A church can strike a word from its book. It cannot strike the God who spoke it. Here is the cost of the leaving — and the door that is still, even now, standing open.
The Church and the Christian Church • Part Four • By the Virginia Christian Alliance Editorial Board
The Big Three
- By its own records, the Episcopal Church has lost more than half its members since 1966 — and what remains is graying toward extinction. A body that abandons the living Word does not stay a living body.
- This is where the series turns. For four articles the plumb line only hung, silent, measuring. Now it speaks. The canon — the rule — becomes the cannon. Weighed in the balances, and found wanting.
- The warning is for every watching church, not one. Can you read your own committee’s minutes? Is your shepherd guarding the wall, or only filling the bowl? And after all of it — the door of repentance still stands open.
We have measured a church across three articles. We read its receipts. We watched it edit the man and the woman out of its marriage canon in its own hand. We held its case against the Word and found that the case could only stand if the Word were first moved off the bench. Now we come to the last and heaviest question. What does a church lose when it loses the line?
The answer is written, like everything else in this series, in the church’s own records. And it is a number.
The Cost Is Not a Building
In recent weeks the Episcopal Church announced it will market its twelve-story Manhattan headquarters for sale — the building known as “815,” completed in 1963 as a monument to a denomination then at the center of American power. Much of it now sits unused. It is a vivid image, and it would be easy to make it the point. It is not the point. The church is not the real estate. A denomination could sell every building it owns and still be the body of Christ, if the breath of the Word were in it.
The real cost is not measured in square feet. It is measured in souls. And here are the church’s own numbers. In 1966, the Episcopal Church recorded its peak: 3,647,297 baptized members. By 2023, its own parochial report counted 1,547,779. That is a loss of more than two million people — well over half the church — gone from the rolls in a single lifetime. And the remnant is old: by recent analysis, a clear majority of those who remain are over sixty. This is not a body in decline. It is a body in hospice.
We will be careful here, because honesty is the whole authority of this series. We do not claim that any single vote emptied those pews. Membership decline has many fathers — falling birth rates, a secularizing culture, the long retreat of mainline Protestantism as a whole. A church can shrink for reasons that have nothing to do with a marriage canon. We will not pretend the graph proves what it does not prove.
But here is what the numbers do show, and it needs no causal arrow to land. In the very decades when the Episcopal Church poured its energy into editing the Word — striking “a man and a woman” from its canon, rewriting its rites, advocating for what Scripture forbids — it was not being filled. It was being emptied. A church that traded the gospel for the approval of the age did not win the age. It lost itself. Even observers outside our circles have read it as a parable; one called the Episcopal Church “what’s left when the gospel is sidelined and the Holy Scriptures are undermined.” The decline and the drift are not proven to be cause and effect. They are the same story, told twice — once in resolutions, once in the rolls.
A Body That Unbuilds Itself
Scripture gives us the picture of what a church is meant to be. It is a body, joined and held together, that “grows so that it builds itself up in love” (Ephesians 4:16, ESV). That is the design: a living thing, knit by the Word, growing. What we have watched in this series is a body doing the opposite to itself — not building up but cutting away, removing the very joints that gave it life. The plumb line builds. This un-builds. And an un-building body does what every dying thing does. It gets smaller.
And this is where the grief is. Not in a building, and not even, finally, in a statistic. The grief is in the people behind the number. Behind “more than two million” are souls who sat in beautiful pews, sang the old hymns, kept the calendar, and were never once told that the foundation had been quietly removed from under them. They trusted a church that had stopped telling them the truth. “You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead” (Revelation 3:1, ESV). That word was written to a church named Sardis. It could be read aloud in a hundred sanctuaries today, and the people in the pews would not know it was about them. That is the cost. We do not write it with relish. We write it with tears.
The Canon Becomes the Cannon
And now this series must do the thing it has waited four articles to do.
From the beginning, the plumb line has only hung. It hung in the introduction. It hung through the receipts, and the redline, and the verdict. After every charge, the same words returned — and still the plumb line hangs straight. The line never argued. It never raised its voice. It only measured, silent and unmoved, while the church voted and edited and explained. That silence was deliberate. It was the long inhale before the word.
Because the line has a second name. The same ancient root that gives us canon — the measuring reed, the straight rule — gives us one more word built on the very same image: the cannon, the straight line that does not measure but fires. We laid the canon down at the start as the rule. We have measured every wall against it. And now, at the end, the rule that has hung silent for four articles is turned on the position and fired.
This is the oldest verdict in Scripture, and it was written on a wall in a single night. A king had weighed himself against nothing and found himself splendid. Then a hand appeared and wrote four words, and the prophet read them: “Mene, Mene, Tekel, and Parsin.” And Daniel gave the meaning: “Tekel, you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting” (Daniel 5:27, ESV). That night the kingdom fell. Not because God was cruel, but because a thing measured against the true standard, and found short, cannot stand on its shortness forever.
That is the cannon, and that is its round. We do not fire it. We only read what the hand already wrote. Measured against the Word it once preached, the Episcopal Church has been weighed, and found wanting — not in our judgment, which is worth nothing, but in the verdict of the Scripture it set aside. The artillery here is not our anger. It is the Word itself, aimed not to destroy the people behind the wall but to break the lie that holds them, and to clear the ground so they can come home.
