Daily Archives: January 28, 2012

Budgets, Decline, and Mission–The current meeting of the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church

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Word came yesterday that Executive Council was presented with two competing proposals for the budget for the next three years (Triennium). One used 19% asking from the dioceses; the other 15%. Today, via twitter, I followed the debate at a distance. It’s similar to the debate that has been going on on the diocesan level as well as in parishes. As membership and attendance decline, how do we maintain our buildings, ministry, and mission?

There was a stark portrayal of the extent of decline by Kirk Hadaway. The full presentation is available here: ExecCncl_012712_FINAL

There’s a great deal to digest in this report, including a decline in membership from over 2.4 million in 1992 to under 2 million today. And this, between 2002 and 2010:

• Change in church school enrollment: -33%
• Change in number of marriages performed: -41%
• Change in number of burials/funerals: -21%
• Change in the number of child baptisms: -36%
• Change in the number of adult baptisms: -40%
• Change in the number of confirmations: -32%

Even more scary, for every church that was started between 1999 and 2009, 2.5 closed. There are maps of the country that show the relative growth and decline among dioceses, comparisons with other mainline denominations (and even the Southern Baptist Convention, which has seen membership decline for the first time in recent years).

But there are other ways to parse that data, and larger issues, as well. I read an article yesterday about America’s permanent dead zones, defined by the authors as areas where the unemployment rate has been at least 2% above the national average for the last 5, 10, or 20 years. It’s a fascinating read, and it would be interesting to compare the geography of the dead zones with the areas of decline in the Episcopal Church. For example, among the towns listed as dead zones are a series of towns in the Diocese of Upper South Carolina–Gaffney, Greenwood, Union, Chester, Lancaster, Seneca, Sumter. Some of these towns have thriving Episcopal churches; others don’t. By contrast, not a single city in that diocese is included in the list of prosperous zones. The diocese of Milwaukee seems not to have any dead zones, and Madison is listed as a prosperous zone. My question is: to what extent is growth in the Episcopal Church linked to those “prosperous zones”?

Here’s today’s report from Executive Council, contributed by Episcopal News Service.

If this is any indication, it’s going to be an interesting few months leading up to General Convention.

The Vast Christian Right Conspiracy to brainwash your kids

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Otherwise known as “See You at the Pole.” There’s another in the long line of liberal media-bashing of American Evangelicalism in the Daily Beast. Katherine Stewart writes about the program that has kids gather at flagpoles in schoolyards to pray regularly. While including lurid details about rallies leading up to such events, Stewart wants us to focus on the constitutionality of the practice:

At Starbucks I meet up with students who participated in the SYAP prayers at Bradley High School, another public school in Cleveland. “Everybody basically bumps into us on their way into the school building,” says a boy with a wide, freckled smile, “so almost every kid in the school joined in.”

 

I ask a curly-haired girl, a participant over the past several years, how she heard about the event. “Sometimes they make an announcement during lunch,” she says. “Sometimes your teachers tell you about it.”

I’m shocked! Peer pressure? I read this as I read another in  long line of articles from evangelical (and progressive) Christians about the radical decline in religious involvement among young adults. These liberal conspiracy theorists assume teens have no power to resist the attractions of evangelical Christianity, that such acts turn people into unthinking, conservative Christian robots.

It didn’t happen to me. When I was in high school, we were granted permission to leave study hall to attend movies shown in the cafeteria by a local church. They were cheesy attempts to convert us, silly, really, because we were all already saturated with Christianity.

The reality is more complex than Stewart would have us believe. Yes, evangelicalism is a powerful force in American culture, especially in the South and in the heartland. But there are other powerful forces in our culture. Hollywood and consumerism are powerful as well, and have probably claimed the allegiance of all of those kids already, whether they realize it or not.