Roman Catholicism, bolstered by an influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Africa, has overtaken the Anglican Church as the nation’s most dominant religious group, figures obtained by the Sunday Telegraph reveal.
A survey by Christian Research shows that the number of people going to Mass last year stood at 861,000 compared to only 852,000 Anglicans worshipping each Sunday. Leading figures from the Church of England have warned that it could become a minority faith.
What Bloody Mary couldn’t do, Elizabeth I’s church has done to itself–give Rome the higher attendance. It was C of E’s to lose and they succeeded.
I read through the comments by readers of The Telegraph, and it seems to me that blaming the demise on lack of traditional worship, music, etc misses the point. I believe that clergy who don’t know why they are preaching is the greatest cause of institutional church impotence. If you could get a private and confidential honest conversation with all of the clergy of the Episcopal Church (and probably the C of E as well) you would be shocked to find out how many have no idea what it might mean to be under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. I know what I am talking about; I was such a priest many years ago. Seminaries bear much of the blame. Unconverted clergy, in my opinion, are the greatest problem: unconvincing second hand testimony about someone they’ve never really met (and whose work of redemption they don’t really understand) is our primary problem. “how shall they hear without a preacher [who believes what is being preached]”?
#2. How right you are. The answer to the question is to Preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ and not the pablum found in the social gospel.
What people want is something true today, tomorrow, and forever. I believe people want something they believe will help them be as good a person inside as outside. This is more true for the early twenties younger people who see very little to hang on to in order to cope with the rapid changes around them.
I disagree with the relevance of the question to practicing our faith. The purpose of our existence as Christians is to share our faith in Jesus with others. The relative health of various denominations is a secondary or even tertiary consideration. The question here assumes that there is some sort of ideal business model, and that kind of thinking is not Gospel based. Jesus Christ is the true reality, the light of lights. We must live and act on that transcendant truth with faith and explain to others why an encounter with the Living Lord has transformed us. Worship then, in any context, becomes the natural response but not an end in itself by any means.
It is important to note that some places where Christianity is most “flourishing” numerically in our Nation, it’s also the most unhealthy.
#2, Brien, and #3, Oldman,
While I’m highly sympathetic to your views, and the citation of Romans 10 is very apt (How shall they hear without a preacher?), there is no single cause to blame for the manifest ills besetting the C of E, or TEC for that matter. If it was so simple to diagnose and treat and reverse this long-term decline, it would have been done before now and there would be more growing “mainline” churches.
I propose another factor for consideration. As Methodist minister Dean Kelley argued persuasively back in the early 1970s, in his controversial but solid analysis of “Why Conservative Churches Are Growing,” one of the key factors is that, as he puts it, “strict churches are strong,” whereas lax and lenient churches are weak, since they downplay the importance of religion. As a result, the people on serious spiritual journeys and who take their faith the most seriously tend to drift toward churches that are strict and demanding. And unfortunately, some of those demanding groups are unhealthy cults, like the Mormons, who are growing by leaps and bounds.
Certainly, the Roman Catholic Church is inherently more demanding in general than we Anglicans are, especially in England, where you still have a de jure state church (although it’s long ceased to be truly “The Church of all England” de facto). Constantinian churches are inherently weak, because they operate on the basis of making only minimal demands, in order to try to include the whole populace and thus unite the nation. it worked for centuries in the West. But that era is now over.
Nowadays, ALL the state churches of Europe have withered away. It doesn’t matter if you look at the Catholic churches of southern Europe, or the Lutheran Volk Kirchen of Germany and Scandanavia, or the Presbyterians in Scotland and the Netherlands, or the dear old C of E, they are all in deep, deep trouble. For the fact is that we now live in a secularized, POST-CHRISTENDOM society everywhere in the western world. We just haven’t awakened yet in Anglicanism and realized how drastically our social context has changed, and what that profound new hostile social environment now requires of us if we are going to survive, much less thrive and flourish long-term.
