Buckle up, patriots—the Episcopal Church is bleeding members faster than a leaky balloon at a porcupine convention. We’re talking steep, cliff-diving decline: baptized rolls shrinking by the tens (and hundreds) of thousands, attendance circling the drain for decades.
Why the nosedive? Simple. About twenty-some years ago (okay, more like forty if we’re being honest), they traded in the timeless truths of Scripture for the latest trendy cocktail of “wokeness.” Rainbow flags? Check. Support for gun control? You betcha. Social justice sermons that sound suspiciously like MSNBC scripts? Double check. Actual Bible? Gathering dust in the sacristy.
But wait—why are we even dragging church drama into Guns Save Life territory? We’re the plucky crew fighting tooth-and-nail for your God-given right to defend yourself and your loved ones, not debating hymnals.
Because the Episcopal Church didn’t just go woke—as we hinted in the opening paragraph, they went full anti-gun zealot mode at every possible turn.
They’ve been cranking out resolutions since the 1970s calling for bans, restrictions, “common-sense” laws (you know, the kind that only inconvenience law-abiding folks), and basically treating firearms like the devil’s own pitchforks. Bishops United Against Gun Violence? They’ve got a whole squad preaching that guns are the root of all evil, urging Congress to disarm America one “scary black gun” ban at a time. No peace with “gun violence” (which we all know is really GANG violence!), they say—while conveniently ignoring the peace-of-mind a good guy with a gun brings when the bad ones show up.
So yeah, while their pews empty out faster than a free-bar happy hour, they’re still thundering from the pulpit about how your AR-15 is the real sin. Meanwhile, Guns Save Life keeps showing up to defend the Second Amendment—no apologies, no virtue-signaling, just straight talk and real results.
Funny how that works: ditch the Bible, embrace the politics, watch the congregation vanish. Who could’ve seen that coming?
Here’s another example of their misguided woke endeavors… And yes, even their Episcopal News Service drips with anti-gun wokeness:
[Episcopal News Service] High school students from the dioceses of Michigan and the Great Lakes gathered recently at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Lansing to learn how to work faithfully toward ending gun violence through community organizing.
At the Jan. 16-18 Youth Working to End Gun Violence Retreat, the 17 participating teenagers were surprised to learn that “there are more gun dealers in the United States than there are McDonald’s and Starbucks together,” Labron, a parishioner at the Church of the Messiah in Detroit and a high school senior, told Episcopal News Service. “That’s really disturbing.”
Labron, last name held by request, said he personally knows “a lot of” people, including former friends, who were killed by gun violence. He registered for the retreat to learn how to be an effective gun violence reduction advocate.
The Detroit-based Diocese of Michigan co-hosted the retreat with Team ENOUGH, the youth outreach wing of the nonprofit Brady: United Against Gun Violence. Adult staff from The Episcopal Church and the dioceses of Ohio and Colorado observed the retreat to potentially implement a similar churchwide program, said Michigan Bishop Bonnie Perry.
“We want to be really rooted in the context of the state of Michigan and to look at ways that kids can both explore and embody their baptismal covenants,” Perry, a co-convener of the Bishops United Against Gun Violence network, told ENS before the retreat. “We want the youth to be equipped to tell their story and understand how they might be involved in community organizing to educate adults as to how to keep them safer.”
Gun violence prevention is a cornerstone of Perry’s episcopate. In 2022, she co-founded End Gun Violence Michigan, which is credited with helping gun safety legislation pass in Michigan in response to the 2019 mass shooting at Oxford High School in Oxford Township and the 2021 mass shooting at Michigan State University in East Lansing.
During the retreat, the students learned about state and federal gun violence laws, including red flag laws. They also learned about the systemic loopholes, like delays in court processing, that enable many people to bypass the laws and purchase guns.
The students also learned state and nationwide gun violence statistics. For example, on average, 1,412 Michiganders, including 115 minors, die annually from gun violence, according to data compiled by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As of Jan. 21, 674 people, including 54 minors, have died from gun violence in 2026, according to the Gun Violence Archive, an American nonprofit that catalogs every gun-related death in the United States. Still, most U.S. gun-related deaths are suicides.
“There’s a lot more to gun violence than just mass shootings. There are accidental shootings, there’s suicide, and these deaths have succumbed to crazy numbers. Why are we not caring more as a nation?” BrookeLynn, last name held by request, told ENS. “It’s just very shocking, and it’s morbid to me that we’ve hardly done anything at all to make a change.” BrookeLynn, a high school junior, is a parishioner at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven.
In 1999, 14 people were killed in a mass shooting and attempted bombing at Columbine High School in Colorado. At the time, it was the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. Since then, more than 390 school shootings have occurred nationwide, killing at least 203 students and staff, according to data analysis by the Washington Post.
“This is why more youth need to learn how to advocate for gun control. We need to tell our friends and our families these facts and do something about it together,” Labron said.
More on the decline of the old, white liberals’ church…
The Episcopal Church continued to see declines in baptisms and the number of parishes in 2024, but did not release an overall membership tally when unveiling its annual figures this month.
The Episcopal Church released its 2024 Parochial Report last week, its annual and most continuous gathering of data, of which more than 94% of congregations submitted information…
In contrast to past years, the 2024 report did not include a total count of overall membership, which in 2023 was approximately 1.547 million and around 1.96 million in 2010…
According to the report, the median age for a member of the denomination is 60, with around 95% of Episcopal Church members being white….
Why and how bad is it? They will be done in 30 years… and have no baptized members in 47 years. Oh what a shame.
While multiple factors have been at work in this general decline, the denomination’s progressive theological direction has alienated some members.
For example, in 2003, when the Episcopal Church consecrated the Rev. Gene Robinson as its first openly gay bishop, scores of congregations voted to leave in protest.
In 2020, Kristine Stache, then interim president of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America-affiliated Wartburg Theological Seminary, gave a presentation before the denomination’s Executive Council in which she concluded that, at the current rate of decline, according to Stache, the denomination will have no Sunday attendance in 30 years and no baptized members in 47 years.
The feature photo at the top shows how this decline started.
This is how it’s going and where it will end.
Again, oh what a shame.