Is This Thing Sustainable At All?

By my possibly imperfect count, four OCSP groups have gone inactive at minimum after losing their priests: St Edmund Kitchener, St Alban Rochester, St John Fisher Virginia, and now St Gregory the Great Stoneham. The reasons in each case are slightly different, but the bottom line is that the OCSP is unable to replace a priest who retires, loses his visa, has to move for family issues, or can't get diocesan support. Surely additional circumstances will arise that bring the same result.

Add to that the implication in both comments I had yesterday on St Gregory the Great that congregations are aging along with their priests, which means they will inevitably lose mobility and be less able even to commute to a parish not especially distant. But beyond that, as the parishioners age, actuarial reality will catch up, but I don't see those who pass on being replaced.

Nor is this problem new: the loss of Fr Tea at the Anglican Use parish St Mary Las Vegas had exactly the same result. Within five years of its founding, the OCSP has lost roughly 10% of its parishes and groups and is clearly unable to sustain many of the others if any adverse situation comes up. I think a reasonable projection would be that within a fairly short time, it will revert to the roughly half-dozen prosperous parishes that came in as that sort of special case.