ACNA grows as the Episcopal organization shrinks

From The Living Church, 

Attendance in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) is up by double digits for the third consecutive year, according to congregational report data released June 19 during the denomination’s Provincial Council meeting at Trinity Anglican Seminary in Ambridge, Pennsylvania.

“We’ve grown in every category that we track,” said Dan Hassler, director of administration and operations. “We are at highest attendance and membership of all time.”

The denomination in 2024 reported a net increase of 14 congregations to a total of 1,027, an increase in membership of 1,997 (+1.5 percent) to a total of 130,111 and an increase in attendance of 11,354 (+13.4 percent) to a total of 96,148.

“It is humbling and incredible,” Archbishop Steve Wood said of the numbers in his opening address to the council. “And it makes me eager to see what the Lord is up to next.”

Provincial Council is the annual governance meeting of the ACNA, comprising a bishop, elected clergy, and two elected lay members from each of 28 dioceses, alongside delegates from a half-dozen ministry organizations with an official status.

The council is charged with producing a provincial budget and electing members to trial courts and the Executive Committee (a smaller governance body that meets monthly). Canonical changes are also reviewed and passed before they can be brought for ratification before the larger assembly, which convenes less frequently.

Hassler said leading indicators, including baptisms (+207, or 5.6%), confirmations (+656, or 15.8%), and weddings (+104, or 17.4%) are also up. These metrics are regarded as signaling the direction of future membership and attendance numbers. For the first time, 27 local churches now have an average attendance exceeding 500, up from 16 surpassing that number the year before.

Conversations with council delegates indicated different sources of growth, among them a post-COVID return, as well as an increasing number of people specifically seeking Anglican worship.

The Rev. David Drake of Church of the Resurrection in Timonium, Maryland, in a June 20 concluding panel interview with Archbishop Steve Wood, discussed the Asbury Outpouring, 16 days of continuous prayer and worship that began at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky, on February 8, 2023.

Nearly all 41 churches in the Diocese of the Mid-Atlantic have grown in the past two years (Resurrection’s attendance grew 38% ). The Baltimore-area rector said the guidance and direction of the Holy Spirit was responsible for the growth. Provincial Council organizers highlighted 1 Corinthians 3:7 (“So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth”).

Provincial finances also improved—2024-25 is the first fiscal year since its 2009 inauguration that the ACNA has operated fully within financial sustainability, reporting a budget surplus of $435,000, Executive Director Deborah Tepley said. The Provincial Executive Committee will determine how to spend surplus. Tepley said it may go toward decreasing a $175,000 debt, establishing cash reserves, or investing in missional priorities such as church planting, leadership development, or the Common Life Commission (CLC).

The latter exists to address overlapping jurisdictions, work toward regionalization, and help mediation/training of diocesan leaders. Bishop Steve Breedlove, the CLC’s chairman, said the commission’s goal is for dioceses to not step on each other’s toes, work together in creating missionary dioceses that work collaboratively, and provide resources to one another “against a scarcity mindset.”

Note the amazing 73.9% attendance rate for ACNA members. 

We don't have 2024 data from the Episcopal organization, but 2023 numbers looked grim. From Juicy Ecumenism,

Membership

2013: 2,009,084

2022: 1,584,785

2023: 1,547,779 (-37,006 or 2.3% since 2022, -461,305 or -23% since 2013)

Attendance

2013: 657,102

2022: 372,952

2023: 410,912 (+37,960 or 10% since 2022, -246,190 or -37% since 2013)

Baptisms (Children)

2013: 28,509

2022: 15,272

2023: 16,924 (+1,652 or 10.8% since 2022, -11,585 or -41% since 2013)

Baptisms (Adult)

2013: 4,484

2022: 2,147

2023: 3,323 (+1,176 or 55% since 2022, -1,161 or -26% since 2013)

Receptions

2013: 6,970

2022: 4,106

2023: 7,567 (+3,461 or 84% since 2022, +597 or +8.7% since 2013)

Marriages

2013: 10,394

2022: 5,562

2023: 4,886 (-676 or 12% since 2022, -5,508 or -53% since 2013)

Burials:

2013: 29,605

2022: 25,905 

2023: 24,878 (-1,027 or 4% since 2022, -4,727 or -16% since 2013)

Open Parishes & Missions

2013: 7,115

2022: 6,789

2023: 6,754 (-35 or half a percent since 2022, -361 or -5.1% since 2013)

Note a 26.7% attendance rate for Episcopalians. Compared with the 73.9% rate for ACNA.