The Warning to Every Watching Church
Here some readers have grown comfortable again. This is the Episcopal Church. My church is sound. Stay a moment longer, because the most important sentence in this article is the next one. The only reason we could prove any of this is that the Episcopal Church wrote it all down.
Every step of its descent is public. The committee reports, the floor debates, the redlines, the recorded votes — all archived, all dated, all one click away. We did not need a whistleblower. We needed a library card. That transparency is the single thing that let us build the case. And it raises the question every reader should now ask of his own church: can you read your church’s minutes? When your denomination meets in committee, are the records open, the votes recorded, the proposals published where any member can find them? Or are the real decisions made in rooms you cannot enter, in language you are told not to worry about? A faithful church has nothing to hide and keeps its books open. When the minutes vanish — or were never kept, or you are gently told they are not your concern — that absence is itself the warning. You could only catch the Episcopal drift because it left receipts. Make certain your church leaves them too, and that you are reading them.
But transparency alone will not save a church, because the danger is not only the wolf in the committee. It is also the shepherd who means well. A pastor can love the Word, preach it warmly every Sunday, and never once name the thing battering against it from the culture outside — and call that faithfulness. It is not. It is a colander. A colander is not broken; every hole was bored on purpose, and it still looks like a sound vessel. But it cannot hold water. A silent pulpit is a hole. An unwatched committee is a hole. A shepherd who will feed the sheep but will not watch for the wolf is a hole. None of them looks like a breach. Together they empty the church.
Scripture does not let the silent shepherd call himself innocent. “If the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet… and the sword comes and takes any one of them… his blood I will require at the watchman’s hand” (Ezekiel 33:6, ESV). Paul did not merely feed the flock; he warned it, “night and day with tears,” that “fierce wolves will come in among you” (Acts 20:29–31, ESV). The shepherd’s task is not only the feast. It is the wall. And a man who will do the first and not the second has left the gate open while calling himself faithful. We have written elsewhere about the responsibility of the pulpit, and the warning belongs here too: the Episcopal Church did not fall only because wolves entered. It fell because the watchmen, for the most part, did not blow the trumpet.
And lest anyone think this danger died in 2015, it is at other doors right now. As we write, another mainline body debates from its own floor whether its clergy must even be limited to one spouse — the same trajectory, the next wall, moving by the same quiet process while most of its members never read the motion. The serpent has not retired. He has simply moved down the street.
The Door Is Still Open
We have fired the cannon, and we will not end on the shot. A warning that ends in judgment is only half a warning, and the lesser half. The whole reason a watchman blows the trumpet is so the city can be saved.
So hear the hope, because it is the truest thing in this article. The drift was never a fate. We know this, because not everyone drifted. When the Episcopal Church crossed these lines, thousands did not follow. They walked out — surrendering their buildings, their pensions, their inheritance — and formed the Anglican Church in North America rather than bend the line. They began in 2009. They have grown. A church that left to keep the Word is being built up, while the church that kept the buildings and lost the Word is being emptied. Two bodies, one choice, opposite ends. That is the proof that the leaving was never inevitable — which means the returning never is either.
And the bookend is exact. In Part Two we watched the Episcopal Church take its red pen to its own marriage canon and strike out the words “a man and a woman.” Open the marriage canon of the church that left — Canon 7 of the Anglican Church in North America — and you will find those very words written back in, in their own hand: marriage is “a lifelong covenant between one man and one woman.” It requires couples to sign nearly the same sentence the Episcopal Church deleted — “we hold marriage to be a lifelong union of husband and wife as it is set forth in the Book of Common Prayer.” One church struck the words out. The other wrote them back in. The same canonical act, in opposite directions, both recorded, both public. The wall can be torn down. It can also be rebuilt true.
And the way back has only ever had one name. Not a better vote. Not a reform committee. Not a softer culture, or a cleverer strategy, or a younger staff. Repentance. The turning of a church, or a soul, back to the line it abandoned. God’s promise to a drifting people has not expired: “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14, ESV). That door has never once been shut by God to anyone willing to walk through it. The wall measured crooked can be torn down and rebuilt true. The prodigal who comes to himself in the pigpen is still, every time, met on the road by a running Father.
So we lay down the plumb line where we picked it up — straight, and not ours. No council ever voted a church back to life, and no argument on a page has ever raised the dead. But the God who set the plumb line still stands over His house, and the wall He measures crooked, He can also make straight. The Episcopal Church has been weighed, and found wanting. So would any of us be, measured against that line, but for grace. The hand that wrote the verdict is the same hand that was nailed to a cross to answer it. The door is open. It is open still. May every church with eyes to read its own receipts walk back through it while the light lasts.
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV). Membership figures are drawn from the Episcopal Church’s own records: peak baptized membership of 3,647,297 (1966), reported in the Church’s Office of Research; and 1,547,779 total members (2023), from the Church’s 2023 Parochial Report. The phrase quoted in “The Cost Is Not a Building” is from Albert Mohler, World Opinions, June 2026.
For Further Study
- The Receipts Condemn the Episcopal Church — Part One: the dated record, wall by wall.
- How the Skin Came Off: The Redline That Unmasked the Wolf — Part Two: the 2015 marriage canon, struck in the church’s own hand.
- The Verdict of Scripture — Part Three: the affirming case, given its strongest hearing and held to the line.
- The Pulpit Is Responsible — the silent watchman, and the cost of a pulpit that will not blow the trumpet.
