At some point, young people contemplating a clerical career will have to consider just how long there will indeed be a church for them to serve.
This isn’t meant to be panic-mongering, and infinite extrapolations rarely follow exact lines. But if any church is losing 2.6 percent of its attenders every year ”“ not every decade ”“ it should be deeply alarmed. Why isn’t it?
One of the commentators to the original article appears to be from ACNA. She wrote:
[blockquote] “We just had 8 new Spanish speaking parishes in the Chicago area join the Diocese – our Bishop (a monk) also happens to be Spanish speaking.”[/blockquote]
Does anyone know where these churches are?
And how do parishes “join” a diocese – does she mean they are previous church plants who finally reached the size where they could be counted as parishes?
Isn’t there a mathematical error in this analysis? The assumption is that the church will drop by a constant number. Jenkins is assuming that if, say, the decline is 2%, then in 50 years there will be zero.
But if a church is declining at 2% each year then each year it is 2% of the reduced number, so, paradoxically, each year the zero retreats further away, as per Zeno’s Paradox. Of course, the numbers still fall, and the broader point about sustainability remains.
I agree with Jenkins (as usual). Maybe the most disturbing thing about the rapid and persistent decline in TEC is that many of the failing denomination’s leaders seem untroubled by it. We can speculate all we want to about the various possible explanations for the apparent lack of concern, but no matter what the real reasons for it are, they aren’t good.
The way the bottom is falling out of TEC’s ASA is only one symptom out of many dangerous signs that TEC is actually nearing the point of implosion and collapse. Personally, I think the most ominous of the stats is that the national mean age for Episcopalians in the pews is now 63 (whereas the national mean age of the population as a whole is just 35, a huge gap of 28 years). The grayihg of TEC has been progressing relentlessly for a long time. It’s a vicious cycle: the older congregations become, the less attractive they become to younger adults, and especially to parents with young children.
If TEC were a publicly-traded business on the stock exchange, the board would’ve taken action long ago to fire the CEO and would’ve undertaken drastic steps to turn the corporation around.
I’m so glad I got off the Titanic before it sinks. My only regret about leaving TEC (in 2009, as soon as the ACNA was officially launched) is that I didn’t leave sooner.
David Handy+
Michael A (#1),
My guess is that those 8 Hispanic congregations have transferred to the Diocese of Quincy, since Quincy’s bishop is Alberto Morales, a Benedictine monk and a native of Puerto Rico. If so, that would be a major boost to a small but vibrant ACNA diocese.
It’s perhaps worth mentioning that one main reason why the TEC Diocese of Chicago had the number of Hispanic churches that it did was because of the faithful missionary work of my friend Fr. William Beasley (a fellow Wheaton grad and ardent evangelical), who had been a missionary in Costa Rica and who served for several years as the diocesan leader of outreach to Hispanics. Fr. Beasley left TEC way back in the mid 1990s, when he became disgusted with the pro-gay and ultra-liberal policies of +Frank Griswold and the diocese.
David Handy+
RE: “many of the failing denomination’s leaders seem untroubled by it. . . . ”
But you know, they’ve got good reason for putting on that appearance. I mean — they’re not able to grow, and I believe they know that.
So why broadcast the Bad News incessantly when one doesn’t have a solution? Why continually talk about The Problem when they can’t implement a solution?
Besides . . . if you talk about The Problem, you frighten the sheeples, the parishioners, the givers, the volunteers — never a good thing, when you need to continue your position and the facade of a functioning diocese.
Michael A- the churches “joining” may be former Episcopal parishes, or Anglo Catholic churches or plants not associated directly with TEC (I will be honest, I do not know for sure). Like NRA in #4, I would think Quincy a good guess. I don’t recall the specifics, but Bishop Morales came to Quincy as a priest who had been a bishop of an associated Catholic (but not Roman) Church in Central or South America- so these Hispanic parishes may have the same roots. NRA notes Fr. Beasley, but the Anglo Catholics have been working in black and Hispanic and even Native American neighborhoods in Chicago for decades. As has often been the case elsewhere, bishops will send Anglo Catholic clergy to their “low rent” parishes in destitute parts of the city, but some of those are among the most vibrant parishes in the Church. They often don’t have much money, but they are filled with very faithful people, who often make up for in faith and donated time what they cannot provide in money.
