TEC Average Sunday Attendance

2000 857,000
2010 658,000
2019 518,000
2022 349,000

The 2022 data is crucial because it gives us a realistic idea of what COVID did to TEC. The data for 2020 and 2021 was distorted by the disruption of COVID and it was impossible to know whether the huge drop in attendance in 2021 was a blip or sign of things to come. The year of 2022 was not wholly normal, but it was a lot closer to normal than the previous two years, and the data from that year has a greater solidity to it.

It was the first year since COVID when most people could reasonably get to in-person worship. All the evidence suggests that those who had not returned to Sunday worship by 2022 are unlikely to do so in the future -- at least not in significant numbers.

At first glance, the 2022 figures look positive for TEC. Attendance rose by 56,000 persons compared to 2021. But the data from 2021 was deeply depressed by the pandemic. The more important comparison is with 2019 -- the year before COVID. And TEC attendance in 2022 was 169,000 lower than in 2019, down by nearly a third.

It is also important to remember that TEC was in long-term decline for many years before COVID. Having lost 339,000 attendees between 2000 and 2019, it lost a further 169,000 from 2019 to 2022. This means that TEC' s Sunday attendance is now well under half what it was in 2000.

The rise in TEC attendance in 2022 compared to 2021 was, to use the crude metaphor beloved by the stock markets, "a dead cat bounce." It reflected how the easing of COVID restrictions meant some worshipers resumed attendance. It was a blip, which has not interrupted TEC's long-term severe decline.

What of online attendance at worship? The figures for this have been well-described as the wild west of ecclesial data gathering. It is impossible to know exactly what they signify, and church leaders cannot put too much weight on them. The rise of online church has proved compatible with dramatic congregational decline in TEC, and there is no reason to think this will change.

TEC had 6,736 parishes and missions in 2011, but 6,249 in 2022. In other words, over 500 have been lost in just over a decade. The closure of churches, like financial giving, is a lagging indicator of decline. It is the final result of trends across decades. It is highly likely that there is much more of this to come. It also shows us that, despite talk in TEC of starting new congregations, few have actually started, and those that exist are having minimal effect on the overall shrinkage of TEC.

The chances of attracting people back after 2022 are low. Those who have been lost during the locust years of COVID are, as occupants of TEC's pews, probably gone for good. There may have been things that could have been done to prevent such hemorrhaging, but it is largely too late to do such things now. And as an aside, senior leaders of TEC and across Western Anglicanism as a whole showed a staggering lack of concern about how to reconnect with the masses of its members who dropped away during COVID.

Individual parishes largely had to figure it out for themselves. Some did good work, many more struggled. The massive decline of TEC during COVID should not be seen as some unstoppable calamity, about which the leaders of TEC could do nothing. There is striking variation between TEC dioceses in the degree of bounce-back from COVID, some dramatically growing in 2022, others changing little. This deserves serious scrutiny. Not every denomination has been effected to the degree TEC has. Rather, in significant measure, the huge size of TEC's decline during COVID was due to the inaction or dubious actions of the senior leadership.

How does the ACNA Compare?

It is an uncomfortable question, but how is the ACNA doing in the United States? Many in TEC will resist such a comparison. But hard data contains hard truths. The ACNA and TEC are rivals. But they are also very similar in liturgy, polity, and heritage. And their comparative trajectories tell us significant things about the strategies their leaders have followed and about their likely future trajectories.

In 2013, the first year when we have plausible data for the ACNA, it had a Sunday attendance of around 64,000 in the United States. TEC in 2013 had a Sunday attendance of 624,000, ten times higher. The ACNA Sunday attendance in 2022 was 71,000. This is down, compared to 78,000 in 2019. So the ACNA lost about 10% attendance by 2022, whereas TEC lost around a third of its Sunday attendance in the same years. TEC's Sunday attendance in 2022 was 349,000, compared to 518,000 in 2019. This has a marked effect on the comparative size of the ACNA and TEC. In 2013 the ACNA was 10 percent of the size of TEC, in 2022 the ACNA was 20 percent of the size of TEC.

But members of the ACNA have no cause to feel smug. The ACNA's attendance rose significantly as a percentage up to 2019, but the rise was from a modest base (and was in significant measure due to "transfer growth" from the majority of TEC's Diocese of South Carolina choosing to join the ACNA). From 2019 to 2022, the ACNA's loss was modest, bearing in mind the scale of the shock of COVID, but it was still a loss. More importantly, even if you add together ACNA and TEC's attendance for 2022, you get a figure far smaller than that for American Anglicanism 10, let alone 20, years ago.

What about Nigerian Anglicans?

One large wild card is the future trajectory of Nigerian Anglicanism in the United States. There is a large and growing African Anglican diaspora in the United States, the largest segment of which is Nigerian. It is energetically planting churches across the country. Reliable data is hard to come by (and researching America's Nigerian Anglicanism should be an urgent priority for scholars of American Anglicanism). Moreover, such churches are structurally amorphous. They have been part of the ACNA, then separated from it and some have rejoined it. But whatever the ecclesial banner under which they operate, they are usually more vigorous than TEC's congregations. Such congregations have tended, largely, to serve expatriate Nigerians. But regardless of whether they continue in that manner, this sector of American Anglicanism is growing.

TEC shows deep concern about ethnicity as an issue, but when it comes to attracting people of color into its pews, it has made limited progress, despite the huge diversification of many parts of the United States in the last decade, a diversification that continued during COVID. Many African Anglicans have moved to the United States in recent years, but few have made their ecclesial home in TEC.

When Will the ACNA overtake TEC?

In 2013, the ACNA's attendance equated to around 10 percent of TEC. As of 2022 its attendance is equivalent to over 20 percent of TEC. In under a decade, it caught up on significant ground. If Nigerian diaspora Anglicanism is factored in, the gap is closer still.

The gap remains wide, but we should note that the decline of TEC also has a lot further to go. The drop in ordinands and decline of TEC's seminaries are canaries in the mine. The ACNA's growth before COVID and markedly better recovery from COVID compared to TEC suggest that the gap will close much more in coming years.

When will the ANCA overtake TEC? It is reasonable to predict that the ACNA could overtake TEC in the next 20 years, perhaps sooner. Between 2010 and 2019, TEC's Sunday attendance dropped by 140,000, significantly falling most years. If that pre-COVID decline resumes with the same trajectory, the ACNA will likely pass TEC in about 20 years, somewhere around 2042. That would happen even if the ACNA shows no growth during that time. If the ACNA were to grow in coming years, that would hasten the point when it becomes the largest section of Anglicanism within the United States. And if you factor in Nigerian diaspora Anglicanism, that could happen significantly faster still.

Given that the ACNA did not exist before 2009, readers of this article may wonder, "can these things be?" But the onus of proof lies with those who expect TEC to remain the biggest Anglican kid on the block. For that to happen, one of two scenarios must come to pass. Either TEC must arrest its long-term decline (and the data from 2019 to 2022 shows that such decline just grew significantly worse) or the ACNA must collapse (and the stress-test of COVID showed it to be much more robust than TEC). So, will the ACNA overtake TEC? The answer is yes, if current trends continue. When will it do so? Not soon, but not that far away either.
________________________________________
[i] The data quoted refers only the congregations of TEC and the ACNA found in the United States. Congregations outside the United States have been excluded from the data.