THE new Bishop of St David’s has this evening been named as the Very Rev Wyn Evans, the current Dean of St David’s.
After less than a day locked inside St David’s Cathedral, 46 members of the Church in Wales named Rev Evans as their choice.
There was said to be “strong support” for the decision.
It is sad to note the demise of the Church of Wales, which is now only a shadow of its former self. This once proud province has shrunk so badly that it now has an ASA (average Sunday attendance) of less than 40,000. Even at Christmas, it barely hits 70,000 in attendance.
Yet St. David’s is one of SIX dioceses, all pretty small now. And with over 1,400 congregations in Wales (some 1,444 at last report), that makes for a parish ASA of less than 30 people per congregation. It’s hard to reverse such a drastic decline. A mere 27 people in your average church on Sunday is not exactly critical mass.
The continued steep decline under both ++Rowan Williams (when he was Archbishop of Wales) and ++Barry Morgan (his successor and the current incumbent) doesn’t speak well of either man.
David Handy+
Cool. Locked inside; you mean white smoke and stuff after the ballots are burned?
#1: And Barry Morgan is shilling to get his own gay bishop in Jeffrey Johns.
I never knew lemmings came from Wales.
What else do we know about Bp Elect Evans?
As a member of this diocese I would say to New Reformation Advocate that the small ASA in Wales, especially in St Davids diocese is evidence of two things:
1) Decline, as he points out, but also
2) Rurality – the diocese has large numbers of very small rural communities and few large urban areas. There are no big suburban churches in the diocese – nothing larger than large market towns.
But I wouldn’t deny that even those small communities had far higher attendance figures a couple of generations ago. In fact, at Disestablishment in 1920, St Davids had the highest Easter communicant figure of any diocese in England or Wales as a proportion of the population, despite the high attendance at Nonconformist chapels. We’ve come a long way I’m sorry to say.
The systematic dismantling of Evangelicalism in the Church post-Disestablishment had a lot to do with this decline – first at the hands of traditional Anglo-catholic bishops and latterly by their liberal successors.