I don’t know that Chicago was ever an “Anglo Catholic diocese” but certainly 50 years ago, there were many Anglo Catholic parishes. Last I knew, there were still a couple, sort of flying under the radar. There are, of course, many that like to dress up in lace and parade about (with the current bishop among them) as though they were, but gave up the faith a long time ago.
Remember that Anglo Catholics in North America have disparate roots- the first breaks came with TEC over 50 years ago, and the pogrom began in earnest in the mid 70s. Anglo Catholic dioceses in TEC were reduced from 25 (more or less) to zero in the past 40 years- with a diaspora of sorts. So there are Anglo Catholic parishes out there that have had no official Anglican Communion attachment for several decades. Quincy and Fort Worth and the Diocese of All Saints have been beacons for many of these scattered parishes, clergy and laity since they split from TEC 5 years ago.
It seems to me the failure of Episcopal leadership in this matter comes down to a Hobson’s choice. Life and growth in the Christian church require evangelism (see under “Great Commissionâ€). Evangelism requires the conviction that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life. That conviction, however, is exclusive, fundamentalist and hateful. Whatever else the Episcopal Church stands for, it is not exclusive, fundamentalist and hateful. Therefore evangelism is repugnant to its DNA, its raison d’etre. Hence the only conscientious option is slow death.
We have seen this choice acted out time and again recently. The denomination forces an evangelical Anglican body out of its building, it cannot fill the facilities, then it gets its thirty pieces silver by renting or selling the building to a non-Anglican evangelical body. “OK, they are evangelicals, but they are not [i]our [/i]evangelicals!â€
#7, You are correct. There is also a long history behind this going back to 2002 when the Evangelism Standing Commission told PB Griswold that TEC was in institutional decline which would be irreversible if not stopped immediately. I think Griswold was sympathetic, but the EC, especially Louie Crew, were not only not sympathetic but were openly hostile to the Standing Commission. The Commission was led by John Guernsey at the time, so you can see what was actually going on. EC essentially adopted the head in the sand policy that TEC will push a left wing, political LGBT agenda and we will grow. We will be the DNC with vestments and it will all work out. It didn’t.
#7 and 8, You are both more learned than I, and undoubtedly correct. But I think the TEC problem goes much farther than that, down to the parish level. I participated in a parish meeting, perhaps 8 years ago, when the priest in charge suggested to the dwindling congregation (down to an ASA in the low 30s, and a supposed membership of 75) that if each of us brought in one friend or family member, some might well stay. We should institute a visitor Sunday once a year, and everyone ask their outside friends- churched, unchurched, whatever- to come.
The responses came in 2 varieties. Those of us who were actively engaged in trying to restore a semblance of orthodoxy had a hard time with it on the grounds that we would be exposing our innocent friends to open heresy (imagine taking a young family with a couple of kids into a TEC Church). Essentially, we would be taking the unchurched or young Christians in formation, and bringing them in so TEC could mold them into revisionist pewsitters. Fine if we could slip in a half dozen staunch Anglo Catholics or Evangelicals- but the former in that area were now Roman Catholic, and the latter had their own churches and were not up for taking on a fight for a church they saw as heretical.
The rest of the parish was just embarrassed. They knew that if they even suggested to a friend that they come, the response was going to be- (if they followed religious news) “oh, you mean that church with the gay bishops” or (if they just paid attention to local conversation about churches) “weren’t you complaining last week about the meaningless sermon….”
That parish is now, for all intents and purposes, ELCA with an occasional out of the book Rite II service (shared ministry with the local ELCA congregation). “Evangelizes” young liberals from the local college, and desperately looks about town for the few openly gay couples, hoping they will come so it will appear “inclusive” when the bishop visits.
I believe this started in the seminaries when non-believers were hired to teach. The curriculum may have remained orthodox but what was actually communicated was not.
