ACNA Releases a Memo Summarizing Parochial Report Data

Stand Firm has posted a memo in which the ACNA released the 2010 parochial report numbers in response to Matt Kennedy’s 10/13/2011 article, “A Request to the ACNA: Release the Numbers.” With the memo Stand Firm has also posted Brad Root’s explanation of the numbers. Root is chief operating officer of the ACNA. What caught my attention was that only 64% of the ACNA congregations complied with the provisions of the ACNA canons and submitted parochial reports. 36% did not submit a report. The numbers do not reflect a total parish membership, which the ACNA neglected to request. Root states that the total parish membership is conservatively estimated to exceed ASA by about one third or 33%. This number is problematic because how total parish membership is estimated from ASA varies with the size of the congregation. ASA also reflects the average number of people attending church on Sunday. It does not reflect the percentage of this number who are first time visitors and the percentage of the same number who are regular attenders/repeat visitors and church members.

What else caught my attention is that “Churches in ACNA Ministry Partner Organizations” are being counted as a part of the “Total ACNA Churches,” artificially inflating the number of ACNA churches. Should the ACNA be counting as ACNA churches congregations that the Anglican Church of Rwanda is counting as its churches? The Anglican Mission is after all a Missionary Jurisdiction of the Anglican Church of Rwanda. A church or cluster of churches partnered in ministry with the ACNA is not really a part of the ACNA. There is nothing wrong in identifying such churches and church clusters in ACNA statistics but they should not be classified as ACNA churches or church clusters. That is misleading.