In one of the most holy weeks in the Christian calendar, a report says that in just over a generation the number of people attending Church of England Sunday services will fall to less than a tenth of what they are now.
Christian Research, the statistical arm of the Bible Society, claimed that by 2050 Sunday attendance will fall below 88,000, compared with just under a million now.
The controversial forecast, based on a “snapshot” census of church attendances, has been seized upon by secular groups as proof that the established church is in decline. But the Church of England has rejected the figures, saying they were incomplete and ignored new ways of worshipping outside the church network.
Maybe [i]Church Times[/i], [url=http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=67441]so dismissive of the Anglican Church in North America[/url], has a plan.
One way to make this grim prediction come true: [i]drive out the Evangelicals and the Anglo-Catholics[/i]. Then the reappraisers will have all the space they could possibly want; so will the bats. So much space that if you don’t like bat guano, you can just move to another empty pew.
#1: Not for nothing is it known across the water (if it is known at all) as ‘The Church Tombs’.
However, there are still plenty of lively evangelical churches and full seminaries in England, so it doesn’t face the death that Tec does. Only the liberal kind of evangelicals can be appointed bishops according to the closed shop cabal operative there, but increasingly bishops are irrelevant to the structures of a disintegrating church. What good are more generals when the ground troops are few and far between?
The meteorologist can’t tell me with any reliability what the weather is gonna be in two days, but these people are telling us what is gonna happen to the CofE over the next three decades. Uh huh.
If you try and project anything out exponentially you usually end up with an unlikely outcome, and this seems to be what is being reported on here. I remember in 1976 that there was a poll that was reported in either Time or Newsweek that suggested by 2006 there would be one priest in the Episcopal Church to every layperson. Even with all the malarky that has been going on that now looks a ridiculous misunderstanding of statistics.
The Church of England is far from perfect, as I have discovered afresh in my time back here, but there are some very exciting things happening that never ever get reported because the media are more interested in bad news and not good (and this must be said to be true of ecclesial media outlets and blogs as well). I have just gone through Titus and discovered that although there is this story reported from the Guardian there is no mention of a wonderful article from the Financial Times (December 13-14) which was a Wow-aren’t-
some-interesting-things-happening kind of piece. The journalist, Victoria Combe, writes, “As I set off to explore at grassroots what is it really means to be part of the Church of England at the end of 2008, I found something far more intriguing and unreported: out in the real world of local churches, there is both new growth and unexpected dynamism.” She follows that statement up with about thirty column inches of evidence, and from my experience I could give her at least another thirty inches.
What’s the lesson? Don’t believe everything you read in the press, especially everything about the church in general and the Church of England in particular in the press. Media coverage is of the man-bites-dog variety, and coming from virtually every news source in the UK has a strong secularizing bias — the press adore bad news about the church because they have little or no time or patience with faith of any kind. It is also politically correct and de rigor among the chattering classes and the commentariat to slam the C. of E., while tiptoeing around Muslims, Jews, New Agers, and others.
Knowing something of the theology and history of renewal and revival, and looking at the utter lostness of Britain at the moment, I would suggest that there is a far better chance that these statistics have little to do with he reality of God and how he works.
PS I wrote Guardian when I meant Observer. They both come from the same stable, however.
This is silly. My own church is growing all the time on a diet of orthodoxy, Christ centred worship, positivity and Gospel preaching. Any decline is due to poor priests and a sinful heretical gospel at the heart of luke warm watered down faith- as practiced by so many, usually weilding glove puppets, today.
Better recruitment is key to reversing decline- and a return to orthodoxy. But the future is far from bleak for true Christians…that said the C of E will lose this committed priest if it continues to refuse structural provision to Anglo-Catholics.
http://www.sbarnabas.com/blog
Let’s see: forty-two years back from 2000 gives us 1958. Hmmm…. at that point, we were still all going to have flying cars in the next century, and our churches were going to look like temples of space flight. Funny thing: the only churches that look like that now are ones built around 1958. And in 1958 nobody saw that American Methodists were about to go into a steep decline, and that the SBC was going to go shooting past them to become the #1 Protestant denomination.
RugbyPlayingPriest [#7]: Good to her about the vitality of your parish. And thank you for the link to your own website.
#4 — I completely agree. Church attendance and participation is based on so many things, religious and secular. Predictions such as this are foolish and part of the problem!
The media seems to enjoy, for whatever reason, “reassuring” the masses that religion is in decline and on the path of inevitable extinction. When you think about it, these pronouncements don’t make sense. The secularists shrug their shoulders and believers shrug, too, for a different reason — faith is important to them and what the media says doesn’t matter one whit. Both groups know the media to be wrong-headed, biased and self-serving.
Perhaps there’s secular media concern that the global recession will actually awaken secularists to the need for something beyond consumerism? Faith leaders around Wall Street are reporting higher attendance at churches and synagogues in that area.