The Dead Cat Bounce in Episcopal Pews

The Episcopal News Service sees stabilization. The 2025 Parochial Report shows a church that has lost a third of itself in ten years.

By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org  October 15, 2026

The Episcopal News Service is very good at what it does. Give it a decade of hemorrhage and it will give you back a headline about stabilization. Its account of the newly released 2025 Parochial Report tells us that attendance is "stabilizing," that finances are steady, that younger attenders are excited and that Episcopalians are "deeply engaged." Membership, we are told, continues to "slowly decline."

Slowly. Hold that word up against the numbers.

Credit where it is due. The Parochial Report is the oldest continuous data series the Episcopal Church keeps, it gathered returns from nearly 92 percent of parishes and missions, and the analysis was done by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, a serious shop. The data is real. It is the reading of it that needs correcting. When you set aside the adjectives and do the arithmetic, the report is not a story of stabilization. It is the record of a church emptying out.

A Third Gone in Ten Years

In 2015 the Episcopal Church reported nearly 2 million members. In 2025 it reported 1.4 million. That is a loss of roughly 600,000 people in a decade, about 30 percent of the church, and an average of 60,000 souls a year. Put plainly, the Episcopal Church loses the equivalent of a good-sized diocese every twelve months.

Average Sunday attendance tells the same story with more force. In 2015 nearly 600,000 Episcopalians were in church on an ordinary Sunday. In 2025 the figure was 407,000, a fall of 32 percent.

And consider the gap between the rolls and the pews. Of 1.4 million members, 407,000 shows up. Fewer than three in ten. Seven of every ten people the church counts as its own are, for practical purposes, somewhere else on Sunday morning.

If this is slow decline, one shudders to think what fast decline would look like.

The Dead Cat Bounce

The release makes much of the fact that attendance, after dipping to 300,000 in 2021 during the pandemic, has "rebounded." So it has: from 300,000 to 407,000, a recovery of about a third.

Wall Street has a name for this. It is called a dead cat bounce. Even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great height. A stock that crashes will often recover part of its loss as the panic subsides, and the unwary take it for a turnaround. It is not. It is the market finding its old floor before the slide resumes.

That is precisely what the report describes. Read the release carefully and it concedes the point itself: attendance has rebounded "to the previous point of decline." That is, to the line it was already falling along before COVID struck. The pandemic did not cause the Episcopal Church's decline. It interrupted it, briefly and dramatically, and the church has now climbed back onto the same downward escalator it was riding in 2019.

Nor does livestreaming rescue the numbers. Average Sunday online attendance was 116,936. Add every one of those screens to the in-person count, and assume no household, no double counting and no one who clicked away after the opening hymn, and you arrive at about 524,000. That is still well short of the 600,000 who were physically present in 2015.

Forty-Three Souls

The most sobering figure in the release is buried in a single sentence. The median Sunday attendance for an Episcopal congregation, in-person and livestream combined, is 43.

Half of all Episcopal churches, in other words, cannot muster 43 people on a Sunday even when the online viewers are counted. The in-person median, which the release does not give, must be lower still.

Think about what that means on the ground. A building to heat and repair, a rector or vicar to pay, a diocesan assessment to meet, an organ to maintain, all resting on a congregation smaller than a school bus. This is not a church of thriving parishes with a few weak ones at the margins. It is a church in which the typical parish is fragile.

Spending the Inheritance

The financial news is presented as stability: income and expenses are nearly equal at about $2.7 billion. Breaking even is not the same as being healthy, and the composition of that income tells the real story.

Only 54 percent of it comes from the offering plate and pledges, the giving of living members. The other 46 percent, well over a billion dollars, comes from elsewhere: endowments, investments, rental income on buildings and land. A very large part of the Episcopal Church is now funded not by the people in its pews but by the people in its churchyards, the generations who built and endowed these parishes and are no longer here to see what has become of them.

Divide $2.7 billion by 407,000 Sunday attenders and you get roughly $6,600 for every person in a pew. The median pledge is a generous $3,193, a figure that speaks of an older, affluent and dwindling donor base. Those givers are not being replaced at the rate they are being buried.

One in a Hundred

Here is the number the Episcopal News Service did not calculate, and it is the most important one in the report.

According to the Hartford survey, 32 percent of current attenders joined their congregation in the past five years. That sounds like vitality. But of those newcomers, 77 percent came from another congregation, 20 percent were returning after years away, and just 3 percent were new to church.

Three percent of thirty-two percent is about one percent. Roughly one person in a hundred sitting in an Episcopal pew today is someone who came to faith, or at least to church, for the first time in the past five years. In a survey of some 2,500 attenders, that works out to perhaps two dozen people.

Everything else is reshuffling. Christians leaving one church for another is not growth; it is transfer. A church that grows only by receiving the disaffected of other congregations is not making disciples. It is collecting them. Our Lord's commission was to go and make disciples of all nations, not to wait for them to arrive from the Methodists.

Asking the Survivors

The cheerful findings in the second half of the release come from the Exploring the Pandemic Impact on Congregations (EPIC) survey: 2,500 respondents in 123 Episcopal congregations, out of thousands.

The problem is not the sample size. It is who was asked. The survey went to people who are still attending. Of course, 92 percent of them worship monthly or more. Of course they find their churches "spiritually alive." The 600,000 members who left over the past decade were not surveyed. Neither were the seven in ten who remain on the rolls but stay home.

This is survivorship bias in its purest form. It is like polling the passengers still aboard a sinking ship and reporting high satisfaction with the voyage.

We are told that 89 percent of attenders under 35 are excited about their congregation's future. We are not told how many attenders are under 35. We are told that 74 percent see their congregations as "striving to become more diverse." We are not given a single figure on whether they have.

What the Questionnaire Forgot

There is one more thing worth noticing. The 2024 changes to the questionnaire mean, in Hartford's own words, that most of the data "cannot be compared over time." The only trend lines that survived the redesign are the three that could not be buried: membership, attendance and money. A denomination whose every trend points downward has, conveniently, a new form that makes most trends impossible to track.

And look at what the new form chose to ask. More than 4,300 congregations reported how they are reducing their carbon footprint: HVAC upgrades, recycling, single-use plastics. The release says nothing at all about baptisms, confirmations, adult conversions or Sunday school enrollment, the historic measures of whether a church is passing on the faith.

A church that carefully measures its carbon footprint and does not report its converts has told us what it thinks matters.

Where the Line Leads

Projections are not prophecies, but arithmetic is arithmetic. If the Episcopal Church simply repeats the past decade, and nothing in this report suggests otherwise, it will have about 1 million members by the mid-2030s and roughly 275,000 people in church on a Sunday. The median parish will not be 43. It will be smaller. The endowments will be carrying more of the load, and there will be more buildings than congregations to fill them.

The Episcopal News Service calls this stabilization. It is the stability of a long, steady descent.

The Episcopal Church is not being persecuted out of existence. No one is closing its doors but itself. It is being emptied, one transfer, one funeral and one shuttered parish at a time, while its leadership counts recycling bins and celebrates a bounce.

A church that does not make disciples does not have a future. It has an endowment, and endowments run out.

David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East can be viewed here: davidvirtue2.substack.com