Yet another commission reports that TEC is in steep decline. We are helped to digest this news with the sweetener that there are good things going on as we decline! So what happened to us?
The extraordinary thing about all this is our fairly sudden and dramatic collapse. The late fifties were a time of growth in numbers, income and “membership” both in England and the US. Over 3 million people in the US identified themselves as Episcopalians. New church plants were on the rise and special shorter courses were established in seminaries to train older men for ordination. For the CofE, things were better than at any time since Victoria died.
I do not for a moment believe that suddenly in the sixties people became less religious or religiously inclined. I do believe that Anglicanism lost its nerve. I do believe that we began to produce a leadership, lay and ordained, that assumed that the voices heard in academia and among the “culture-vultures” reflected the thoughts of most people. Yet the “intelligentsia” of that day ”“ I am not speaking of truly educated people ”“ no more reflected the feelings and thoughts of every day people then than they do now.
We went for a ride with “right thinking” people and still not cannot get it into our heads that these people, what ever their social or political ideals, are a vocal minority.
The vast majority of people were left out of this small company of the self-obsessed.
I just finished reading Arthur Lloyd’s, [i]The Church of England, 1900-1965[/i] (published in 1966). One theme that jumped out at me, even at that early date, was the recounting of the peaking of the parish as the instrument of mission and conversion.
The missionary societies like SPG arose in the 18th century to address the shortcomings of the parochial system, but fell back in the 19th century as the Oxford movement reinvigorated parish life. After the First World War, however, one sees a resurgence and expansion of non-parochial “specialist” ministries that reflected a renewed crisis of confidence in the ability of the ordinary parish to reach the unchurched.
“The level of the whole Church, wrote Lloyd, “can never rise higher than the level of its parish clergy.†(23) One suspects he may have been right.
[url=http://catholicandreformed.blogspot.com]Catholic and Reformed[/url]
EXACTLY, Tony!
actually you should believe that in the 60’s people suddenly became less religious because it is true. Read ‘the death of Christian Britain’ for the answers why.
!962 to be precise- this was when media entered peoples homes and shifted from images of women at home and at prayer- and shifted to visions of self fulfilment, materialism and the me culture. It also offered entertainment to rival that offered hitherto by the church. I am in no doubt that the secular and left leaning media hurled at the world since then is directly linked to where we are now
#3,
I would be careful about over-emphasizing the miasma of the 1960s.
Lloyd has some interesting chapters on the problem of faceless suburbia (so beautifully captured in George Grossmith’s [i]Diary of a Nobody[/i]), that suggest that by the 1920s, if not earlier, selling the Church in the new towns was an uphill battle.
One of the critiques of the Church made by Temple and the Life and Liberty group – which ultimately resulted in the creation of the Church Assembly – was precisely the sense that many people had no sense of participation in the national church.
You could argue that the Sixties merely confirmed trends that had been forty years in the making. By the same token, the Keele Conference met in 1967 to redefine Evangelicalism for the modern world and the explosion of charismatic experience followed shortly thereafter, but none of this did much to bolster the mainstream of the Church of England (or The Episcopal Church).
This is a bit of the chicken or the egg dilemma from my perspective. Did people begin to become less religious and this influenced the culture, or did culture influence people to become less religious. I don’t think you can definitely say either.
I think Tony has it right. Trying to pander to the latest trend is a sure-fire recipe for irrelevance. ACNA, beware.
I will repeat what an older minister once told me about the decline of Mainline Protestantism. When I asked him, he said without hesitation it was due to the Vietnam War. The seminaries became a prime refuge for draft dodgers who didn’t really have a calling to ministry, but for whom seminary was an easy way of getting out of going to Vietnam or ever being put in a combat situation. Once they got to seminary, they realized the “ministry” could be a good platform for pushing various leftwing causes, and people (the denomination/congregations) actually paid you for doing it. And you got instant respectability by putting the dog collar around your neck, so people would listen to you.
So the Mainline denominations became populated with ministers who had no real Christian beliefs or calling to the ministry, and thus you have the result we have today of a “church” which is not Christian, but instead is devoted to various leftwing secular causes. And once these people became the power base, they simply replicated themselves and chased out others that actually believe the church is about preaching the Gospel.
I think some good evidence of this is the fact of how few graduates of Mainline seminaries now actually go into pastoring a congregation, rather than being part of some “social justice ministry” or administrative bureaucracy pushing the secular parts of a denomination’s activities.
Another case of “Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory”?
Or, “We were able to eke out a small loss”?
I think I am suffering from whiplash… Before I went out for groceries a while ago, I just read the wonderful news that TEC still had 2.3zillion members, and was not much smaller at all from Episcopal Life Online, or some such..
And then this from Fr. Clavier……
What’s going on?
Grandmother in SC
This is what Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman said in the 19th Century. Eventually, the COE would succumb to Liberalism in religion. It’s in the DNA of Anglicanism. This is not to disparage many good individual Christian Anglicans, but Anglicanism itself doesn’t have the institutional structure to withstand what St.Pius X called the “Mother of all Heresies”.
At the very least Anglicanism in the developed world has suffered a catastrophic decline in credibility with the general public.
“small company of the self-obsessed.” Tony has hit the nail right on the head!
In a slightly oblique manner, this passage of Scripture is perhaps pertinent :
“You are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his flavor, with which shall it be salted? it is thereafter good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.”
