Religion Scholars Hear About Church Numbers

By Greta Gaffin

THE LIVING CHURCH

November 26, 2025

The American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature host an annual conference dedicated to the academic study of religion. This year it met on November 22-25 in Boston. The Living Church attended panels that included Anglican theologians, as well as one about Protestant relic collecting.

The Rev. Dr. Molly James, an Episcopal priest and interim executive officer of the Episcopal Church, gave a presentation on membership trends and the future of the Episcopal Church.

“The data bears out what we hear everywhere: We are declining. We have fewer people. The only thing that might surprise you is the finances,” she said. The plate and pledge numbers have stayed mostly consistent despite the significant decrease in membership, but for the first time church expenses are exceeding church incomes.

This financial twist is not evenly distributed throughout the church. Some parishes, particularly in the Northeast, are extraordinarily wealthy, but others are not. Half of Episcopal churches have an Average Sunday Attendance under 50. On the other hand, five percent of congregations contain 30 percent of Episcopalians, and these tend to be the churches with the largest endowments.

The Episcopal Church’s numbers peaked in 1965. James argued that this decline is primarily because of a decline in birth rates: Episcopalians simply have fewer children than they did during the mid-20th century. While this is true, it seemed to neglect other factors. One individual asked why there was no discussion of the Anglican Church in North America. Neither was there a mention of data on retention of the children Episcopalians have.

James emphasized that Episcopalians today are not worse at evangelizing than their grandparents. They simply are not beneficiaries of the societal structures of the 1950s. The United States has grown significantly since the 1960s (from 179 million in 1960 to 329 million in 2020), and most of those people are not Episcopalians. “We have a tremendous opportunity for growth in the church. It just won’t come as easily as it did in the 1950s and 1960s,” she said.

James is hopeful about the future of the church. “We have communities whose primary characteristics are hospitality and love, who seek to offer a place to help people make meaning in their lives,” she wrote in her full presentation.

The Rev. Dr. Charles Bączyk-Bell, a Church of England priest and a psychiatrist, lectured on what it means to be an Anglican in the 21st century. “What exactly constitutes the Anglicanism we believe we all belong to?” he said.

“You have to be willing to have fellowship with other Anglicans because they call themselves Anglicans,” he said. Anglicanism, in his view, is more about the church’s stance and approach to the world than anything else.

One thing he was frustrated by is the focus on institutional structures over anything else. He spoke about his meeting with a bishop in Southern Malawi who said what really matters to him is who he can call and know he will receive a response.

“We think we do synodality, but we don’t. Just because you call something a fish doesn’t make it a fish,” he said. Is Anglicanism one church, or numerous autonomous churches? What do different ecclesial gatherings mean, and who do they serve? How much power should Lambeth conferences or the Archbishop of Canterbury have?

The Very Rev. Dr. Michael Battle, an Episcopal priest and professor at General Theological Seminary, discussed his book series, Conversations in Global Anglican Theology. The second book in the series, Culture, will be out in December. (The first, Faith, appeared in December 2024.)

Battle is American, but spent part of his career in South Africa, and so including the voices of Anglicans from non-Western countries is important to him. “Many voices are not being heard,” he said.

“Culture is vital to understanding Anglicanism,” he said. What it means to be Anglican for a woman in Kenya or Pakistan is very different than what it means for an American or Englishman, and so he hopes his book will be able to share these experiences with the broader church. “If we become one with God, we can’t help but be one with another,” he said.

The Very Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas, an Episcopal priest and theologian, was one of the panelists at a panel dedicated to responding to Immaculate Misconceptions: A Black Mariology. This new book by Protestant Mariologist Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones is about the figure of the Black Madonna and how she can challenge notions of race and gender in Christianity. Brown Douglas is currently a visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School and canon theologian at Washington National Cathedral, and she was previously interim president and dean of Episcopal Divinity School.

“Adkins-Jones reminds us that theology is not benign and never a luxury for subjugated people,” said Brown Douglas, who is a womanist theologian. Womanist theology centers on the spiritual experiences of Black women.

Discussions of Mary are often rooted in a Catholic theological context. But, Brown Douglas argues, evangelical views on good and evil foster a particular dichotomy between Mary and Eve. She believes this has led to the demonization of Black women. “It requires a Black Eve as a foil to a white Madonna,” Brown Douglas said.

Brown Douglas challenged one aspect of the book. “How do we avoid fetishizing Black suffering?” she said. While she wants to acknowledge the struggles of Black women, she wants to see more works that include Black joy as well.

