Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

How do you summarize the state of the Episcopal Church in one 20-page report? What status reports are most helpful for the church-at-large as it seeks to live out its mission in the world? How do you crunch a sea of statistics into a usable form for planning? That was the challenge before the House of Deputies Committee on the State of the Church as it met in Atlanta this week.

The committee is chaired by Matilda Kistler of Western North Carolina and is made up of three clergy and five other lay people representing the Dioceses of Chicago, Mississippi, North Carolina, Olympia, Texas, Southeast Florida, Arizona, and San Diego. We make up a good cross section of the church and we play well together. Bonnie Anderson, President of the House of Deputies, is ex officio and was with us for our entire meeting.

The outline of our report will cover sections on the laity, the clergy, transparency in the church, the work of the Committees, Commissions, and Boards, the evolution of the program staff at 815, and a demographic overview of our church. One section will detail the make-up of the Episcopal Church in the continuing dioceses of San Joaquin, Ft. Worth, Quincy, and Pittsburgh.

Right now the report is jobbed out to subcommittees who will build each section and submit them for editorial review. My two assignments are the overall demographics and the evolution of the program staff at 815. This second topic has been an ongoing concern of mine since the last General Convention.

At the Anaheim General Convention in 2009, budget decisions led Linda Watt, Chief Operating Officer of the Episcopal Church, to call together the 815 staff and begin immediately the task of layoffs. By the beginning of 2010 the staff had been cut from 160 to 120 people, a 25% reduction. Then further cuts were required. The section of my report will detail what the 815 staff looked like in 2009 and what it looks like at the end of 2011.

The other section I will be authoring will be a snapshot of our church drawn from the Parochial Report and from a fascinating survey entitled “Faith Communities Today.” This instrument will give us access to a ton of topics of concern to our churches. One of my favorite sections asked churches to rate their primary worship service on the following scale:

5. How well do the following describe your congregation’s largest regular weekend worship service? 
√ ONE ON EACH LINE                Not at all    Slightly    Somewhat    Quite    Well   Very Well 
Reverent...................................... 
Filled with a sense of God’s presence 
Joyful ...........................................
Innovative ....................................   
Inspirational .................................
Thought‐provoking ......................

The demographic section I am producing is the largest section in the report. I am MORE than open to hearing from you about what you think counts when the church does its counting. Feel free to use the comments section to suggest data analysis you think we ought to include. Our goal is to represent a snapshot of our church and the state it is in.