St. Paul's, Darien, once described as the flagship charismatic parish in The Episcopal Church, is being demolished to make way for multimillion-dollar homes. That image is doing a lot of work. The Episcopal Church had roughly 3.4 million members in the mid-1960s. By 2023, it had 1.55 million. That is not a slow fade. That is a structural collapse, and the building coming down in Darien is the right metaphor for what happened to the institution around it.
Religion demographer Ryan Burge published an analysis on April 10 calling the mainline situation "a stark picture" with "almost no chance of the trend reversing." His framing matters because it cuts through the usual explanations. The standard story is that mainline churches lost members because they became too progressive, too political, too willing to ordain women and gay clergy. The Episcopal Church's consecration of Gene Robinson as bishop in 2003 fractured the Anglican Communion and triggered a formal split. That's real. But it doesn't explain why evangelical churches, which avoided those controversies, are also losing ground to LDS and Black Protestant congregations that have built genuinely effective retention systems.
The Pipeline Nobody Fixed
Burge identifies the actual mechanism: mainline churches are worse at cultivating and retaining members than their evangelical and Black Protestant counterparts. Not worse at theology. Worse at the institutional work of keeping people connected. Active diocesan priests declined 9 percent between 2014 and 2021. Seminarians fell 22 percent. Total priestly ordinations dropped 24 percent. Pastors are being moved from thriving 350-person congregations to struggling sub-100 churches not as strategy but as triage. A system running out of clergy cannot grow. It can only manage its own contraction.
Meanwhile, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints grew 66 percent this century, reaching nearly 17.9 million members at the end of 2025. LDS growth is not accidental. It reflects a deliberate, resource-intensive investment in member cultivation: missionary programs, community infrastructure, retention rituals built into weekly life. You can disagree with the theology and still recognize that the institution is doing something mainline churches stopped doing decades ago.
The counterargument worth taking seriously is that young people's reluctance to join any institution is the real driver, and no amount of pastoral investment can fix a generational shift in how people relate to organized anything. That's fair, as far as it goes. But evangelical churches face the same generational headwinds and retain members at higher rates. The institutional skepticism is real; it just doesn't hit every denomination equally.
What Mainline Leaders Keep Getting Wrong
The Episcopal Church and United Methodists have spent years debating who belongs rather than building systems to keep the people already there. I'm not arguing they should have suppressed those debates. Theological honesty matters. But the pastoral pipeline crisis didn't emerge from the culture wars. It emerged from decades of underinvestment in clergy formation, congregation support, and the unglamorous work of member retention. Those are fixable problems, and mainline leadership has mostly treated them as background noise while the foreground burned.
Burge's conclusion is that institutional membership will likely keep falling for decades. He's probably right about the trajectory. But the gap between mainline and evangelical decline rates is not fate. It reflects choices made about where to put resources and attention. Mainline churches that want to survive the next 20 years need to stop eulogizing their own decline and start treating clergy formation and congregation health as the emergency they actually are. The building in Darien is already gone. The question is what gets built next.
