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Next Best Step

The tool is built on the TEC Trajectory Study, which surveyed Episcopal congregations about their practices and compared their answers with their attendance trends through 2024. A church enters its attendance and a few facts about itself. The tool shows where the church stands and suggests the next best thing to try. The example churches are invented.

Rather not answer the questions? Start from a rule of thumb

Have consistent follow-up of every first-time visitor, give at least a third of vestry time to strategy and vision, and add a third practice, such as childcare at meetings or members inviting friends. In the study, churches with follow-up, the strategic vestry, and childcare at meetings were growing or recovering about twice as often as churches without all three (21.4% against 10.7%). That figure is adjusted only for church size and comes from a wide search of practice combinations, so treat it as a possible difference rather than a clear one. Once you answer the questions, the steps come from churches like yours, and they may point somewhere else first.

Average Sunday attendance

Copy these from your parochial reports. The tool needs 2019 (or 2018, if you have no 2019 figure) and at least one year from 2022 on, and it leaves out 2020 and 2021, as the study did. An earlier year, from 2011 on, gives the longer view.

Where to find your numbers
  1. Open the General Convention's Explore Individual Parochial Report Trends page.
  2. Choose your diocese in the Diocese menu, and your city in the City menu if the list is long.
  3. Tick your church in the Congregation Name list; each name shows its city.
  4. Click Average Attendance below the chart. The number above each bar is that year's average Sunday attendance, from 2015 on.
  5. Enter 2019 and each year from 2022 on, and 2015 as your earliest year (or 2011, if your parish has that year's report). If the page doesn't show your latest year yet, take it from your own parochial report. Plate and Pledge gives your giving for 2019 and your latest year.

Not an Episcopal church? Use your own attendance records, or your denomination's yearly statistical reports.

Earliest year: the first year you have a figure for, 2011 if you have it; the tool also uses it to check whether your church fell and has since recovered. 2019, or 2018: the year the tool measures your change from; choose 2018 only if you have no figure for 2019. 2022 on: each year you have, through your latest. This year so far: optional, your average for this year to date, which counts as this year's figure until the year is over; then its box asks for the full year.

Plate and pledge is optional, but the tool needs both figures to tell whether a church has recovered.

Don't have your numbers for earlier years?

Describe your attendance instead. Your numbers, if you enter them, always come first. A description gives a rougher result: a church near the edge of a range may land on the neighboring path, and the tool can't draw your trend.

Compared with 2019, our average Sunday attendance in our latest year is:

Your church

Enter your ZIP code to fill in your county and your community's age figures. Nothing is sent anywhere.

Your county and your community (if your ZIP code won't capture them accurately)
Your county is
How many families with children live near your church?

Your own figures replace the town's. Your answer about families with children, if you give one, decides whether children's steps are offered, in place of either.

Which of these best describes your main Sunday service? Pick the first description that fits.
What you teach about Scripture and the Creeds (optional)
What position is closest to what your congregation teaches about the Bible?
What position is closest to what your congregation teaches about the Creeds?
If a leader publicly rejected part or all of the Creeds, what would follow?
Which of these does your congregation treat as authoritative?

What you already do

Tick each box if your congregation currently…

Every figure compares churches at one point in time; none shows what would happen if a church started a practice. The practices come from survey answers compared with attendance trends that run only through 2024. Built on the study's released results (September 28, 2026).

The study's director is Fr. Chris Corbin, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, Oshkosh.

Your answers stay in this browser. The page doesn't send them to the study or to anyone else.

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