[popsicesHoupe]

Why can't we be satisfied with the truth regarding Church membership?

Probably because we can't find it.

I did a quick bit of Googling for the membership numbers of the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese in North America. I found (in decreasing order):

• 500,000
• almost 400,000
• 380,000
• 350,000
• 300,000
• 250,000
• 130,000
• 84,000
• 83,700
• 54,667
• 51,320
• 50,000
• 41,840

Understand, it only took 5 or 10 minutes to get this many widely disparate figures. Interestingly, I didn't run across any figures on the Antiochian Archdiocese's own website (not that I was digging all that deep).

Part of the problem is that we don't really define what church membership numbers should mean. At my parish, I would have no trouble coming up with four or five different membership figures (with the highest being at least twice as big as the lowest, probably more), depending on how we defined "membership".


Michael