The Largest Episcopal Churches in the U.S.A.
Excerpt:
The 1998 edition reported 208. The 1999 edition reported 228. The 2002 edition below reported 271. I.e., in the five years 1997-1992 the number of congregations with 1,000+ members increased by 23%. During the same five years, the total number of communicants in the Episcopal Church increased from 1,584,760 to 1,857,843, or only 17%. Large congregations are growing at a faster rate than others.
Twenty-three percent of all Episcopalians are members of churches with 1,000 or more communicants, yet those 271 congregations represent only 3.7% of all Episcopal churches.
The 7,347 congregations of ECUSA average 252 confirmed communicants each.
Caveat: The Episcopal Church Annual is clearly wrong with regard to a few specific "big" congregations. E.g., for several years, the Annual has shown Trinity in Boston as under 100; yet Trinity's website, http://www.trinitychurchboston.org/ states that Trinity has over 2,500 members, and parochial report revealed an average attendance of 1,440. I cannot undertake to naysay the Annual -- my sole source regarding size -- but clearly some congregations are not communicating clearly when they file their parochial reports on which the Annual bases its data.