One of the notable things about this synod was who wasn’t there. There was little interest from the secular press, visitors were sparse and blog comments were at nothing like the levels seen for the Synod of 2007. Even big name Anglicans like Katherine Jefferts-Schori (from the US Episcopal Church) attracted only a motley bunch of specialty Anglican journalists. For the most part, the secular press was absent.
The church is trying to use social networking to spread its message, so it had a twitter account where a dedicated tweeter typed in endless 140 character messages to edify the curious. There were 114 followers, a half of which were probably already attending synod. To put this in perspective, Stephen Fry has 1,550,779 followers ”“ and he doesn’t even talk about sex all the time.
Why is this? It’s because most people no longer care what the Anglican Church does ”“ whether it is blessing same sex marriages or demanding an end to global warming. The Anglican Church spends much of its time questioning the faith that has shaped not only it, but the last 2000 years of Western civilisation. To fill the void, it has idolatrised “inclusion”, thereby alienating to the point of exclusion many who are determined to hold fast to orthodox Christianity. The church’s quest for relevance has become an accommodation to secular culture and it now finds itself in a market where it cannot and never will be able to effectively compete.
True enough. We’re no longer in Christendom in the West (Europe, America); we’re on a mission field. This is the greatest of times to be in the Church.
#1. O.P.
I know you like a challenge!
Wow– David Jenkins writes with piercing clarity… what an incredibly perceptive analysis. Thanks, Kendall, for spotting this.
Fr. Dale,
You know it! I see the future of my ministry much like training for and racing on the trails (of which I’ve got a 5k, 10k, 15k and 25k lined up for this summer!): challenging, sometimes painful, sometimes a slog or a physically and mentally draining run through which you don’t think you can continue, but also surprising, full of unknowns, exploration, adventure, trial and error and just and fun.
“To fill the void, it has idolatrised “inclusionâ€, thereby alienating to the point of exclusion many who are determined to hold fast to orthodox Christianity. The church’s quest for relevance has become an accommodation to secular culture and it now finds itself in a market where it cannot and never will be able to effectively compete.”
Jenkin’s absolutely nails it using the fewest words yet. Nicely done. He came close to plagiarizing my equation, “inclusion = reduction”…but that’s just fine.
I wasn’t raised Anglican, but most of my family has been Church of England/Ireland. I was raised in a small Protestant sect, but came around to Catholicism due to how their governance and doctrine mostly lined up with my reading of patristics. However, there’s simply too much in Catholicism that I can’t rationally bend my mind to believe in and after much consideration decided that some form of protestant episcopalianism was the most sound sort of belief. Anglicanism perfectly describes my beliefs in theory.
However, I happen to live in the Diocese of New Westminster, which has its own peculiar problems. As an outsider looking in, the churches seem mostly empty and mostly grey, which doesn’t bode well for the future of the Anglican Church in Canada. The leaders of the church also seem to be more interested in political and social causes rather than religious matters. Theologically, I sometimes cannot whether or not they’ve adopted some form of unitarian universalism.
Leaving aside theological matters which have sometimes been cited as the cause of the decline, I think the real issue is that Anglicanism has seen fit to remain an ethnic church (a sometimes strange way of looking at things when the ethnicity is your own) rather seeking a broader membership. This would be a sound strategy if the Canadian church were established like the Church of England, but year over year the proportion of Canadians of British descent gets smaller.
Instead of trying to reorient the church in Canada as [i]the [/i] episcopal protestant church that broadly seeks to build its membership from the whole population, they’ve been responding to this decline by watering down their beliefs to keep their more marginal members. This has the unintended effect of driving away more traditional members.
That said, the Canadian church will continue for a long time despite their social irrelevance. They have quite a lot of valuable, historic properties that they can and have successfully used to stay fiscally solvent. I can’t really comment on the state of their spiritual solvency.
For the Anglican Church of Canada……and TEC…..to become spiritually solvent and stop their slide to oblivion, they have to stop trying to climb the heavily greased flagpole.
I agree with #3 & 5, that David Jenkins’ pithy summary and analysis is dead on target. That the ASA of the ACoC has plummetted by over 50% in less than a decade illustrates the extreme severity of its problems.
optimus prime (#1),
I like your spunky attitude. I would tend to echo the famous line in Dickens’ [b]Tale of Two Cities[/b]: “[i]It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.[/i]” For churches still stuck in the old Christendom mode of thinking and operating, it’s the worst of times because we have clearly moved into a radically new, post-Christendom era where those historic patterns are obviously obsolete and counter-productive. That style of Christianity, with which Anglicans with our state church heritage are so familiar, is withering and dying. And it will never be revived in this age.
But OTOH, for those of us who dream of recovering the vitality of the pre-Constantinian Church, this is indeed the best of times. Never have we in the West had so much hope or opportunity to rebuild from the ground up a very different, and more biblical, style of Christianity.
It’s time to stop pouring new wine into old institutional wineskins whose time is past. But before there can be a resurrection, there must first be a death. The Old Anglicanism is dying all around us in the Global North. But a new and better Anglicanism is arising, especially in the Global South, but also in our midst in North America, for those who have the eyes to see it.
I have two Scriptures for you, o.p. Perhaps they will encourage and inspire you as much as they do me. Isaiah 43:18-19 and 61:4.
David Handy+
Passionate advocate of a radically post-Christendom style Anglicanism for the 3rd millenium