From RenewalWorks Director Loren Dixon:

Over a few years, Forward Movement and RenewalWorks have partnered with the Rev. Chris Corbin of the Diocese of Wisconsin as he conducts research into the attributes of growing Episcopal churches.

Amidst a narrative of denominational decline, Chris sees "bright spots" for growth. He is looking for churches to participate in a detailed survey due May 26th.  RenewalWorks churches are invited to participate, and findings will be shared in July through the RenewalWorks and Forward Movement websites.   

Read on for a message from Chris and details on participation:

Your RenewalWorks data has a sibling—and your parish's voice is in the right place to help with it.

If your parish has done RenewalWorks, you already know how much can shift in a congregation when leaders take the time to learn what their people are actually saying about spiritual life and discipleship. The same posture—paying close, structured attention to what's happening on the ground—is the heart of the TEC Trajectory Study, the Forward Movement-funded denomination-wide research project closing its main data-collection window on May 27.

If your parish was invited and hasn't yet participated, this is the last meaningful window. If you weren't invited and you think you should have been, we'd like to fix that—keep reading.

What it is, briefly

The Trajectory Study groups roughly 5,600 Episcopal congregations into four trajectories based on 14 years of attendance data (2011–2024)—Growth, Bounce-Back (post-COVID recovery), Decline, and Representative (the full denominational baseline). Each parish in the frame takes the same three-part survey covering worship, evangelism, welcome and fellowship, belief, ministry, leadership, finance, and demographics. About 15 to 25 minutes per survey, three surveys total. Most of the variables you'd expect a RenewalWorks-engaged parish to care about—how a congregation invites people in, how it forms them once they're there, how clergy and lay leaders share the work—are exactly what the survey is asking.

The payoff: instead of saying "growing churches tend to do X," the study can say "Growth churches do X significantly more than Decline churches, with Representative churches falling between." That's the comparative leverage the Episcopal Church hasn't had before—and which RenewalWorks-engaged parishes are uniquely positioned to help produce, because you're already attuned to the questions.

Why RenewalWorks parishes' data is particularly valuable

Two reasons:

1. You're already practiced in the discipline. Parishes that have done RenewalWorks know what it's like to surface congregational realities honestly through structured questions. That habit shows up in survey responses that take the questions seriously, give specific rather than aspirational answers, and pay attention to how the parish actually functions—which is exactly what makes the dataset useful.

2. The discipleship gradient is the under-studied dimension. Most denominational research on growth-decline focuses on structural variables (size, demographics, location). The Trajectory Study includes those, but the more interesting findings are likely to come from the practice variables—formation, evangelism, worship pattern, lay-leadership culture—which are exactly the variables RenewalWorks has been pressing on for years. Without RenewalWorks-engaged parishes in the dataset, those findings will be thinner.

"Our parish hasn't done anything special—why would our data matter?"

This is the single most common reaction we hear, and it's worth answering plainly: your data is what makes the rest of the study possible. The Representative group is the denominational baseline—the picture of what's typical. Without it, the findings about growth and decline have nothing to compare against. Parishes that have been struggling are if anything more important to the dataset, not less. The study is built to honor that complexity, not flatten it—there are no "wrong" answers, and there's no comparative scoring of parishes against each other published from the data.

Who's in the frame

The study covers Episcopal congregations with an Average Sunday Attendance of 15 or more in either 2011 or the most recent reporting year. The cutoff isn't a judgment about whether smaller parishes matter (they do); it's a technical floor below which year-to-year attendance noise gets so large that trajectory analysis becomes unreliable.

How to participate

If you've received an invitation—from survey@forwardmovement.org or frchris@trinityosh.org—please complete the three short surveys before May 27. The first question of each survey asks for your church code; that's how responses match across the three pieces. Clergy can complete them, a senior warden or experienced lay leader can complete them in lieu of clergy, or the three can be split across people in the parish. One completed set per parish is all that's needed.

Congregations that complete all three earn a 25% discount on a Forward Movement title.

If you should have received an invitation but didn't—our contact data has gaps, and that's part of what this final stretch is meant to fix. Please email survey@forwardmovement.org from a parish address and we'll get you set up with your church code and the survey links. Check your Promotions tab, spam folder, and parish-office account first; the message may have been routed somewhere you don't usually look.

If you're not sure whether your parish is in the frame—email survey@forwardmovement.org and we'll check.

For RenewalWorks-engaged parishes, this is a meaningful chance to put the discipline you already practice in service of the wider Church's self-understanding. The findings of the study will be shared freely through Forward Movement, and the strength of what we learn about the Episcopal Church depends entirely on how broadly parishes participate.

Faithfully,

The TEC Trajectory Study, in partnership with Forward Movement and RenewalWorks