Lots of dioceses showed growth this year, with the largest absolute increase coming in the diocese of Washington. Half of that increase, it appears, came at the cathedral, where the new dean seems to be working out: attendance is up over 20% from its 2014 low. This has to be evaluated, though, against the decline of over 500 from the most recent peak, in 2007: on that basis we're looking at a 30% loss still to be undone. Several other larger parishes appear to have contributed most of the rest of the increase; of course the prevailing pattern is still decline.
Maryland, as I mentioned earlier, also posted a small gain, again, it appears, mostly based on gains at a few of the largest parishes. Besides the two mentioned, twenty-four other domestic dioceses posted gains, with the largest percentages in Navaholand (12.3%) and Northwest Texas, whose 7.0% gain was the second largest absolute increase (Washington is 7.6 times larger, so it only increased by 1.8%).
No province gained attendance overall, but the geography of dioceses with increases is striking. While there was at least one gaining diocese in each province, the gainers were concentrated in Province 3 (the mid-Atlantic) and even more so in Province 7 (Texas and the southern plains), where seven of twelve dioceses showed gains. The five dioceses with losses, however, tended to lose big. In Province 3 the gaining dioceses lie in a strip running from Erie to Richmond, with Philadelphia tacked on the northeast corner; again it's big losses in a few dioceses which make the difference, as losses in Bethlehem and Southern Virginia together account almost exactly for the 525 net loss for the province. Curiously, of the four surviving split dioceses, all but South Carolina recorded gains; unfortunately the schismatic diocese hasn't posted numbers yet, so I can't see how they compare.
The situation for the foreign dioceses has shifted markedly. Province 9 is dominated by huge losses in Honduras, but sampling of the parish charts suggests that there are still severe record-keeping problems, as the numbers since the 2013 "correction" tend either to grind along as very small values, or jump about erratically. Suffice to say that the diocese accounts for most of the loss in the province, and 55% of all the foreign loss. Haiti also posted a large loss, and since it accounts for half of foreign attendance, well, between it and Honduras the foreign dioceses as a whole lost 10.6% of their attendance, and it could be worse: it appears that Venezuela didn't report data this year. On the other hand, omitting the foreign dioceses from Province 2 reduces its loss from 3.3% to 2.4%.
One year is not a trend, and while the Living Church made a fairly cautious and minimal report, headlined "Declines Soften a Bit". The Episcopal Cafe, on the other hand, went for "Signs of hope in 2016 TEC stats", ending with "The clear takeaway from this report should be that terminal decline is not our future, but certainly consolidation is." Well, even if the 3% per annum losses had continued, it would be a long time, I suspect, before we would see wholesale consolidation of dioceses, but really, this is trying to put a good face on things. And their analysis tends to concentrate on the less reliable membership numbers, so when they say that "There do not appear to be large regional variations in ASA or membership changes domestically, though the southern provinces (IV and VII) had smaller percentage declines than average," well, that's not what I see in the ASA numbers, where Province 4 is not among the worst, but where few diocese recorded gains, and those gains were small. But it will be at least three years before we can see whether this represents an interruption in decline, or a slackening, or the beginning of a real turnaround.