At a macro level, as Pb suggests, it started academically. But at this point in time, Episcopalianism has become a religion unto itself. The leadership, at this point down to the deanery level, if not lower, everywhere but a very few dioceses, have rejected certain books of the Bible, and have, in fact, functionally created a new one- the Book of Spirit!!! (no longer Holy, no definite article, always at least 3 !s), which is the accumulation of all the new things that their god has done in the past 50 years, which leads them in “prophetic witness.” I am sure that someday soon, someone will post the Book of Spirit!!! on the TEC website, but until then, it will be presented to congregations around the country through sermons, GC resolutions, and actions of the HoB.
The Book of Spirit!!! has also caught on with much of the rest of Western Anglicanism, as we see with the recent quotations from it by the bishops of the CoE.
I concur. Last Sunday I attended a TEC service. The lay reader concluded the reading with “Hear what the Spirit is saying to the People of God.” And we responded “Thanks be to God.” We could have a whole thread on the implications of this change.
#10 and 11. I asked an older priest about this a number of years ago, when the slide was just beginning. He said he believed the Episcopal Church and all the mainlines were destroyed by the Vietnam War and young men avoiding the draft. A well-known exemption was you couldn’t get drafted if you went to seminary. So the mainline seminaries were flooded with folks who weren’t Christians, were often leftist in orientation, and were looking for a place to hide from the draft. They were in no way “called” to ministry, which used to be the test and usually required prior vetting and recommendation by the applicant’s church that this person was a suitable candidate for the ministry, had been active in the church and helped serve, etc.
The seminaries were only all too happy to take these folks, because they paid the bills and kept the classes filled. And a lot of them were only Christianity Lite at that point anyway. And once these folks got into the ministry track, they realized how churches could be platforms for “social change” (and an easy way to make a living, with a captive audience and podium for your social and political views, and at that point, pretty much an assured lifetime employment). So within a few years, the mainline seminaries and churches began to fundamentally change.
Certainly that was the case in my parish. When I was a kid and went, it was a solidly conservative Anglo-Catholic parish. We were taught our catechism, the Creeds, and that the 39 Articles of Religion were binding on all Anglican churches. We even had real Sisters teaching Sunday School (there was an Episcopal girls’ school next door also run by the Sisters). Men wore suits, women wore hats. Today, that church is a shattered shell of its former self. The last service I went to, which was advertised as a service of Christmas Lessons and Carols, turned out to be a service for the Winter solstice, almost totally lacking in Christianity.
I posted this once, but it took so long I think my session timed out.
A couple of comments (WARNING: this is rather long):
1. (Re Terry #2) Philip Jenkins understands trajectories quite well. He is arguing a “what-if” scenario. Of course the decline won’t be consistent. On the other hand, decline in both ASA and membership has been fairly consistent over the past five years, so he’s arguing that the near-future news is likely not very encouraging. See here for the statistics for the past five years. The ASA in 2011 increased 55 for the year because that year had 53 Sundays, one of which was Christmas Eve. The reconfigured numbers for 2011 indicate decline consistent with surrounding years.
The reasons for the decline are a combination of (1) systemically spiritual values, (2) strategic decisions at the diocesan level, (3) “national” leadership unwise strategic decisions, and, (4) yes, demographics.
(1) Systemically spiritual values. Episcopalians, as a whole, don’t do evangelism. We are generally content to attend church–some more faithfully than others–and do nothing to engage their friends and family with any sort of intentional proclamation of the Gospel in word and deed. We don’t even do much of “make a friend, be a friend, bring a friend to Christ” with an intention to draw them into a relationship with Christ through our church. (Two notes: First, there is warrant for recognizing that evangelism takes place best within the context of the worshiping community, but that is another long post. Second, let me hasten to add that I led two workshops among “the remnants” of people who were considering starting new churches as they saw their own churches being unfaithful doctrinally, and the vast majority of those people only wanted an orthodox chapel of ease that was more doctrinally pure than the church they were leaving. This lack of evangelical zeal is not limited to people remaining in TEC.)
