A wakeup call?
What with the wounded, and what with the dead, and what with the lads that are swinging the lead, if there aren’t some changes round here and pretty damn soon, there won’t be anyone left in this old platoon.–Canadian soldier’s poetic lament in WW2
“Projections from our data indicate that there will be no members, attenders or givers in the Anglican Church of Canada by approximately 2040,” said the Rev. Neil Elliot, an Anglican priest in Trail, British Columbia, who authored a report to the church’snational leadership recently.
(First, as a words nerd, my hat is off to Elliot for using the word “attender” and not the abominable “attendee” which means someone who is “attended,” and so is meaningless)
ACC membership has fallen from a peak of 1.3 million in 1961 to 357,000 two years ago. At this rate “there won’t be anyone left in this old platoon” by 2040.
The head of the ACC , Archbishop Nicholls called the report a”wakeup call” but in the same breath warned against being drawn into a vortex of negativity,” and instead should continue to be a witness of Canada and the world (presumably about the environment, minority rights and Palestine). So, not a wakeup call.
It’s not the first time the Anglican Church has received death notices. I remember reporting on one at least 20 years ago. The United Church of Canada has got them also, quite recently. A UCC member versed in numbers, David S. Ewart, put the UCC’s data together to show that , if trends from 2003 to 2013 continued, membership in Canada’s largest Protestant church would drop by 43 % by 2025. Sunday service attendance would fall by an astonishing 77 % from 150,000 to 43,000.
A few years ago, in response to its own decline, the Vancouver Island Anglican diocese commissioned a study,which was done by a minister named Nicholosi. His conclusion amounts to an application of Ockam’s Razor ( the simplest explanation is the likeliest). If the Anglicans want to grow, he said, they have to hire new pastors trained in how to recruit new members. As it stood, the church’s grassroots clerical leadership stressed ministering to their current parishioners. Not finding new ones. Nothing was done, and Nicholosi moved to London, Ont. to a church that emphasized recruitment.
In Canada many individual Evangelical churches continue to grow and some mainline churches too, but no mainline denominations. Skeptical scholars attribute growth to high birth rates, high retention and, yes, recruitment. But recruitment is just sceptical scholar talk for evangelization. The churches who believe that evangelization is not just important, but of the ultimate importance, as in achieving eternal salvation for the evangelizer and the evangelized , are the likeliest to attract new members. Ockam’s Razor again.
In 2016 a team of scholars at Redeemer University College in Ancaster, Ontario put two and two together with a survey study of members in 22 mainline Ontario Protestant congregations, some growing, some shrinking. Their finding: the more likely the members believed that Christianity was the one, true faith and that salvation came only through it, the more likely they were to be growing.
The more relativistic the church’s members were in their personal religious beliefs (I’m looking at you, United and Anglican types), the more likely it is to be shrinking. No churches the scholars classified as liberal were growing in their sample.
I quote from my own story published in Lifesite News: “
While members of shrinking congregations tended to relativistic positions such as seeing Christ as a worthy teacher like Buddha and believing there are many roads to the good life and salvation, those attending growing fellowships agreed much more strongly with such statements ‘It is very important to encourage non-Christians to become Christians,’ ‘’Through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God provided a way for the forgiveness of my sins,’ and ‘Those who die face a divine judgement where some will be punished eternally.’”
I believe there are other findings that emphasize theology less. Canada’s renowned sociologist of religion Reginald Bibby thinks people are hungry spiritually and emotionally and recruitable on those grounds, but maybe not so much by absolutist appeals based on exclusive truths promising eternal salvation versus damnation. Instead, he would urge reaching out to people where they are at emotionally and spiritually.
A few years ago I did a story on a conservative Anglican church planter who reached out by holding weekly dinners where people were invited to share about their feelings and beliefs. His group was called “the Table.”The goal was to “bring them to Christ” in the conventional meaning of the phrase, not to start there. This guy was definitely low church. He didn’t care,he said, if his recruits ever attended a traditional Anglican communion service or even his own group’s rock band event. Their relationship with Christ was what mattered. Traditional church services, he believed, would just weird out most young Canadians.
There is a danger in being too open. The aforementioned Nicholosi recommended open communion for example: everyone welcome to take communion whatever they believe about its meaning. Make newcomers welcome; don’t begin their experience by excluding them.
Pope Francis appears to be moving the Catholic church in this direction, by apparently encoyuraging communion for divorced and remarried Cathol,ics and active homosexuals.
I get it, but i believe it is wrong. I prefer “the Table” approach. Communion has many levels of meaning, but the highest one is that it is the Body and Blood of Christ. Only those who believe this is true and, indeed all crucial Catholic teachings, should be sharing in it. So it has been for 2000 years. For the new recruits not yet admitted fully into the body of believers, let them have dinner with the pastor and other believers.
Nicholosi believed the church has to emphasize reaching out. But mainline Protestant churches, and the Catholic church too, I fear, in general don’t have the motivation to reach out. Evangelizing requires deep, deep commitment. If you think that all religions are equally worthy, that Amazonian paganism is as good as Christianity, that you will respond to dismal trends with ironic shrugs and inaction, as will the Anglican, United and Catholic churches.
If you click on the link below in exactly the right way you will be led to the study of Ontario congregations