Well, personally, I think Tony’s jeremiad is awfully vague and too brief to offer an adequate explanation for the sudden, steady decline of TEC and the so-called “mainline” denominations in the US. I don’t know the English situation nearly as well, so I won’t try to comment on it.
But I suspect that there are MULTIPLE reasons why TEC/ECUSA and the other historic major denoms peaked in the mid 1960s and started to tank so badly. I’d agree with Tony that part of it was that the leadership of those fashionable churches “lost their nerve” when the Boomer generation became so anti-institutional. They tended to adopt the futile, self-defeating approach: [i]”Well, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”[/i]
And yes, I’d agree with Jim the Puritan (#7) that the Vietnam War also played a part, and not just because seminaries were filled with a lot of draft dodgers (like Al Gore, for instance, who thankfully didn’t go on to become a Baptist preacher). To echo Tony, part of the problem was that the liberal Protestant churches were so obsessed with being “relevant” in terms of the hot button issues of the day that they become irrelevant to those on a serious spiritual quest. I mean, during the Vietnam Era, the most popular course in many liberal seminaries was on how to consul draftees or potential draftees. But after the end of the war in 1972, can you imagine anything more irrelevant than such a course? As Dean Stanley (of St. Paul’s, London early in the 20th century) put it so well:
[i]”He who marries the spirit of the age will soon be left a widower.”[/i]
And yes, the decline in the birth rate after the Baby Bust set in did play a part, although the PB smugly relies on that convenient demographic excuse far too readily.
But for my money, I think Methodist researcher Dean Kelley got it right in his early blockbuster of what was wrong with the “mainline” in his lucid analysis from 1972 called “[b]Why Conservative Churches Are Growing[/b]” (and as a staff member of the NCC he wasn’t exactly a partisan supporter of theological conservatism). In the second edition (1985, I think), Kelley admitted that if he could, he’d rename the book, “[b]Why Strict Churches Are Strong.[/b]” That is, Kelley’s provocative thesis (and to me, it’s quite convincing), was that the primary factor was expectations, which tend to be self-fulfilling. In other words, churches tend to get the level of commitment that they ask for and demand, and the churches that are really serious about spiritual matters are quite demanding and strict, on matters of doctrine and morality. So the strict churches get the most committed people, and hence are more likely to grow.
That helps explain why high-demand liberal churches can defy the general trends and often keep growing, while lax and “inclusive” churches that are theologically conservative may be stagnant or even declining. It’s not as simple as many suppose, i.e., that all conservative churches or denominations grow, while all liberal ones decline, although that’s certainly the broad pattern.
In the end, you also have to factor in the mysterious ways of God, who gives and takes away, blessed be his name. It certainly makes sense to me that the Lord wouldn’t send people to churches where they’d be led astray or not cared for well spiritually.
Finally, I would add that one often overlooked factor in the disastrous decline of the “mainline” churches is that they switched all their finanical resources, as well as their interest, to promoting liberal social causes and away from church planting in particular. Almost all the historic denoms basically dropped out of the church planting business in the mid 1960s, and didn’t even try to start more than a few new churches until the 1980s, and only weakly from then on. The priority had become working for a more just society.
There is LOTS of empirical data that shows that the churches that grow the most are the ones that plant the most new churches, although both of those things may be due to an underlying passion for evangelism, rather than one causing the other. But I guess that comes down to “losing their nerve” again, in the sense of losing their confidence in the truth and attractiveness of the biblical, authentic gospel.
David Handy+
Greetings.
Permit me to offer the following small excerpt from Bicknell’s [i]Thirty-Nine Articles[/i], speaking here of so-called Modernism’s de-emphasis (or outright denial, [i]a la[/i] Spong) of the basis of Christianity in historical fact:
[quote]… Christianity claims to be a religion for all men, not only for the wise or the spiritually gifted, but also for the savage and the plain man. But a religion of ideas can only make a limited appeal. It has no message for the dull and uneducated. The average man is influenced by concrete facts. It is the actual death and resurrection of Jesus Christ that come home to his heart. If Jesus Christ be pronounced to be only a shadowy figure upon whom men have projected their ideals, if His resurrection is only an allegory of spiritual truth, then the saving power of the Christian truth disappears. We are left with nothing but human aspirations disguised. If Modernism is true, then Christianity can only be the religion of a few mystics, gifted with a keen insight into the unseen world. The ordinary man is not a mystic. He has neither the ability nor the time to become one. The opposition to Modernism in all its forms is not due simply to clerical prejudice or conservatism. It arises from the conviction on the part of those who deal with the spiritual life of ordinary men and women, that in setting aside the historical ground of the faith, Modernists are undermining Christianity itself.[/quote]
From Bicknell, E.J. [i]A Theological Introduction to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England[/i], 3rd ed. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., Ltd, 1963), pp. 265-266.
Cf. 1 Cor 15: 17-19. Speaking for myself, I agree, despite two graduate degrees. While I am not ready to schedule my baptism, and may never, if the essentials of Christianity are not historically, factually true, I have no use for it — I’ll be honest and do political/social action instead, or just stay home. Apparently others feel the same.
regards,
JPB
“The vast majority of people were left out of this small company of the self-obsessed. As the church concentrated on flirting with this self-important minority it forgot the majority and the majority more and more forgot the church”
Sooo…poll the congregation, and set your agenda that way? Lots of “majority” (salt-of-the-earth nonintelligensia) vs. minority (out-there progressive academics) pot-stirring, but no real answers.