(2) strategic decisions at the diocesan level. Where are the church plants among us? (I’m speaking to my fellow Episcopalians here.) If the diocese is the basic unit of the Church, it is incumbent on the dioceses to lead the way in church planting. ‘Nuff said.
(3) “national” leadership unwise strategic decisions. I could go on and on about this. First, although it is not the role of the denominational structure to oversee the way, it is the role of the denominational structure to cast that vision and fund those priorities. Instead, we have a Presiding Bishop who, when asked about two months ago how many churches have been planted in TEC, she responded that she did not know because she is usually invited to established congregations, not new ones. In a denomination that is in severe decline, one would think that the PB would want to make a priority of new church plants and reversing that numerical decline instead of making a virtue out of the decline. Second, several years ago BS–before the split–a 2020 task force was established that made many good and serious recommendations. The task force was tamed and the recommendations went nowhere because a certain segment of the committee was more concerned with inner-city issues only and the more liberal social agenda than they were the suburban growth and supporting normative congregational development. The work of the committee was completely derailed thanks to a few vocal people on the task force, and the larger leadership did not have a will to overcome these loud voices.
(4) And yes, demographics. It is true that we are dying more rapidly than we are producing biologically. That is not to our credit, rather to our shame.
2. (Re, Sarah #5) Yes, the leadership continues to publish the bad news even though they have no solution. However, at least they are publishing the numbers. I commend Kirk Hadaway for continuing to post these numbers and the leadership for not eliminating that position.
3. (Re David#8) Yes, it is my understanding as well that the scenario you allude to did occur. It was the same group that torpedoed the 2020 Task Force.
Also, the attendance and membership decline under PB John Allen leveled off during the tenure of Ed Browning. I believe it was not so much because of Bishop Browning’s leadership as it was the stability and energy from Bishop Allen’s tenure and Venture in Mission resources made available to the dioceses after the bloodletting under PB Hines. (I realize that will inflame more than one reader, but that is my interpretation of events and personalities.)
Thank you Fr Handy and tjmcmahon for that information.
I haven’t found a specific reference on the web, but I note that Fr Handy’s friend William Beasley is head of the Greenhouse organisation, and it has been active in the Chicago area.
Also, an interesting blog entry in September 2013 said that ACNA had “over 60” Hispanic congregations, and that 18 of these were in Cuba! There were also indications that some of the ACNA Hispanic congregations are in Mexico. (I had no idea there were any ACNA congregations in Cuba or Mexico).
#14, I can guarantee it happened–I was on the Standing Commission and I was there when it happened.
Very interesting comment, Neal.
One perhaps small quibble [since I agree with so much] . . .
In one sense I agree with this point in its entirety: [blockquote] Episcopalians, as a whole, don’t do evangelism. We are generally content to attend church—some more faithfully than others—and do nothing to engage their friends and family with any sort of intentional proclamation of the Gospel in word and deed. We don’t even do much of “make a friend, be a friend, bring a friend to Christ†with an intention to draw them into a relationship with Christ through our church. (Two notes: First, there is warrant for recognizing that evangelism takes place best within the context of the worshiping community, but that is another long post. Second, let me hasten to add that I led two workshops among “the remnants†of people who were considering starting new churches as they saw their own churches being unfaithful doctrinally, and the vast majority of those people only wanted an orthodox chapel of ease that was more doctrinally pure than the church they were leaving. This lack of evangelical zeal is not limited to people remaining in TEC.)[/blockquote]
But . . . I think what’s *really* plummeted what little evangelism that existed in my diocese, for instance [and in many others where I chat about things with fellow Episcopalians] . . . is that as TJ above points out . . . traditional/conservative Episcopalians now no longer invite their pagan friends to church.
Fifteen years ago, for instance, as I discerned that a pagan friend might appreciate what sacramental liturgy might offer, I invited. No more, of course, now — I don’t think it’s right to introduce vulnerable seekers and pagans into the toxic stew of corrupt godless heresy that they *will* encounter within TEC, even if they manage to “make it” to a traditional parish.
Of course, that doesn’t stop conservatives. I simply point those who are interested to other options entirely — the EPC, the PCA, contemporary worship, etc, etc.
