Nearly 500,000 members have left Episcopal Church in past decade

The mainline Episcopal Church continues to hemorrhage membership. It has lost about 500,000 members over the past decade, “The Christian Post” reported.

The church had about 1.425 million members last year, an internal report found, down from 1.54 million in 2023 and 1.917 million in 2015. “Membership continues its slow decline, a trend that has persisted for decades,” the report said.

In-person Sunday worship attendance has fallen from about 600,000 in 2015 to about 407,000 last year. The 2025 figure also is slightly lower than in 2024, when the denomination reported Sunday worship attendance of more than 413,000. The analysis also counted 6,673 open parishes and missions last year, down slightly from 6,707 in 2024. Baptisms dipped slightly as well, from 19,624 in 2024 to 19,316 in 2025, according to the report.

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Although many factors have contributed to the decline in membership and attendance, the denomination’s increasingly progressive theological direction has alienated some. In 2003, for example, when the Episcopal Church consecrated the Rev. Gene Robinson as its first openly gay bishop, scores of congregations and a couple of dioceses left in protest.

In October 2025, the denomination released its 2024 Parochial Report, which, unlike past annual reports, did not include a total membership count. At the time, the Episcopal Church’s Office of Public Affairs said in a statement that the report reflected “responses to new and revised questions that were compiled by former members of the House of Deputies Committee on the State of the Church and approved by the Executive Council in October 2023 and January 2024.”

“The committee experimented with new ways to ask about and count total churchwide membership, and the data collected revealed confusion in how churches understood and reported this topline number,” the office said. “The presiding officers are collaborating to devise a process that provides clearer data on total membership in future years.”

–Lee Hartman | Metro Voice

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