The new key mission field in the world is in the neo-pagan West. It’s just as resistant to the genuine gospel as Islam is in the famous “10-40 window” (i.e., the big hostile belt between 10 degrees and 40 degrees latitude surrounding the equator in Africa and Asia, where Islam and Hinduism are deeply entrenched). And in a mission field context, you need church leaders (ordained and lay) who are missionaries and apologists more than shepherd care-takers. Here is where Romans 10 comes in again. Who will take the gospel to them?
Another key factor, however, is the expectation for evangelism and life transformation to take place. It should be no surprise that those church traditions that stress the necessity of personal evangelism and that foster high expectations that sanctification will follow conversion naturally tend to see more of those things happen (e.g., Baptists and Pentecostals). To a large degree, you get what you expect. You reap what you sow.
Granted, a LOT of the growth of Roman Catholicism in England has come from the MASSIVE influx of Polish immigrants flooding the country seeking a better life (like the Mexicans flooding across our southern borders, except that illegal immigration is much less of a problem for England, thanks to its isolation as an island). But the recent conversion of former PM Tony Blair shows that Rome continues to attract prominent defectors from the C of E as well. The growth of the RCs is not all due to the swelling numbers of Polish or Irish workers.
That’s why I keep signing many of my posts with some variant on the formula, David Handy, Advocate of High Commitment, Post-Christendom style Anglicanism.
But I also agree with #2 and 3. Orthodoxy matters. Conversion matters. Unconverted preachers and pastors lead to unconverted flocks. Why should the Lord send people to churches where they won’t find Christ and the new life only found in him?
David Handy+
A genuinely Post-Constantinian Anglicanism would indeed amount to a brand New Reformation
Looking back I don’t think the episcopal church ever cared about growing their church. They have been more concerned about furthering their agendas than about evangelizing and growing their church. The Episcopal church has been very wealthy and knew it could survive financially without growing their attendance. They would rather have a small church with people who agreed with their “mission” than to appeal to the masses. Fast forward into the future, after Schori nearly destroys the church and blows through alot of the endowment money on lawsuits and agendas, it will need people in order to rebuild. I’m hopeful that in the future they will return to more orthodox views which will appeal to the masses but unfrotunately it may be too late. Many who are fleeing will be converting and making commitments to other faiths such as mormonism or catholicism etc., which right now is there for them, providing for their spiritual needs. I don’t think they will forget about how the Episcopal church turned its back on them and I don’t think they will be so willing to leave their new church homes.
#7 is, alas, incorrect.
TEC is declining because of the same reason other mainline churches decline: liturgical fundamentalism and a lack of entreprenurial leadership. The moderate laity prefer stasis, as is the human condition.
#2 you are right in most all you say but that does not negate the comment about traditional awe inspiring worship. Indeed the two are linked. those who do not ‘really’ believe will never fathom the secret to good liturgy. The self always becomes the idol bowed to.
Those with eyes of faith know that Christ centred worship is what works. In my church it is very trad and high – at others very different. But the essence is that where Christ is worshipped over the self – congregations flourish and people will flock.
Amidst all this in the C of E about 50% of churches have falling attendances, whilst others are holding their own and some are growing.
I can vouch for one that has much higher attendances than 40 years ago. #9, the rugby playing priest gets it right with “Those with eyes of faith know that Christ centred worship is what works.” and “But the essence is that where Christ is worshipped over the self – congregations flourish and people will flock.” Exactly.
48% growth in 5 years and counting……….
rugbyplayingpriest,
Way to go, man! BRAVO! We need to lionize people like you who don’t just talk about church growth, but who succeed in pulling it off, steadily, over time. Praise God!
Of course, we all know that Alpha has likewise been a huge factor in helping many Anglican/TEC churches to reverse a decline and start growing. But the Alpha Course only really works if the rest of the parish culture supports it, and the priest’s theology is compatible or coherent with it.
Going back to #7 & 8,
I don’t see your viewpoints as mutually exclusive. Alas, there are MANY reasons why TEC has been in steady decline for over 40 years. That’s why it’s so hard to turn things around. But I actually think #7, nochurchhome, was on the right track with his comment on our historic preference for being a small elite church made up of “the right people” rather than playing to win over the unkempt masses, the hoi polloi. At least, that has certainly been the case here in Virginia where I live.
