ABSTRACT
Shortly after her election as Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church (TEC), 1 Katharine Jefferts Schori conceded that her denomination’s membership had fallen to 2.2 million, a circumstance she attributed to the fact that ‘Episcopalians tend to be better-educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than some other denominations’. 2 Schori’s observation was itself a pithy rendering of the findings of TEC’s Officer for Congregational Development, who, just four years earlier, had identified a close correlation between the national birth rate and changes in Episcopal Church membership since the 1950s:
Not surprisingly, American women with a graduate or professional degree have the lowest birth rate, followed by women with Bachelor’s degrees. Also, women in families earning $75,000 or more have very low birth rates, as do women in families earning $50,000 to $74,999. The Episcopal Church has the highest proportion of members among mainline denominations who are college graduates and in households earning $75,000 or more. 3
In an aging and increasingly childless denomination, Kirk Hadaway concluded, the only way to arrest membership decline was to embrace increasingly creative forms of evangelism calculated to attract not only those from other Christian traditions (something in which TEC historically excelled) but also the unchurched. 4 In the event, however, the first decade of the twenty-first century was to be marked by intra-denominational strife that not only led many Episcopalians to abandon their former church, but also served to characterise The Episcopal Church – rightly or otherwise – as a body more noted for theological controversy than pastoral care.
