The Church of England will no longer be “functionally extant” in 20 years time according to some projections, a member of the General Synod has warned.
The Rev Dr Patrick Richmond, from Norwich, told members of the Church’s national assembly that they were facing a “perfect storm” of ageing congregations and falling clergy numbers.
The average age of congregations was 61, with many above that, he said.
Women bishops and gay bishops will reverse this trend, as they have for Tec.
Rowan needs to step down and let someone else try to reverse the results of his failed attempt at being ABC.
Do I detect a note of sarcasm, #1?
The difficulty with +RW stepping down, #2, is that the “Tory” government seems intent on appointing a successor who will be worse. Perhaps +RW will hang on until KJS finishes her term at TEC, so she can be appointed to the post (I know, CoE canons say….., but since when have canons mattered to either +RW or KJS?). One supposes he wants to finish his work of divorcing CoE from the Global South, and building the alliances with the uber-revisionist churches of N America and Scandinavia. Note that the CoE, under his leadership, is now in full communion with more gay bishops, and more bishops not in apostolic succession, than even TEC. CoE has ceased to be either Catholic or Apostolic. One wonders what he means when he says the Creeds. Or what any other CoE bishop means, as they have approved all these alliances.
“…If present trends continue…” arguments should be held very lightly. Present trends have a way of taking unaccountable diversions.
“The Church of England, as she now stands, no power on earth can save.” — Thomas Arnold, 19th century.
Whatever of any church that is rightly and truly part of Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church will survive and flourish into the Kingdom of God.
Whatever branch bears no fruit, but is only dead wood, will be cut off, cast out and burned.
Not complicated.
Of course the Bishop of Lichfield has the answer. Shorten those terribly long worship services and get rid of all those pesky Holy Communion services and the youngsters will probably flood back to church.
Funny, when I was in Cambridge, quite a few parishes were standing room only on Sunday and they were mostly the under 35 crowd.
Archer_of_the_Forest,
That is a good point. In particular, conservative evangelical churches in CofE tend to be both large and young.
Mind you, that doesn’t necessarily contradict Dr Richmond’s point about the church in general…