Episcopal Church Withdrawal?

The Episcopal Church is selling or leasing its legendary headquarters building in New York city, from whose perch its Presiding Bishops long ruled and resided in a penthouse apartment overlooking the Manhattan skyline. One former presiding bishop reputedly decorated the penthouse all in white, which allegedly matched her chilly personality, provoking snarly critics to deride her as the “white witch.”

This sale could be seen as a metaphor for the collapse of liberal Protestantism, if any more metaphors are needed. More widely, it illustrates the collapse of institutional religion in America, liberal or not.

Mainline Protestant denominations have been pulling their headquarters and agencies from New York for decades. The United Church of Christ quit New York in 1990 for a new headquarters building in Cleveland, which it sold in 2022 for smaller rental space a mile away. The Presbyterian Church (USA) headquarters quit New York in 1988 for Louisville, Kentucky. United Methodism’s largest agency, the General Board of Global Ministries, quit New York in 2016 for Atlanta. The National Council of Churches quit New York in 2013 for Washington, DC.

The Episcopal church across sixty years has lost 56 percent of its members. United Methodism has lost 65 percent of its members. The Presbyterian Church (USA) has lost 75 percent of its members. The United Church of Christ has lost about 70 percent of members. These denominations long maintained extensive staffs in New York, as did the once influential but now barely existing National Council of Churches.

Their continuous membership decline began in the mid-1960s. We can mostly fault theological liberalism, which minimized if not disdained evangelism, upon which all religions depend for life and growth. Mainline Protestantism had always been dominant in America and robustly assumed it always would remain so, with or without any effort. It choked on its own over confidence.

But in recent years the Mainline denominations have been joined by declining evangelical denominations. The Southern Baptist Convention has lost nearly 25 percent of its members, and the cause is not theological liberalism. American Christianity no longer esteems denominations and their related institutions. American Christianity is now individualized, self-collated and largely shaped online.

The large denominational agencies long based in New York that influenced millions of American Christians were rooted in another world almost unimaginable today. A Washington Post story about the Episcopal Church headquarters sale observed of the historical significance:

Half of America’s founders were Episcopalians, the American counterpart to the Church of England. More U.S. presidents have been Episcopalian than any other faith group, and until recent decades the denomination was shorthand for a type of crème de la crème of American society.

The Episcopal Church in America was never very large, like Methodism or Baptists, but it was, as The Post noted, prestigious beyond its numbers and occupied a unique niche in American Christianity. For that reason, although its decline will continue, it may outlast other Mainline Protestant denominations.

Amid the collapse in membership and denominational loyalties, it’s hard to see how the United Methodist Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Presbyterian Church USA, United Church of Christ, or Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) meaningfully exist in ten or 15  years. Thousands of their churches will close. Surviving congregations will be populated mostly by people who have no conscious attachment to the denomination. Those congregations will function autonomously if not quit the denomination altogether.

Maybe several Mainline denominations will endure as loosely affiliated networks, or perhaps simply as endowments that continue particular missions. The Episcopal Church, with its unique liturgical worship and episcopal form of government, stands apart. It will likely always attract a constituency drawn to its beauty of worship, refinement, and history. Christians who esteem these qualities will not find them in nondenominational churches.

The Episcopal Church has much that is wrong with it. Its national leaders and agencies still tout left-leaning political causes, although they are almost entirely ignored, as with other Mainline bodies. The denomination’s teachings on sex are heterodox, as is true for other Mainliners, but again, most local congregations largely do not discuss these policies. The liturgy is still orthodox. And theological modernism, which denied or minimized the Bible’s miracles and creedal truths, receded.

So in ten years The Episcopal Church will sink to below a million members for the first time in a hundred years but it will almost certainly still exist, while other Mainline denominations likely will not, at least to any serious degree. “Underutilized buildings” like the Episcopal Church headquarters in New York will be discarded. But many beautiful and historic sanctuaries will still endure.

As American Christianity evolves and restructures, the current trend of nondenominational non liturgical worship might ebb in a decade or so. And there might be at least a wider Protestant market for traditional worship and practices rooted in Christian history. Whatever is left of the Episcopal Church then, with other Mainline surviving elements, might benefit from that potential renewed interest.

The constant churn of Protestantism never sits still for very long.