The Anglican Church has unveiled plans to reform and modernise the church in Tasmania.
The plan, costing $250,000 a year, has angered some parishioners, who have accused the church of ignoring its traditional worshippers.
With many of the church’s congregations dwindling and some churches recently closed, the Bishop of Tasmania, John Harrower, says it is time to re-engage with the community.
“Out of the church and into the 21st century, out of the church and into the world,” he said.
Bishop Harrower says research shows it’s time for a new approach.
“All the surveys we have done and the statistics we have show that there’s a real need for us to be more outwardly focussed and connect to bring the good news of Christmas, which is Jesus’ love to people and we need to do it in ways that make sense to people that we show Jesus makes sense of life.”
I actually had to laugh out loud at the headline. “Well, I knew they’d wind up there EVENTUALLY.”
Yep. Just go ahead and do what the Romans did in the wake of Vatican II and ditch anything that smacks of tradition in worship. Look how well that worked for the Roman Catholics!
One thing to be learned from the classical music business-and there are more similarities than I am often comfortable with-is that if you tell your audience they are too small and you need new people…
You may end up with a smaller audience of new people.
There are ways to reach out to communities without throwing out the baby and the bathwater. I hope that is what is being done here, but I imagine an ideologically motivated re-arranging of the furniture is what is actually happening.
“All the surveys we have done and the statistics we have show that there’s a real need for us to be more outwardly focussed and connect to bring the good news of Christmas, which is Jesus’ love to people and we need to do it in ways that make sense to people that we show Jesus makes sense of life.”
… I guess “Go and make disciples…” was insufficient motivation. Glad they now have the statistical evidence.
Brian
Actually, Harrower has been doing a good job of waking up a very sleepy little diocese. Lots of very small isolated churches scattered around the state with just a handful of people attending on a regular basis, critical mass evaporated a long time ago.
Jon R
[blockquote] Yep. Just go ahead and do what the Romans did in the wake of Vatican II and ditch anything that smacks of tradition in worship. Look how well that worked for the Roman Catholics! [/blockquote]
As a Roman catholic traditionalist attending the TLM, I sense that things are definitely looking up. With his Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum and other moves, Pope Benedict XVI has given the signal that the silly season is now over.
I hope that Tasmanian anglicans will evangelize while resisting our post-modern culture. There is no other way for christians. In the world but not of the world.
Yeah, yeah, I heard this story in the 1970s when the assumption was that liturgical revision would bring in “young people” as I then was. So they dumbed it down, incorporated middle-class clerics’ sanitized version of youth culture, and made the whole thing boring, pedestrian and emotionally flat. And I don’t know anyone, young or old at the time who liked it. Promoters were always saying that even if we didn’t like it other people did and we should sacrifice to appeal to them.
If this is the way the Church treats its friends no wonder it has so few.
And I am no conservative.
So why is it that the churches that are growing the fastest are the ones that strongly hold to traditional faith and doctrine? Something for this parish to consider!
Because, libraryjim, secularization which is a global phenomenon, is proceeding from the top down. Globally, citizens of affluent countries as a rule (with the exception of the US) are highly secular while religion flourishes in the third world. In the US, affluent, educated, coastal elites are as secular as Europeans; the lower classes are still religious--for the time being. The lower classes are conservative, both socially and in their adherence to what you call “traditional faith and doctrine.” So churches that cater for their preferences have a shot at growing while liberal churches whose natural constituency is the affluent, educated, coastal elite are doomed.
That’s the way it is in the aggregate. There are certainly affluent, educated individuals, like me, who are religious, and some of whom who are, unlike me, theologically and socially conservative. I’m just talking about the way things are in the aggregate, about the figures, and about why, from the demographic point of view, liberal churches are declining. I note also that the Episcopal Church in the US is poorly positioned to appeal to the conservative lower classes because there are lots of other religious organizations with very different histories that do a much better job. The natural constituency of the Episcopal Church is increasingly secular elite–which is tough.
So IMHO if the Episcopal Church wants to survive (which I’m beginning to doubt) it has to do a better job of appealing to this elite. Not by cranking out the absurd politically correct crapola that it’s been pumping for a few decades now, but by providing goods that aren’t available to us in the secular world–specifically, high liturgy, mysticism, and the thrill of transcendence, with no strings attached.
LogicGuru, cutting the strings hasn’t worked either. You might consider the traditional doctrine and theology actually account for the growth of churches as opposed to say the theology and doctrine of liberalism which ascendant in the mainline correlates with their insignificance culturally and historically as demonstrated by statistics.
What do you mean by “cutting the strings”?
I’m certainly prepared to consider the possibility that traditional doctrines account for church growth. But then you have to tell me what you mean by “traditional doctrine.” Do you mean the metaphysics–traditional claims about the existence and nature of God, and post-mortem survival? I can buy that because apart from these claims religion is empty. I’m all for the metaphysics and in fact believe that the Church is collapsing because clergy don’t believe in God and don’t regard these claims as interesting, important or plausible.
But I don’t buy “Christian ethics.” Maybe these doctrines, about sexuality and other matters, attract people but, I believe, they are false. If this is what it takes to grow the Church then I have to say it isn’t worth it. Ethics is a purely secular enterprise–it’s time for the Church to get out of the ethics business.
I just found this quote in an interview with Kemper Crabb (on the [url=http://www.tollbooth.org/features/kcrabb.html#music]”Phantom Tollbooth”[/url] site). Rev. Crabb is a minister with the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches in Houston, TX, and ministers primarily to artists and [i]”EBO’s,” or Evangelical Burn Outs. We have lots of artists who slipped between the cracks. They still loved God but didn’t know what the heck to do because they felt so ripped off and rejected[/i]. His observation:
[blockquote]I believe that if the American church is going to fulfill its calling in our generation, then it’s going to have to draw on the evangelical and the reformed theological basis, the liturgical and sacramental worship patterns, and the kind of life that comes from the charismatic movement. Those things form a tripod. Until the church, either as a whole or even individually in congregations, achieves some kind of sane balance between those three legs, we’re going to continue to be deformed and not do our job.[/blockquote]
Kemper rocks!
Hrumph. There are plenty of churches in different traditions who do a fine job of being evangelical and reformed, or charismatic. There’s no reason why the Episcopal Church should try to compete for this market niche. Nothing wrong with being a Baptist, Pentacostal or non-denominationalist.
The Episcopal Church’s mission is to the liberal elite, to provide metaphysics, mysticism, and high art with no (ethical or doctrinal) strings attached. No other church provides that.