“We praise God that after a significant decline before and during the COVID period, the Diocese has now surpassed its pre-COVID attendance levels,” the Sydney Anglican Diocese’s Standing Committee reports in the 2026 Synod papers.
The report notes, “This is based on church attendance records from the 80% of parishes who have submitted their 2025 data and so have submitted complete reporting across the 2023-2025 period.
“Attendance declined by approximately 16% between 2013 and 2022 before rebounding by around 22% between 2022 and 2025, resulting in total attendance slightly above 2013 levels (when considering the 80% of parishes for which 2025 data is available).”
In essence, the Standing Committee team focused on attendance and assumed flat attendance overall for the missing parishes. Hence the dotted line on this graph.
The report suggests “The actual number is expected to be higher still.”
In detail, “The reported 2024 attendance across the 52 parishes who did not complete their 2025 annual statistics was 9,525 (refer Table 6). If one were to assume no change to the combined attendance of these 52 parishes since 2024, and were to add this data to the 2025 diocesan attendance Grand Total (38,744), it would yield a 2025 attendance figure of 48,269.”
Once again, the analysis by regions identifies clear trends. “Some regions have enjoyed stronger growth over the last 3 years, noting that regions with the greatest pre-COVID decline saw the strongest post-COVID growth. The Western region saw the lowest rebound but is among the highest overall growth.” The Northern and Wollongong regions, once regarded as the stronger areas of the diocese, are laggards.
Another graph attempts to chart church health by identifying momentum in attendence. It shows shows the number of parishes experiencing decline, stability, or growth for each of the six year rolling bands.
The report notes: ” It is encouraging that 85 churches experienced growth (more than at any time since 2013. This number is likely to go up as some of the churches that have not returned data are likely to have experienced growth.” However, Covid will have distorted the momentum results.
The report considers factors such as youth ministry and staffing that might influence growth while cautioning about correlation and causation. They found that the strongest relationship with growth was church size. “Churches averaging more than 250 adults experienced relatively modest declines before COVID (−8%) and grew by 29% between 2022 and 2025. In contrast, churches under 100 adults experienced much larger declines before COVID (−25% to −33%) and recorded more modest recovery afterwards.”
Attempting to analyse conversion growth, the reporting team looked at adult baptisms and confirmations as the best indicator they could find.
They assessed churches against the 5% growth in church attendance target that the Sydney Synod adopted last year.
“In the baseline year [2025], adult baptisms and confirmations were equivalent to at least 5% of adult attendance in 13% of reporting parishes. We recognise that “Confirmations plus adult baptisms” is a useful ministry indicator, but it is not defensible as a near estimate of conversions.”
The synod will be invited to discuss: “Rectors are urged to record the names of all those converted during a year, in order that the local church might rejoice with the angels in heaven, those new saints nurtured and prayed for, and anonymised data shared with the Committee through the Registrar in order to move beyond the current proxy of ‘confirmations plus adult baptisms’.
This year’s Sydney Anglican Synod will run on September 14, 15, 16 and 12, and 22 in the Wesley Conference Centre.