Does the Episcopal Church have Room for my People?

This month, some of our discussion centered on the socioeconomic realities of our wider culture and how these realities relate to the church. The next several weeks, various members of the group will be blogging on this topic.
The table was beautiful. On the snowy white table cloth was a spread of wine and cheese and other finger food I could not immediately identify. Gathered around the table were clusters of priests, professors, and seminary students, fresh from evensong, all dressed smartly in expensive suits and engaged in polite conversation. Walking into this room in a fine house I could only consider a mansion, I felt like I had stepped into another world, a world so foreign to this scholarship student who had grown up in blue collar, rural America. I watched what people were doing carefully, trying to imitate their actions, keenly aware of how underdressed I was for the occasion, choking on what ended up being cheese but looked for all intents and purposes like my mama’s pudding, and scanning the crowd for a familiar face.
Whenever I participate in a conversation about declining numbers in the Episcopal Church, I think of moments like this. There are many ways to define class in the United States, but one way researchers do so is based on college education. Only 30% of Americans get a bachelor’s degree or higher for professional jobs; the rest of the American population is working class and getting poorer all the time (NY Times). In the rural town I lived and worked for some time, the collapse of the logging industry had driven most of us into low paying service jobs and the poverty rate was high. It wasn’t until I saved enough money to be the first in my family to go to university that I considered attending the Episcopal Church. There was an unspoken assumption in the community that the little stained glass brick church was for middle class people with means. Indeed, when I started attending, disillusioned with the evangelical churches of my past and attracted to the liturgy, I found myself primarily in the company of the dwindling number of well-educated and relatively wealthy people in the area, people who did graciously welcomed me.
A recent study in 2011 by the American Sociological Association found that church attendance was rising among middle class, college educated people and declining steeply among working class Americans. Working class people, the people I grew up with, remain relatively religious, but they are going to church less and less. There are many theories as to why this is the case—shame over less stable family lives, the shift among evangelicals to cater to a more upwardly mobile demographic (NY Times), or the increasing disconnection of working class people to traditional social and economic structures in a globalizing economy (Huffington Post).
The Episcopal Church, with some exceptions, does not often cater to this group of people, partly for historical reasons. Dwight Zscheile writes, in his book People of the Way; “The Anglican Church in America went from being the officially established church to the church of the establishment as it remained favored by many of the socioeconomic elite... As long as the Episcopal Church tended to uphold the status quo of a stratified economic system and a rationalistic faith, it failed to attract and retain wider swaths of the American populace.” This trend continues in some ways today. The Episcopal Church, in our diocese and across the country, is thriving and, dare I say, growing in urban areas like Seattle that are attracting an influx of young, well educated professionals. However, in areas that are majority working class, our numbers are declining, perhaps in part because we do not always have the resources to reach this demographic.
Much of my ministry has been on the street, with working class people who have lost everything as their economic situation worsens in this country. My question of the Episcopal Church and the question that I bring to this discussion is this: How much are we willing to reach out to working class and poor people? As I asked in the meeting, does the Episcopal Church have room for my people?

Sarah