The ACCA [Anglican Catholic Church in Australia], which is an independent church within the international Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC), has about 400 members across the country.Four hundred members? There are flying-saucer cults in the US with far more than that! And the Australian John Hepworth, who until he either resigned or was expelled earlier this year was the Archbishop of the entire Traditional Anglican Communion, rose to prominence in that church. What on earth does it mean to become a bishop of a denomination with 400 members and then an "archbishop" of a world organization made up of similar rag-tag groups?
Yet Hepworth had become a major figure in conservative Anglican circles due to his approach to the Holy See, which in the view of many led to Pope Benedict XVI issuing the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus. The media, even the new media, thus creates myths out of nothing, and that's what led me to question seriously what the heck is going on here. If "John Hepworth, Anglican Archbishop" is a phantom and a con artist, where's the truth?
Regarding numbers in the US, the Wikipedia entry for the ACA lists 5,200 members, but this number was probably always exaggerated, and in light of departures in recent years, it can't possibly be correct. A friend sent me a list of parishes and missions in the ACA Diocese of the West as of January 2010. I've crossed out the names of the parishes and missions that are no longer listed in the diocese as of July 2012 (I'm being generous in including St Mary of the Angels, which did vote to leave the diocese and the ACA in August 2012):
Parishes
All Saints', Fountain Valley, CA
Epiphany, Phoenix, AZ
Holy Cross, Tucson, AZ
Holy Nativity, Payson, AZ
Resurrection, Spokane, WA
St. Augustine of Canterbury, Hollister, AZ
St. Columba's, Lancaster, CA
St. Francis, Portland, OR
St. James', Olympia, WA
St. John's, Sun Lakes, AZ
St. Mark's, Loomis, CA
St. Mary's, Hollywood, CA
St. Peter's, Auburn, CA
Missions:
All Saints, Green Valley, AZ
Holy Cross, Honolulu, HI
St. Anselm's, Sequim, WA
St. Augustine of Canterbury, Hamilton, MT
St. Erasmus, Gig Harbor, WA
St. George, Fairbanks, AK
San Pedro y San Pablo, Phoenix, AZ
St. Stephen's, Fillmore, CA
That's 21 parishes and missions as of 2010 (a number tiny enough; in comparison, the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles alone has 85,000 members in 147 parishes). By mid-2012, this number had shrunk to 11 -- in other words, in a little over two years, the diocese had lost almost half its parishes and likely an equivalent membership.
References to numbers elsewhere in the ACA show a similar decline. An article in a local newspaper on Brian Marsh, ACA Bishop of the Northeast (and Presiding Bishop of the whole absurd little denomination in the US), said in 2009:
Then, last month, he was installed as the ACA's Northeast Diocese bishop. In that position, he will oversee 35 churches with about 2,000 parishoners.As of 2012, there are only 26 parishes listed on the diocese's web site. That's a decline of 31%. If we take the almost certainly optimistic number of 2,000 in 2009, if it's declined by an equivalent 31%, Marsh's flock must now number only 1380. There are, of course, individual medium-size parishes in any number of denominations that have more members than in Marsh's whole diocese. Much has been made of membership declines in The Episcopal Church, to which many observers attribute its increasingly liberal leanings -- but those declines have been nothing like the precipitous drop in the ACA. If current trends continue (though they may not, of course), there will be nothing left of the ACA in less than a decade.
I'll look more closely at John Hepworth in my next post.
