The Anglican Church of Canada is not just crumbling from within, its buildings are also falling apart.

The external decay is a fitting metaphor for the spiritual malaise that afflicts the bishops and clergy whose main preoccupation seems to be to avoid Christianity at all costs. The buildings are empty shells, devoid of purpose, meaning and significance; no wonder they are collapsing.

The Journal articles here and here, lament the loss of historic buildings rather than the loss of the ideas and faith that inspired them.

The destruction by fire of St. Anne’s Anglican Church in Toronto last June underscores risks faced by aging churches across Canada, an architectural historian says—and the country could face significant loss of cultural heritage in the years to come.

Peter Coffman, a Carleton University art and architectural history professor who specializes in Canadian Gothic Revival buildings, says many churches are in danger of being destroyed or collapsing. As their congregations shrink, so does the money to pay for their maintenance and preservation.

Canada’s loss of its historic churches is likely to be a protracted process, he says.

From the headline you might be tempted to think that one of the statements is: we have decided to start preaching the Gospel.

You would be wrong.

They include things like:

Dismantle the colonial foundations of the Council of the North

And:

Dismantle the racism and colonialism that is built into our governance structures.

There is a survey which you can fill in to throw your support behind dismantling racism, if you feel so inclined, here.

The hope is that by making some of the changes explained in the survey, the decline in ACoC  membership might be reversed.

In case that doesn’t work, one of the suggestions is to end the funding of independent journalism – the Anglican Journal. So if the decline continues, as it surely will, at least no one will know.

From here:

A primate’s commission tasked with rethinking church structures is encouraging Anglicans to provide feedback on its seven intentionally provocative statements or “hypotheses” through an online survey.

The commission, Reimagining the Church—Proclaiming the Gospel in the 21st Century, established by former primate Archbishop Linda Nicholls, first presented the hypotheses in spring to the House of Bishops and Council of General Synod, then distributed them publicly in early June, says commission chair Archdeacon Monique Stone.

The hypotheses include dismantling colonialism in the Council of the North and church governance structures; eliminating either General Synod or the ecclesiastical provinces; returning to a model where the primate is also a diocesan bishop; reducing travel and meeting costs; looking at new ways of running the national office; and ending editorially independent journalism—specifically, the Anglican Journal—funded by General Synod.

Dean Peter Elliott, a member of the commission, says the hypotheses inviting Anglicans to respond to these hypotheses appeared on the Anglican Church of Canada website in late August.

ACoC revenue is expected to decline by around $200,000 per year, diocesan contributions to the national church are falling and the number of active parishioners is in free-fall.

Most businesses in this situation would have fired their executives long ago but, alas, the number of bishops in the ACoC seems inversely proportional to the number of lay people.

The situation is so desperate that radical solutions are being explored. So radical that, in order not to unsettle the staff, meetings will be held behind closed doors. What could be that unsettling?

Reintroducing Christianity to the church would certainly qualify but that is as unlikely as firing all the bishops. More probably, there will be staff cut-backs, diocesan mergers, church buildings sold and a further combining  with the ACoC’s partner in self-inflicted extinction, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada.

Read all about it here:

He recommends that conversations about the future of the church be convened around the theming of the five “transformational commitments” in the church’s latest strategic plan. Doing so, he says, “could be an instrument to aid in the renewal and rejuvenation of the General Synod and perhaps begin a process of devolving some powers and responsibilities to provinces and dioceses.”

The document ends with five “intentionally provocative statements,” which assert that “generally, General Synod’s adherence to strategic planning must be deemed a failure” and that this planning has not always recognized General Synod’s role as the “weaker partner in a strong alliance of dioceses,” which exercise more power in funding and implementing goals. It notes the church’s “precipitous” decline in attendance and General Synod’s history of strategic plans that have attempted to reverse this without demonstrable results. The last of these statements concludes by asking “Is it time to de-acquisition and downsize some structures to enable new possibilities to emerge? Is this the framing that should guide current planning?”

Archdeacon Tanya Phibbs, deputy prolocutor of General Synod, brought a motion that only council members and Archbishop Anne Germond, soon to be acting Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, remain for the session. It was necessary for CoGS to meet behind closed doors, she said, to ensure its members were able to freely share ideas, hopes, fears and dreams for the church’s future which may be provocative. Phibbs also said some of the content of the discussion might be unsettling to the staff as it directly affected them. It might be difficult for members of CoGS to discuss some of the options before them knowing staff were in the room, she said.

The National Worship Conference of the Anglican Church of Canada is meeting in Regina this summer. It “will examine how church liturgy and worship practices can better reflect the diversity of modern congregations”.

The aim of the conference is to extirpate “expressions of empire” from liturgy in order to “decolonize“ it. As things stand, we are “excluding voices from the margins”.

We have to “begin by listening to the land, hearing the ancient voices of creation that hold our narratives.”