Jamie Brummitt, a religion professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, talked about her new book, Protestant Relics in Early America. In it, she looks at relic collecting by American Protestants—relics of notable figures like George Whitfield and George Washington and the way some individuals kept relics of dead family members.

Collecting Washington’s relics has a connection to the Episcopal Church beyond Washington’s Anglican background. The Rev. Herbert Burk, an Episcopal priest, acquired Washington’s tent and other Revolutionary war objects for the Washington Memorial Chapel at Valley Forge. Today, much of this collection is at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, where it can be more effectively conserved.

The Rev. Dr. Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski of Boston College presented a paper on Anglicanism and comparative theology at a panel dedicated to Protestant understandings of comparative theology.

Comparative theology is a discipline developed in the late 20th century, primarily by the Rev. Dr. Francis X. Clooney, S.J. “Comparative religion is phenomenological. Comparative theology is much more interested in asking what happens when someone with specific commitments to a theological tradition deeply investigates another tradition, and how do they reflect back upon their own tradition as a result?” Joslyn-Siemiatoski told TLC.

His presentation focused on a very non-contemporary Anglican theologian: Richard Hooker, who wrote in the 16th century. “Against the claims of some that only the recent reformations of the 16th century had established God’s true church, Hooker used Israel’s history to show the continued existence of God’s church even amid great scandal and sin,” he said. “Postulating the reality of a faithful church existing since the time of ancient Israel allowed Hooker to argue for the existence of this church not only amid Protestants but also to admit the possibility of the preservation of the true church within the corruptions of the Church of Rome.”

The Rev. Dr. Joshua Kulak, an Episcopal priest and associate rector at St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas, spoke about “Migration with Dignity” and what it means to support immigrants today.

The Migration with Dignity framework came from environmental law, and touches on four points: movement, security, equality, and standard of living. To Kulak, these are reflected in the baptismal ecclesiology of the Episcopal Church that sees Christians as needing to respect the human dignity of all people.

“If Episcopalians stand for Migration with Dignity, they must wholeheartedly embrace their baptismal identity, join with God in the reconciling work of beloved community, and practice migration with dignity through reparative actions rooted in restorative love and justice,” he wrote in his paper.

The Rev. Dr. Robert MacSwain, OGS, an Episcopal priest and professor at the University of the South’s School of Theology, discussed his new book, Essays Anglican and Analytic: Explorations in Critical Catholicism, published in April 2025. It connects Anglicanism with philosophical theology.

He was inspired to write the book by his love for Church of England theologians Austin Farrer and David Brown, and by what he sees as the marginalization of Anglican voices within theology. He said that when he looked at a reading list for a major divinity school, the only pre-21st century Anglican theologians included were John Locke, John Wesley, and John Henry Newman.

At the same time, he sees Anglican philosophers of religion as getting much more attention, something he also wanted to highlight. He wants those interested in Anglican studies to realize the importance of Anglican analytic philosophers, but also those interested in systematic theology more broadly to see that Anglican theologians have made valuable contributions.

Dr. Thomas Noakes-Duncan, a lecturer at St. John’s Theological College in New Zealand, presented on the Rev. George Armstrong, a priest and activist in New Zealand in the 1970s.

Noakes-Duncan touched on a protest over the New Zealand rugby team playing the South African rugby team—which was entirely white because of apartheid. Armstrong brought numerous seminarians with him, clad neatly in cassocks and holding processional crosses, to protest. The protests led to the game being cancelled, something that did not endear him to the majority of white New Zealanders.

Armstrong was also known for his other radical views, such as engaging in protests against the Vietnam War and for blockading harbors to prevent entry by nuclear ships. “Racism and a nuclear apocalypse cannot ever belong in salvation history,” Noakes-Duncan said.

The Rev. Dr. Jesse Zink is a priest in the Anglican Church of Canada and a professor at the Montreal Diocesan Theological College. He discussed his book Faithful, Hopeful, Creative: Fifteen Theses for Christians in a Crisis-Shaped World (2024), which aims to give both clergy and laity a way to understand numerous difficult situations today.

The idea for the book came to him during COVID. “But nobody wanted to read a book about the pandemic, and I didn’t want to write one,” he said. He decided instead to write a book about many overlapping crises. He sees three main issues: climate, migration, and economics.

The book was shaped by his experience in the Diocese of Montreal, which has experienced numerous problems in recent years. “I got tired of church meetings that were a series of well-meaning rhetorical questions that were asked and never quite answered,” he said.

Greta Gaffin is a freelance writer based in Boston. She has a master of theological studies degree from Boston University and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.