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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don’t understand the breakaways. It’s the same for a Anglicans who “broke away” from the Episcopal church. The church leadership set the existing policies, and there are a million other churches and denominations that don’t like women and/or  gay people. Go there if that’s your thing, because fundamentally that’s what it’s about. [/quote]

[b]I left the Methodist Church two years because I got sick of the constant celebrating of the LGBTQ community.  Go be whoever you want.  I really don’t care.  But I don’t attend church to celebrate you and your cause.  I go there to worship Christ and this LGBTQ issue has, in my opinion, taken the focus off of Christ.  [/quote]

Exactly!!!![/quote][/b]

+1.  And FWIW our Bible-based church is booming.[/quote]

[b]Funny, our lefty Episcopal church is filling our pews with young people. Smells, bells, and tolerance.[/quote][/b]

Fine, but that's not what is happening to the population of Episcopal churches across our nation.  From wiki:

As of 2018, the Episcopal Church reports 1,835,931 baptized members. The majority of members are in the United States, where the Church has 1,676,349 members. Outside of the U.S. the Church has 159,582. Total average Sunday attendance (ASA) for 2018 was 562,529 (533,206 in the U.S. and 29,323 outside the U.S.), a decrease of 24.7% percent from 2008.[73]

According to a report by ARIS/Barna in 2001, 3.5 million Americans self–identified as Episcopalians, highlighting "a gap between those who are affiliated with the church (on membership rolls), versus those who self-identify [as Episcopalians]".[74] Church Pension Group also cited having 3.5 million adherents in 2002.[75] More recently, in 2014, Pew Research found that approximately 1.2 percent of 245 million U.S adults, around 3 million people, self–identified as mainline Episcopalian/Anglican.[3]

According to data collected in 2000, the District of Columbia, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Virginia have the highest rates of adherents per capita, and states along the East Coast generally have a higher number of adherents per capita than in other parts of the country.[76] New York was the state with the largest total number of adherents, over 200,000.[77] In 2013, the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti was the largest single diocese, with 84,301 baptized members, which constitute slightly over half of the church's foreign membership.[73]

According to the latest statistics U.S. membership dropped 2.7 percent from a reported 1,866,758 members in 2013 to 1,745,156 in 2016, a loss of 121,602 persons. Attendance took an even steeper hit, with the average number of Sunday worshipers dropping from 623,691 in 2013 to 570,454 in 2016, a decline of 53,237 persons in the pews, down 8.5 percent. Congregations dropped to 6,473.[78]

The Episcopal Church experienced notable growth in the first half of the 20th century, but like many mainline churches, it has had a decline in membership in more recent decades.[79] Membership grew from 1.1 million members in 1925 to a peak of over 3.4 million members in the mid-1960s.[80] Between 1970 and 1990, membership declined from about 3.2 million to about 2.4 million.[80] Once changes in how membership is counted are taken into consideration, the Episcopal Church's membership numbers were broadly flat throughout the 1990s, with a slight growth in the first years of the 21st century.[81][82][83][84][85] A loss of 115,000 members was reported for the years 2003–05.[86] Some theories about the decline in membership include a failure to sufficiently reach beyond ethnic barriers in an increasingly diverse society, and the low fertility rates prevailing among the predominant ethnic groups traditionally belonging to the church. In 1965, there were 880,000 children in Episcopal Sunday School programs. By 2001, the number had declined to 297,000.[8[/quote]

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