncertain,” one respondent said, quoted anonymously in the task force’s report.

“Sometimes it’s hard to figure out if what we mean by the categories listed is the ‘official’ meaning,” another unnamed respondent said.

In previous versions of the parochial report, congregations had been asked to report “active baptized members” by counting any increases or decreases in the prior year.  They also were required to count a subset of that membership number, “communicants in good standing,” defined as a member who had received Holy Communion at least three times in the year and was “faithful in corporate worship.”

The State of the Church Committee, in consultation with the membership task force and the Task Force to Study Congregational Vitality, began drafting a new round of updates to the parochial report. It sought to collect data on people who participate in the life of a congregation but who cannot be placed easily into the traditional categories of “member” or “communicant.” For example, they may be relatively new to the Episcopal denomination or even to the Christian faith and have not yet registered as members or received the sacrament of Baptism.

Those changes were proposed to Executive Council in October 2023 at an online meeting.

“Sometimes the data that is asked for doesn’t really reflect what’s going on in the congregation,” former Utah Bishop Scott Hayashi, then chair of Executive Council’s Governance & Operations Committee, said at the time. The parochial report changes were discussed by his committee and then adopted by the full Executive Council without further debate, to be implemented in the 2024 parochial reports.

Eva Warren, a lay deputy from the Diocese of Ohio who served on the last State of the Church Committee, led the subgroup that studied the parochial report and proposed the changes to improve data collection. “Throughout discussions, we balanced maintaining a subset of questions for continuous or longitudinal reporting needs (for example, average Sunday attendance) while also updating our questions to better reflect the current reality of church life (for example, virtual attendance),” Warren told ENS by email.

“The committee and its collaborators felt these changes were necessary to ensure relevancy and analytic integrity of our data, even if some measures would no longer be continuous,” she said.

Warren added that the State of the Church Committee also proposed “developing educational materials related to the changing definitions to help explain and contextualize these changes.” Such educational support wasn’t possible within the “compressed timeline” between Executive Council’s authorization and the 81st General Convention’s meeting in June 2024, Warren said, though she attended Q&A sessions organized by the General Convention Office to help clarify the new definitions for congregations.

“Throughout the revision process, we were explicit that revision is an iterative process,” she said, “involving ongoing monitoring and evaluation to ensure the survey is collecting the data we intend to collect and being interpreted the way we intended questions to be interpreted.”

In January 2025, when congregational leaders began filling out their parochial report form for the prior year, the new form’s membership questions had been reversed from their traditional order. They now started with the number of communicants in good standing.

The form also no longer contained a prompt requiring the congregation to fill in the total number of baptized members. Instead, a subsequent section was labeled “Active Members and Participants,” and it used expansive definitions to seek two new data points, which caused widespread confusion, as churchwide leaders later realized.

In one blank, congregations were asked to count “total active members (other),” including non-Episcopalians and non-Christians, but not including communicants in good standing. The next blank was intended for recording “total estimated active participants (non-members).”

Even self-described Episcopal “data nerds” have expressed confusion over the changes.

The Rev. Chris Corbin, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, is one. “We have a pretty sophisticated tracking system” for Trinity’s members, Corbin told ENS. That system’s several categories include active members, regular attendees who are not yet members and visitors who may become regular attendees.

But mapping those categories onto the new parochial report form wasn’t obvious. Corbin told ENS that for 2024, he reported 93 communicants in good standing, 19 “active members (other)” and 36 for the “active participants” category. It isn’t clear that adding those numbers would be comparable to the church’s traditional baptized member tally.

At the denomination level, church leaders saw the differences in methods for counting membership across all 6,700 of The Episcopal Church’s congregations, and they realized the numbers in 2024’s new categories were essentially meaningless.

Though the church has no baptized member count for 2024, it was still able to collect reliable data on communicants in good standing. That metric dropped modestly from 1.11 million in 2023 to 1.03 million in 2024, or 7%.

“The presiding officers feel confident that we can improve the form and the quality of the data it measures next year,” a spokesperson for Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe told ENS. “It often takes more than one try to get change right, and that is the case this time. Despite the anomaly in the data on overall membership, the 2024 report yielded a significant amount of useful data to inform our planning and strategic thinking, and we are grateful to all of the congregations and leaders who took the time to fill it out.”

Corbin said he thinks membership is important data to track, though he tends to focus more on average Sunday attendance — not because the number itself matters, but because he thinks all Episcopal congregations should work toward getting as many people as possible to worship together every Sunday.

His internal metrics at Trinity are focused on “how many people are actively involved in the life of the congregation,” he said. He is less interested in expanding the definition of membership to include people with only a passing connection to the church, such as through outreach ministries.

“The primary work of the church is building disciples of Jesus Christ,” he said, and a Christian community does that work most effectively in the pews on Sunday.

– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.