I’m not sure what the “voices from the margins” or the “voices of creation” are, although I’ve heard rumours that many clergy are hearing voices when they forget to take their pills.

Here is a radical idea: instead of straining to hear the voices of creation, try reading the Bible to see what God has to say.

You can register for the conference at the website.

All are welcome except orthodox Christians.

More here:

Berringer said she expected the subject matter of this year’s conference to be sensitive and controversial. The event’s website describes its purpose as exploring what it means to decolonize expressions of worship in the Anglican and Lutheran churches. Berringer says it’s about identifying the ways in which Anglicans and Lutherans from outside European-derived culture don’t see themselves reflected in the churches’ worship, and about finding ways to make it their own.

The word “decolonize” has so many disparate meanings to people according to their backgrounds and preconceived ideas, she says, that the conference may not get beyond negotiating a shared understanding of what the churches need to do to make themselves more inclusive. But even if that means having some difficult and uncomfortable conversations, she says it’s worth doing.

“I fully expect people to attend this conference and have pushback on everything from the title, to the description, to who we’ve included as far as workshop leaders,” she says. “We do expect people to be uncomfortable, probably. We’re providing prayer support, we’ve got chaplains ready … It’s human nature to feel defensive when the perception is ‘what you’re doing isn’t working, we’ve got to change it and make it better.’”

Numerically, of course, not theologically; theologically, it has nowhere left to go – surely.

In 2017, the ACoC published these numbers, which led statistics officer Rev Dr. Neil Elliot to predict extinction by 2040:

As of 2022, the number looked like this:

There has been a 40% decrease in average Sunday attendance since 2001, with a  accelerated decline of 26% between 2019 and 2022. The good news is funerals have not declined.

Read more about it here:

Sharp drop during pandemic: stats officer

The COVID-19 pandemic saw a significant decline in church attendance, marking a “radical discontinuity” even with previous downward trends, the Anglican Church of Canada’s statistics officer says.

Canon Neil Elliot presented data from 2022 diocesan returns in a January report sent to bishops and diocesan executive officers based on parish statistics. The statistics officer said he did not collect numbers in 2020 and 2021 since COVID-19 shut down churches for much of that time.

The figures show a decline on almost all fronts from 2019 to 2022, including a 12 per cent decrease in the total number on parish rolls, 26 per cent decrease in average Sunday attendance, and 17 per cent decrease in regular identifiable givers. The biggest drops came in the number of people attending services on major holy days: a 45 per cent decline in Easter attendance, 37 per cent for Pentecost and 47 per cent for Christmas.

Declines were also seen in the number of pastoral services, with 25 per cent fewer baptisms, 13 per cent fewer confirmations and 10 per cent fewer marriages—the only exception being funerals, which saw a very small increase.

“Attendance has been hit,” Elliot said. “I think that’s a really clear thing.”

That makes it sound like a business, doesn’t it?

Contributions from the dioceses to the national church are dropping, creating, on one level, uncertainty, on another, certainty – that program and staff cuts are imminent.

In one of those rare moments of inadvertent prophetic truth uttered by an Anglican bishop, Linda Nicholls observed:

The church is likely to remain smaller and be less affluent than it once was, she said, but these things should not be taken as signs that it is ending or that it is no longer watched over by God.

God is indeed watching as each year the ACoC becomes more liberal and less Christian than the year before. That is why it is in the sad state it’s in today.

Frome here:

A drop in diocesan contributions to the national budget along with lingering financial uncertainty spurred a conversation about the long-term stability of the Anglican Church of Canada’s finances in a Nov. 24 session of the Council of General Synod (CoGS).

Amal Attia, the national church’s treasurer and CFO, presented figures that showed that as of Sept. 30, the church was experiencing a revenue shortfall of just over $600,000, attributable mostly to diocesan contributions running $724,728 less than budgeted. Contributions from dioceses are expected to pick up by the time the year’s numbers are finalized, she said, and a deficit of $153,667 is projected for the year.

While the 2023 deficit is projected to be small enough to be manageable, the decline in diocesan contributions is part of a trend of declining revenue in the church, which Attia warned will likely continue in the long run. In the short term, it has been possible to balance the gap with other revenue and by cutting expenses. And in case of a severe and unexpected shortfall, the church has a contingency fund it can dip into. But the size of that fund is limited, and the church may eventually need to make cuts to programming to compensate.

Meanwhile, she said, the 2024 budget is projected to break even partly through a reduction in total expenses from $10,666,325 expected for 2023 to $9,631,339 budgeted for 2024. The document Attia provided to CoGS for the 2024 budget forecasts that year’s diocesan contributions, which make up most of the national church’s revenue, to be $312,848 less than the projected total for 2023.

Later in the session, Archbishop Linda Nicholls, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, weighed in on the question of eventual program cuts at the national office.