The two traditional measures of parish size are average Sunday attendance and members in good standing. Average Sunday attendance will always be a larger number, since members in good standing are typically over 18, confirmed, and pledging, while average Sunday attendance will include children, drop-ins, visting relatives, regulars who don't pledge, occasional worshippers, and so forth. I've used members in good standing here for consistency.
Fr Chadwick's version, which is taken from an old post on Christian Columba Campbell's blog, uses "attendance", which I take to mean average Sunday attendance. While this is going to be larger than any estimate based on members in good standing, he comes up with a worldwide total of 240,800, with by far the largest number -- 54% -- in India, although another 38% are in two African provinces. Interestingly, the totals in first-world countries are far smaller, and even those are off, in my view, by factors of at least two or three. A commenter says, "In my 13 years within the TTAC there has never been 1800 members within the UK, 300 would be more accurate."
Regarding Canada, another commenter says, "Elsewhere on her blog Mrs Gyapong gives the 'last count' of the ACCC as 700 (some kind of census was taken). This was before anyone entered the Ordinariate but after some defections to non-TAC jurisdictions by those who were opposed. Of the 700, about 100 entered the Ordinariate." This would be more consistent with an estimate from late 2010 in the newsletter of the Fellowship of Concerned Churchmen for 500 members in good standing in Canada overall -- if the 700 in the comment is average Sunday attendance, then the two would be in general agreement.
Fr Chadwick's version gives 2,500 for the ACA. The ACA's Wikipedia entry, which strikes me as wildly inflated, gives 5,200. My own estimate, based on a review of the web entries for every parish along with some totals from the FCC newsletter I cited above (which have so far proved to be spot-on accurate), would be 1,500. If we allow for 1,500 members in good standing, I'll grant 2,500 average Sunday attendance.
Fr Chadwick gives 6,500 for Australia and environs. I've relied on an estimate from an Australian newspaper of 400 for the ACCA, although there seems to be a growing consensus that the ACCA is almost nonexistent at this point.
Although Fr Chadwick's census lists 65,000 for Southern Africa, this is simply not credible. The web page for the Anglican Church in Southern Africa lists 14 "centres". Visiting those links, I see parish photos suggesting about 40 people posing in each, which would give a total of 560 visible attendees, probably not all members in good standing. I strongly suspect this is pretty close to any actual total, which would put Southern Africa in line with Canada and Australia -- being generous, all somewhere in the mid-three digits.
Regarding India, the comments on Fr Chadwick's blog all suggest that there can be no reliable estimate. I had an e-mail from a former cleric at St Mary of the Angels who retired to India and said that there is simply no discernible TAC presence there. That individual wanted to see one, looked for one, and couldn't find it. I find this reliable. Statistics from third-world areas are always suspect: death tolls from disasters mount in proportion to their distance from Western capitals.
Ms Gyapong gives as a reason to believe the inflated totals in her census as "Anyway, I know some of the bishops, like Louis Falk and Craig Botterill have traveled to some of these countries and seen evidence of real parishes and people." The trouble is that I don't find TAC bishops credible: Louis Falk, the most venerable of the lot, has told several untruths that I've discussed on this blog. Potemkin villages are a well-known phenomenon and are certainly the sort of things that a third-world province would trot out to impress a Western bishop.
I stand by my earlier estimate that total members-in-good-standing of the TAC are no more than about 3,000, and that includes Africa. India by all responsible accounts is impossible to estimate. However, a legal principle that might be apposite is that if damages are impossible to estimate, that basically means they're non-existent. I am not going to take the word of TAC bishops, of all people, that things are somehow otherwise.