The only folks I invite into TEC are strong, informed Christians — and let’s face it, many many strong informed Christians want no part of TEC.
So . . . in my diocese, for instance, you have a fatal combination. One of the biggest “pots” of prospective growth for any church is new people moving into the area. But among informed strong Christians — most of them have understandably x-ed out any thought of engagement with the Episcopal Church. So the brand itself drives people away such that it’s not a “purchasing option” for a huge huge percentage of people moving into the area. And even amongst those who are willing to engage, they then discover what Bishop Waldo has decided in the diocese regarding same sex blessings — and that of course also deletes *a particular diocese* from their options, even if they’re willing to engage in an orthodox diocese in TEC.
It’s a devastating [and entirely predictable] combo . . .
So to simply quote TJ’s apt observation above:
[blockquote]Those of us who were actively engaged in trying to restore a semblance of orthodoxy had a hard time with it on the grounds that we would be exposing our innocent friends to open heresy (imagine taking a young family with a couple of kids into a TEC Church). Essentially, we would be taking the unchurched or young Christians in formation, and bringing them in so TEC could mold them into revisionist pewsitters. Fine if we could slip in a half dozen staunch Anglo Catholics or Evangelicals- but the former in that area were now Roman Catholic, and the latter had their own churches and were not up for taking on a fight for a church they saw as heretical.[/blockquote]
None of my comment above is a complaint, nor is my observation at all surprising — it’s all entirely predictable and understandable — the natural consequences of actions. I’m a happy — and growing — member of TEC and of a TEC parish and am pleased that God has me here, though I recognize anything can change in my calling and discernment.
But reality is that even with happy members of TEC — among those who believe the Gospel — evangelistic zeal really isn’t an option other than for those within the 8-10 dioceses led by Gospel-promoting bishops.
Just a clarification of this last: “evangelistic zeal [i][as regards invitation into TEC parishes][/i] really isn’t an option other than for those within the 8-10 dioceses led by Gospel-promoting bishops.”
My evangelistic zeal in general is thriving and full of opportunity — I simply engage the lost and the seeking outside of TEC entirely.
Sarah, no qualms with your quibble. I can’t tell you how many parishioners would move away and not be able to find a faithful Episcopal church that was compatible with their theological values, so they were lost to the Episcopal Church but certainly not lost to the Church.
In our diocese we are seeing an increasing number of young evangelicals who are, in their words, “reading their way into our church.” They have encountered Anglicanism in their readings–usually C.S. Lewis or N.T. Wright and then decide to check out the local Anglican franchise. Some find a home in ACNA, others in a TEC church, but again, here in Dallas they can find an Episcopal Church that does not cross its fingers or have to use footnotes when the people say the Creed.
#15 MichaelA: Yes, there are now ACNA congregations in Mexico – most associated with the El Paso, TX-based ACNA Diocese of the Southwest. Some of these are recent transfers from the Iglesia Anglicana de Mexico (mostly in northern Mexico) and a few are plants – I know at least one was previously under Quincy. There is now a significant annual gathering of those conducting Spanish language ministry in ACNA (Caminemos Juntos). As of January, there were 57 Spanish language congregations that had been planted in ACNA.
As for Cuba, that is a more complex story. The Reformed Episcopal Church has had a relationship with Reformed Episcopal congregations in Cuba for some time now. As you know, the RE is a founding jurisdiction of ACNA, and all U.S. and Canadian RE congregations are, by extension, ACNA congregations. This past Spring the Cuban congregations expressed their interest in also being part of ACNA. Since ACNA is mostly a U.S. church, their are some complexities with how oversight could be exercised, and how U.S. church officials could visit Cuba. This is being actively explored, but one initial idea is that the Anglican Network in Canada could effectively offer oversight to Cuban churches, as there is no travel restriction for Canadian citizens.
“Since ACNA is mostly a U.S. church, their are some complexities with how oversight could be exercised, and how U.S. church officials could visit Cuba.”
Sounds a bit like the issues when Anglicans in the US wanted to stay Anglican after the war of independence… 🙂