Posted on 02/10/2010 5:51:03 AM PST by marshmallow
Anglicanism in Canada could disappear within a generation, says a report that recommends closing churches in B.C.
The Anglican Church in Canada – once as powerful in the nation's secular life as it was in its soul – may be only a generation away from extinction, says a just-published assessment of the church's future.
The report, prepared for the Anglican Diocese of British Columbia, calls Canada a post-Christian society in which Anglicanism is declining faster than any other denomination. It says the church has been “moved to the far margins of public life.”
According to the report, the diocese – “like most across Canada” – is in crisis. The report repeats, without qualification or question, the results of a controversial study presented to Anglican bishops five years ago that said that at the present rate of decline – a loss of 13,000 members per year – only one Anglican would be left in Canada by 2061.
It points out that just half a century ago, 40 per cent of Vancouver Island's population was Anglican; now the figure is 1.2 per cent. Nationally, between 1961 and 2001, the church lost 53 per cent of its membership, declining to 642,000 from 1.36 million. Between 1991 and 2001 alone, it declined by 20 per cent.
Regular attendance is declining at all Canadian Christian churches, except for the Roman Catholic Church, whose small increase is attributed to immigration.
But Anglicanism's problem is aggravated because it is primarily a tribal church, the offspring of the Church of England. It has traditionally been home to Canadians of Anglo-Saxon descent who increasingly have no ethnic identification with the church, said religious studies professor David Seljak of St. Jerome's University in Waterloo, Ont.
A similar problem burdens the Presbyterian Church – offspring of the Church of Scotland – ...................
(Excerpt) Read more at theglobeandmail.com ...
post-Christian? Perhaps. but it would be interesting to know how the Catholics are doing.
The article tries to attribute the decline of the anglican church to tribalism, but the real culprit is liberalism.
I stopped attending the Episcopal church when it started ordaining women and stopped using the 1928 Book of Common Prayer in the 1970s. Nothing against women — I just believed at the time (and still do) that there are other important roles for them in the church. Every denomination that has ordained women as priests or rectors has gone off course into liberalism soon thereafter.
I’m in the RCIA proicess now and should be confirmed Catholic in the Spring.
- JP
Well, last time I visited England, I was appalled at being forced to pay admission (not optional) to enter Canterbury Cathedral on a weekday. It was being treated like a museum. And while I was glad to find a candle and memorial plaque at the site of what was once the shrine of Thomas Becket, I was told by my friend that I was the only person he saw in the cathedral that day who dropped to his knees to pray. I know that it is a great irony, today, that far more Catholics in England attend church than do Anglicans. Maybe it’s time to give them their cathedrals back. They built them.
If they embrace Biblical Christianity things will change!
As soon as a denomination gives up on inerrancy, in deed or word, it goes apostate and dies. It’s happening with all the formerly “traditional” denominations. (ECA, ELCA, PCUSA, Methodists, etc. etc.)
I believe the issue over priestesses is a misunderstanding of women’s role in the Church — which IS equal to men but different. Just like in a marriage, it needs to be a partnership of equals, but not equals in everything: there is give and take.
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