As everyone knows, we just celebrated the 400th anniversary of Anglicanism coming to VA when the three little ships landed at Jamestown with 114 men and boys. There were some young “gentlemen” from aristocratic backgrounds who were a part of that business venture (boy were they in for a shock!, life wasn’t so easy here at first). And as everyone knows, while the colony of Virginia favored Anglicanism as the state church, it was also closely aligned with the plantation owners and upper class from the start. And thus it remained, even after Jefferson disestablished the state church in Virginia in 1785.
In fact, Jefferson himself epitomizes what really mattered to church leaders then, and now. For as everyone probably also knows, Thomas Jefferson was a very bad Christian, if indeed he was really one at all. He was an open Deist, who publicly rejected the whole idea of the Trinity as illogical nonsense. But he faithfully served on parish vestries much of his adult life. For after all, he was most definitely one of “our kind” of people, rich, well educated, and socially well connected. ‘Twas ever so with PECUSA/ECUSA/TEC. That’s why the leaders of Virginia Anglicanism weren’t dismayed at the way that the Baptists and Methodists quickly outgrew us. Who cares? Let them have the riff raff and the rabble. As long as we have the social elite, that’s what matters (we vainly imagined).
Alas, now even the social elite has turned its back on us. The urbane, cosmopoligtan skepticism that Jefferson exemplifies so well is no longer confined to a few aristocratic intellectuals (like his contemporary, the great historian Edward Gibbons), it has now filtered down into the middle class. And since being religiously active is no longer socially advantageous, more and more people are opting out. Perfectly understandable and predictable.
That, my friends, is why we need a whole new kind of Anglicanism in North America. One that relies not on social prestige to attract people, but on the truth of the gospel and our religious distinctives (e.g., our hybrid evangelical/catholic nature and openness to good scholarship etc.). We desperately need to comes to terms with our new secularized, pluralistic, increasingly anti-Christian social environment. In other words, we simply MUST morph into a “Post-Christendom” kind of church. And that will amount to nothing less than a New Reformation.
David Handy+
Advocate of High Commitment, Post-Constantinian style Anglicanism
The moderate laity prefer stasis, as is the human condition.
*****************************************
#8 If that is the case you would still need to ask why they prefer stasis and prefer a decline in attendance. The answer is they really do not care if their attendance declines because as long as they have money to survive they would rather have a small group who agrees with their agenda than to change and provide what people are looking for and craving—-the Word of God, boundaries for living etc.
Would any good company stand for a loss of customers? If TEC were a company you bet the CEO would be trying to figure out ways to grow a customer base losing customers year after year would not be acceptable. The TEC simply never cared about that. They were complacent because they could afford to be and cared more about their agendas than people.
Even now with people fleeing from TEC in record #s, bishops leaving, priests leaving, congregations leaving, and even a diocese leaving, has it even made bishop Schori pause for a second and think that maybe she has it wrong? Has she ever thought for the sake of the church maybe she should put what she thinks to be right aside so that the church will survive and maybe even grow? No, even today the attitude in TEC is that they are on a path and if anyone doesn;t agree with it then they can simply leave. Yes, people can leave but money, possessions, property cannot. Once again TEC is demonstrating that they have no interest in growing membership or appealing to the masses. This complacency is not a laziness it is how they operate.
#12 Further to your “Of course, we all know that Alpha has likewise been a huge factor in helping many Anglican/TEC churches to reverse a decline and start growing. But the Alpha Course only really works if the rest of the parish culture supports it, and the priest’s theology is compatible or coherent with it.”
In the parish I referred to a further Alpha course finished recently. Entirely lay led – the Vicar of almost 18 years ministry had just moved on. Out of that course a new house group is being formed whilst others are to continue beta fashion.
#12 thanks for the compliment – but as the original point would state- I merely accepted my role as a predictably dissapointing funnel, said my prayers and let the good Lord do the rest! I should also share some credit with a great predecessor who sowed many seeds