Anglican bishop: Church of England likely gone in thirty years

Paul Richardson, the assistant Bishop of Newcastle, in the June 27th edition of The Telegraph:

Annual decline in Sunday attendance is running at around 1 per cent. At this rate it is hard to see the church
surviving for more than 30 years though few of its leaders are prepared to face that possibility. ...

If decline continues, Christian Research has estimated that in five years' time church closures will accelerate from their present rate of 30 a year to 200 a year as dwindling congregations find the cost of keeping them open too great.

Perhaps the most worrying set of statistics for the Church of England is the decline in baptisms. Out of every
1,000 live births in England in 2006/7 only 128 were baptised as Anglicans.

The figure rises by a small amount if adult baptism and thanksgiving services are included but it is hard to see the Church of England being able to justify its position as the established church on the basis of these numbers.

By way of contrast, out of every 1,000 live births in England in 1900, 609 were baptised in the Church of England.  Figures for church marriages show an equally catastrophic decline.

Richardson mulls over possible ways of staving off such decline and death, writing, "If Anglicans could acquire a stronger sense of who they are and what they believe they might slow the rate of decline and possibly even stabilise their numbers. They would still be a minority but they could be a creative minority. The trick will be to reach this situation without falling into a fundamentalist trap or cutting off links with the wider world." He suggests that Catholics might be a good guide in the quest for survival.

Read the entire piece.

Comments

[Cecilia]

Is it bad if I'm feeling a little schadenfreude at the disintegration of the Anglican communion?

[Ed Peters]

Anglican prelate frets the rapid and by all appearances unstoppable decline of his communion. [Insert long sigh here]. Isn't the solution obvious? Hasn't it been since, like, for centuries?

[Kevin]

What amazes me with liberal mainline denominations is that for all their reputed sophistication they seem to miss a rather obvious point. If the faith is not "once for all entrusted to the saints" but is up to each generation to re-imagine and reinvent, then it is not eternal truth but a mere bed-time story for grownups. And if it's not really, objectively true then why bother at all? I for one would rather watch football (American or English variety) than a performance by an unbeliever in clerical drag.

[Howard Richards]

I'm pretty much with Kevin on this one. And the prelate's "solution" simply cannot work. You can't say, "Wow, we've really got to get on the ball and start firmly believing something other than what we believe now, or else we disappear in 30 years!" That's not believing, that's pretending to believe, and as Kevin points out, who cares if a pretend faith disappears?

[Telemachus]

Well, someone correct me if needed, but the Church of England is the Church of ENGLAND. There's your problem. From its very birth, the Anglican church was essentially centered on British nationalism, and not on Christ. How long could that have gone on? It was illegitimate to begin with, and it obviously isn't becoming any more legitimate as time goes on. In a few decades, I'm sure Islam will be the new State religion of the U.K., and if not that, perhaps Scientology or Wicca.

This was actually one of my biggest problems with C.S. Lewis, BTW. No matter how inspiring his words were, his faith seemed shallow given that he was a follower of the CoE mainly because it was from England, not necessarily because it was THE church.

[Ann Couper-Johnston]

I left the C of E precisely because it was so wide rangeing (I'm sure I could have found a sympathetic vicar somewhere for any theological position I chose to adopt: I believed truth was more important than that.). From where I am sitting now I can go five minutes in one direction and find a vicar who commented on the present state of the C of E with: "You see, we don't have a Magisterium." (Did I hear regret in his voice?) and whose liturgy is more elaborate than ours (including, I think, Benediction every Sunday!). Five minutes in the other direction and I come across one whose liturgy is much more informal for whom transustantiaton is anathema (as it was in the parish I grew up in: there are some convoluted wrigglings around John 6 involved, which I can't remember ...)

I came to believe in transubstantiation and once I did it mattered to much to me for me to remain somewhere where some did and some did not. I needed to know that my belief was shared by the congregation.

[Stephen Sparrow]

Not long after I married my wife & I lived in a small rural community which also had a vibrant Catholic scene which met for Mass each Sunday in the local community hall. After one Sunday mass we took an elderly couple for a drive around some local beauty spots. In the course of the afternoon Ben explained how he became Catholic. He was a humanities high school teacher and one day he was hit by the realisation that he needed salvation. First stop the local Anglican vicar - Ben's question being "what must I do to save my soul". The Vicar puffed on his pipe and said "well you could start coming to church & you could do this & that". Ben was dissatisfied so next stop an RC priest who said to him "You must start coming to Mass. You must participate in the sacramental life of the Church community etc etc". Direction was what Ben wanted not suggestions so he and his wife became Catholics.

[Giovanni]

So if you are not going to be using them anymore, can we expect the return of our stolen churches back?

Starting with Canterbury Cathedral of course.

[ELC]

I have a feeling that Moslems have plans for those churches. Confer, for instance, Hagia Sophia.

[Giovanni]

I do not doubt that they do, but they will be out of luck for England is Mary's dowry not Muhammad's.