A mission, at least by the definition in the Diocese of the Missouri Valley canons, has fewer than 20 members. It's hard to find out whether this definition is consistent across the ACA, but I'm going to assume it is in the absence of any other good info. But to be sure, let's say that every one of the 43 missions has 19 members (a true average, of course, would be less, since not every mission would have the maximum number of members). So the total membership in the 43 ACA missions would be 817.
Then let's go to the parishes in good standing. I'm not aware of any public source for membership numbers in individual ACA parishes, but having visited every web site for every ACA parish that has one in the past several days, I can say that the church buildings are almost all on the small side. A couple in photos, such as those in Concord, NH and Portland, ME seem to be fairly substantial, but there are plenty of others that aren't. I'm going to make a guess of 60 as an average membership for the 25 ACA parishes in good standing (which means half would be smaller and half would be larger), which would put the total membership for those parishes at 1500.
There are, of course, knowledgeable people who will say that 60 members is the lower limit for a viable parish anywhere, and I agree, but I'll say just look at the ACA's attrition rate in the past few years, and look as well at how many ACA congregations don't have their own buildings. This means, by the way, that an estimate of total ACA membership that's credible to me would be 2317, not the 5200 given on Wikipedia.
Let me say that if anyone from the ACA would like to correct my estimates here with hard information, such as that derived from parish reports or diocesan receipts, I'll be very happy to correct what I've said here. However, the estimates I've made are from several days' study of ACA parish and mission websites, combined with knowledge of parishes, budgets, and governance derived from over 30 years of active church membership. But I'm willing to be corrected -- with the understanding that just saying "that crazy blogger doesn't know what he's talking about" is not a correction.
It's also worth pointing out that as we approach US Thanksgiving, we're coming to the end of the traditional Anglican stewardship-pledge drive season. Let's think about the ACA simply in terms of stewardship: 2300 used to be (and might still be in some cases) the size of a single Episcopal parish in a medium-sized city. Yet for the ACA, this number is scattered from Maine to Florida to Alaska in 60-some-odd parishes and missions, with two diocesan bishops, a suffragan bishop, assorted retired bishops, and all their associated expenses, especially their travel junkets. (Speaking of which, two ACA bishops each went on the extravagant 2012 trips to Johannesburg, Greece, and Florida.)
This is not good stewardship of resources. If nothing else, this should be troubling the consciences of Marsh, Strawn, and Langberg. The parishes that chose to go into the Ordinariate were in fact making a better choice over stewardship than the ones, with the bishops, who've chosen to stay out.
Back after the US holiday with more questions.
