I have seen some
interesting comments in recent weeks on Facebook about how people understand or
interpret a Church’s Average Sunday Attendance.
Since I am a strong advocate of knowing this number and understanding how
to use it, I found some of the comments helpful, but another group of them not
so.
For example, one Priest
observed that while they had a small ASA, they had an outreach ministry that
served over 50 people a week. The Priest
asked, “Why can’t these numbers be added to our ASA to show the importance of
this ministry? Do we think that those
who gather for Sunday worship are the only ones that matter?” I think the outreach numbers are important,
but keep reading to find out why “adding them to Sunday attendance” is largely
meaningless.
In a similar vein, a
Bishop criticized “ASA envy” and said that congregational impact on the
community is much more important than worrying about where a congregation’s
average attendance stacks up against other congregation. In a way, this is the standard criticism in
new packaging that I have often heard from more Progressive church folks. They used to say, “We don’t count
numbers!” Well as Bishop Payne liked to
say, “We do count numbers because the numbers represent people and people
matter to both God and the Church.”
So why does ASA matter?
Remember that ASA is the average
of all people who attend a congregation on the Sundays in a year. Yes this includes the 8am folks. It also includes A Saturday night service or
a Sunday evening service provided that the majority of those who attend such
adjunct services do not attend Sunday morning.
What we learned nearly 25
years ago was that ASA is a more helpful number than membership. There are lots of reasons for this, but the
basic issue is that Churches and Pastors vary greatly in how they count
membership. For example, it is not
unusual for a large Evangelical Church to have large attendance, but smaller
membership. Why? Because to be an official voting member, the congregation
requires that you submit proof that you tithe.
On the other end of the scale are Episcopal and other mainline churches
that count people as members who have not attended for years.
Even within a denomination
this varies. I have found that churches
that have a long-tenured Rector often show an ASA that is as low as 20% of
their membership. Churches that have had
a change in the last two years of a Rector often have an ASA that is nearer to
50% of its membership. Furthermore, most
new church plants can have over 50% of their members attending each
Sunday. There are reasons for this, but
the bottom line is that membership varies so greatly that it is not a useful
number for understanding a congregation’s life.
I only use membership in the way I just mentioned, measuring the percent
of stated members present on an average Sunday.
In an average Episcopal congregation that number is normally 35 to
40%. It is variations in this “normal”
percentage that gets my attention and has me asking “why?”
So why does ASA
matter? It matters because when you add
the attendance for 52 Sundays (yes this includes Easter and it also includes
the summer months) one gets a very consistent number. Easter doesn’t distort things too much
because it is only 1/52nd of the total. What research on congregations has shown us
is that ASA tends to group around certain predictable patterns that reveal a
congregation’s culture. These should be
familiar to most Episcopal leaders by now.
They are as follows:
ASA of
20 to 50 =
Family Size Congregation
75 to 140 =
Pastoral Size Congregation
141 – 200 =
Transitional Size
200 – 400 =
Program Size
400 + =
Resource Size
By the way, the Diocese of
Texas pioneered the use of the term “Resource Size Church” because the general
protestant term “Corporate Size” seemed too, well, corporate minded. In addition, these larger congregations are
resources to their diocese; they give more than they get back from diocesan resources.
So ASA gives us a way of diagnosing the type of
culture and nature of the congregation as expressed in these descriptive
titles.
A Family Size Congregation
(which usually has a bi-vocational, shared, or retired clergy) hold together around
a group of key families and households.
These bonds transcend the importance of the ordained person. Or as one Bishop used to put it, “Our Family
Size Churches are clergy immune!” I
would add that they have to be.
A Pastoral Size Church is
a congregation with enough people and money to have a full-time, seminary
trained, ordained leader. I point out
that in a Pastoral Size Episcopal Church that the Parish Calendar and the Priest’s
Liturgical Desk Calendar is the same thing.
Transitional Size is not a
true culture but reflects a congregation often caught between the small
Pastoral Size and the larger Program Church.
This is a hard transition and few churches make it. I could write a book
about this topic. Oh wait, I already did,
The Myth of the 200 Barrier. J
You might find it
interesting that while there are some variations in larger Program to Resource
Churches, (see Alice Mann’s book on this topic) the Program Churches can grow
to almost 800 ASA by just doing well what they are good at. As as long as facilities, staff, and program
are expanded to incorporate new people growth can continue. This is why large churches have an advantage
over smaller ones. The transitions from
Family to Pastoral and from Pastoral to Program are radical cultural
changes. While there are significant
changes when a Church’s ASA passes 800 in the Culture of a large church, this
is not a topic for Episcopalians. We
have only a handful of congregations with an ASA larger than 800.
So, let’s get this straight;
there is no virtue in a church simply having a larger ASA than another church. There are significant and impactful Family
Size Churches and there are also dysfunctional ones. There are significant and impactful Pastoral
Size Churches and there are also sick and dysfunctional ones. And, believe it or not, there are even
unhealthy and dysfunctional larger congregations. ASA is important, but it does nothing to tell
you about a congregation’s vitality and health or its mission impact on its
community. These simply have to be
measured in other ways and I have always encouraged Dioceses to develop these
measurements. This should address the “impact”
and “ASA envy” issues mentioned at the beginning.
It also tells us why
adding the folks who come to your Food Bank or other outreach ministry to ASA
is meaningless. If you want to measure
impact, just count the people who are served or supported by these
ministries. In addition, you will want
to measure the number of volunteers who do these ministries because if it is a
small percentage of the congregation, the ministry is at risk.
How is the ASA trending?
Now, we can turn to one
other diagnostic question. By noting the
ASA for say ten years, we now can see the trend for a congregation. So we can take the graph provided by the staff
at our Church’s headquarters and determine whether a Pastoral Church is
declining, growing, or stable. If you
are in an Episcopal Congregation that has been stable or growing for the past
10 years, then you are to be congratulated.
You are bucking the overall trend of the decline of the Episcopal
Church. Generally speaking, our Pastoral
Size Churches are in decline and our Family Size ones are in serious
decline. These sizes make up 80% of
Episcopal Congregations and this is one of the main reasons why our denomination remains in decline. I should point out that this decline of
smaller congregation is a serious crisis for many of our Dioceses. It is a topic worthy of much more discussion
and strategic planning by Bishops and diocesan staff.
One more observation
should be made about all this ASA information.
Note that there are two kinds of growth in churches. There is growth that is congruent with the
congregational culture. There is also
growth that is transformational, from one size to another. The first type of growth usually feels good
to Church people. The second,
transformational, brings stress and sometimes tension.
Your ASA and how this is trending is a very helpful
tool to Clergy, Vestries, Bishops, and Church Consultants. If you want to use it for other purposes, I
will give you some golf advice. I don’t
let my score in a particular round determine my self-esteem. Do not let the ASA of your congregation
determine the esteem of your members or your Clergy person. These should be measured by the joy, love,
mutual support, and caring outreach which you share together as a community in
Christ.
