Yes, indeed, these are interesting, and depressing, numbers.  I saw them yesterday on Fr. Wood’s blog.  I found it helpful that he did a comparison to give some perspective illustrating how bad these numbers from the home office are.

These numbers are fairly meaningless until you can tease the effects of parishes and diocese leaving as groups from the decline due to attrition. The latter is likely to continue, with a slowly increasing rate, as it has for 40 years.

All is well.

And the beat goes on, and on, and on….....and things continue to get worse.

Did Ft Worth and Pittsburg leave in ‘08 or ‘09?  If ‘09 then next years numbers are going to be increadibly bad.

They did, chips, and you’re right…..next year’s numbers ARE going to be incredibly bad!  TEC can’t continue to hide from the truth forever.

“Median Average Sunday Worship Attendance” 
I find it very interesting that they use the “median ASA” instead of “mean ASA” because the median just means middle number while mean means average.  So there could be in a group of 1001 parishes 501 parishes with 74 people and 500 parishes with 10 people and the median is still 74…

7- but conversely, a handful of extremely large congregations can inflate the mean

I would hasten to point out that Fr. Wood’s church is in the middle of a Charleston, SC suburb, so comparison of his parish with the Episcopal median is pretty unfair. I imagine that he may even be on the small side for Charleston churches.

re 7: They use median because the handful of really big parishes would make the numbers look a lot better than they actually were.

If you look at the diocesan numbers, you can see the effect of San Joaquin leaving; their departure alone accounted for over half the decline in Province 8. OTOH it appears that Los Angeles continues to report numbers for a bunch of parishes that have left. All of this is but a cupful in a bucketful of steady decline.

We already know the effect of the departure of Pittsburgh.  In 2008 the ASA is listed as 7139.  However, at its convention this weekend the TEC Pittsburgh diocese is reporting its 2008 ASA as 2609.  This is a loss of 4530.

Yes it is true that using the mean can also creat problems, *but* the whole way through they use average numbers and then jump to a median number just for this statistic.  That is what I found interesting.  So why change how the statistics are given?  If you want to try to show what is going on most accurately, why not put both?