ASA: Love It or Hate It but Use It

 I have read with interest several comments by Episcopal leaders critical of measuring and reporting the Average Sunday Attendance of congregations. This is important. ASA is not a measurement of success.

For Example, a congregation with an ASA of 250 is not “more successful or better” than a congregation with 95 ASA. Bigger is not better when it comes to congregations. As a consultant, I use ASA as one measurement reporting this number. My interest is rooted in the fact that I am one of two people who made the Average Sunday Attendance a factor in the annual parochial reports of Episcopal congregations. I learned the importance of this number from my mentor Lyle Schaller.  I thought it would be helpful if I clarified what this number means and what it does not mean.

Let me repeat what I have taught for 30 years. Average Sunday Attendance of the 52 Sundays of the year is NOT, as I have heard said by several leaders lately, a measure of success!  It is a tool to help measure the trends and health of a congregation and can understood best in context. 

The first trend is what this year’s ASA is when put alongside the ASA for the last ten years.  When Bishop Payne would visit a congregation for confirmation, he would meet with the Vestry and share with them 3 numbers for the last ten years in graph form. One number was membership. The second was stewardship (the average annual giving.) and the third was ASA. When we shared this information with leaders, we would often ask them what they thought this means for the future of their congregation. 

I still remember two experiences in doing this. One vestry member said after some silence, “Well, will the last member please turn out the lights when we are forced to close our doors!” The information raised a sense of urgency for a congregation long in decline with leaders who were complacent with the status quo.

A second revealing comment generated while looking at these numbers in a fast-growing congregation but one with conflict was “Who the hell are all these new people anyway?” A single statement made by a long-term leader showed what the conflict was about. My bias remains the same. I think all congregational leaders should have access to this historical information. After all, why do planning and stewardship without knowing the long-term trends. One thing leadership must understand is that if you keep doing what you have done, you will get what you have always gotten.

The second thing that ASA over time reveals is the type of congregation. We used Schaller’s numbers for four sizes: Family size between 20 and 70, Pastoral size between 80 and 150, Program size between 225 and 400, Recourse size between 400 and 1,000, What do these numbers mean? There are 4 distinct ways of being the Church. 

How a congregation remains stable, or declines, or grows is particular to each size. Some of you will remember a helpful tool from Presiding Bishop’s Office, “Sizing Up the Congregation for New Membership Growth” by Arlin Rothauge. What we did in the Diocese of Texas was to resource our local leaders with this information and easily 80% would plan and make healthy choices based on their size. Using these resources, we helped the Diocese become the fastest growing diocese for five years in both numbers and percentages. That was a remarkable result. Our result led the 815 staff to incorporate these three measurements into the Annual Reports. These are still being made available and can be found on the Episcopal Church’s website.

Again, while the growth was remarkable, success was not what we were measuring, the ASA and other numbers were diagnostic. You can also see why simply looking at last year’s ASA has little meaning outside of the longer trends.

Now let me say this. Some Episcopal leaders including Bishops, do not want to see this information because (a) our numbers for the past 20 years are very bleak, and (b) they are in denial about the implications of these trends. Denial is never a healthy response by a person, a leader, or a congregation, or even the Executive Council of TEC. Of course, the decline of TEC is a complex issue and needs to be understood in the context of Christianity in North America. My suggestion to leaders is to get out of denial and work for the spread and health of the Church given the current realities.

Some who read this will notice that I intentionally give gaps between the sizes, the most important one in my experience is the gap between the large Pastoral Size congregation and a small Program one. This became so clear to me as I worked with over 150 congregations that I wrote a book about it. If you fall in this in-between ASA, “The Myth of the 200 Barrier” is still a valuable tool. Episcopal Leaders might be interested to know that this book has been used by many Lutheran and Methodist congregations with positive results. 

All of this has been reinforced by the application of Systems Theory to ASA and its revelations for leaders. Each size represents a system or culture that can have both positive and negative health implications.

So, the next time you hear one of our leaders denigrating the use of ASA, note what it reveals about that leader’s denial and why the use of Average Sunday Attendance is still important. By the way, the ASA for our congregations dropped from pre-Covid of 65 to today’s 35! No wonder many of our leaders are caught in such strong denial!