More burials than baptisms is not a good sign either. 

Church Times Gets Used

Over in jolly olde England they have a publication called "The Church Times". In light of a recent letter from two Church of England (CofE) priests in which they tried to show that same-sex relationships are Biblically okay. The letter is here. There is nothing new in their arguments. We've heard it all before during the American wars of Episcopal separation, but you can read it for yourself. 

Julian Mann, who had a blog that I used to follow when he was a vicar in the CofE, wrote a good response which I quote below. He did not point out one error the two priests made when they asserted that the ancient people did not know about committed same sex relationships,

"...in the ancient world, such activity was invariably exploitative and oppressive, while lifelong, exclusive, and loving same-sex partnerships were unknown."

That has been well debunked by Dr. Robert Gagnon. 

 Now, on to Julian Mann's response at Anglican Mainstream,

Cavalier treatment of the Bible in Church Times ‘Open Letter to the Church of England’

The treatment of the Bible in an article in the latest Church Times by two prominent London clergy is highly revealing of the state of the Church of England.

The Revd Dr Sam Wells and the Revd Lucy Winkett wrote “an Open Letter to the Church of England, in the light of plans for a separate structure made by those who reject the validity of same-sex relationships”.

The piece entitled “Separate structures put the Church of England in danger” has the feel of an Ad Clerum, a letter a diocesan bishop periodically writes to his or her clergy. Wells is Rector of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square. Winkett is Rector of St James’s Piccadilly. Both are contributors to the Thought for the Day religious slot on the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme.

Their letter begins: “We are two incumbents in central London. Some neighbouring parishes have announced their intention to form a separate structure, perhaps a new province, within the Church of England.

“This has been prompted by the modest steps that the House of Bishops has taken to enable clergy to affirm civil partnerships liturgically, as part of the Living in Love and Faith process. Headline aspects of the announcement include withholding parish contributions to dioceses and the commissioning of lay people to lead churches, in many instances following the principle of male headship.”

Their open letter includes a section on marriage which is breathtaking for the liberal arrogance with which it dismisses centuries of Christian orthodoxy:

“The Old Testament offers various portrayals of human partnership, including kings with multiple wives and concubines. This was an era in which children were a necessity, and large extended families were a blessing.

“The New Testament also has diverse notions of faithful partnership; but the central emphasis is on singleness in the face of God’s impending in-breaking realm. While there are analogies relating marriage to Christ and the Church, there is also Jesus’s insistence that following the way of the cross disrupts family life and upturns all relationships.

“The notion that monogamous heterosexual marriage is foundational as a consistent scriptural portrayal of God’s relationship with humankind, and accordingly constitutes the definitive form of relationships of humans with one another, is, therefore, not plausible.”

They make no mention of the divine creation of the institution of monogamous heterosexual marriage in Genesis emphasised so strongly by Jesus in the New Testament when he quoted Genesis 1v27 and Genesis 2v24:

“But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female,’and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate” (Mark 10v6-9 – NIV; see also Matthew 19v4-6).

And they make just a cursory mention of “the analogies relating marriage to Christ and the Church”, so prominent in the final chapters of Revelation and emphasised by the Apostle Paul in his teaching on marriage in Ephesians in which he also quoted Genesis 2v24:

“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansingher by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church – for we are members of his body. ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’This is a profound mystery – but I am talking about Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5v25-32).

The Anglican Book of Common Prayer’s marriage service makes no such omissions, beautifully distilling the Bible’s teaching on marriage: “Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this Congregation, to join together this man and this woman in holy Matrimony; which is an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man’s innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church; which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence, and first miracle that he wrought, in Cana of Galilee; and is commended of Saint Paul to be honourable among all men…”

How do Wells and Winkett get away with such cavalier treatment of the Holy Scriptures in their prestigious London churches? One can only conclude it is because the modern Church of England has a very high level of biblical illiteracy in its pews.

The CofE is either not educating their priests in sound Biblical theology, or they are educating them in unsound theology, or they are doing a little of both.

The BBC is giving false teachers an open microphone (no surprise here).

The CofE is not correcting the false teachers in their midst.

The Church Times is complicit in the spread of false teaching and was "used" when it published such rubbish.