The Anglican Church of Canada is groping to find the reason for the catastrophic decline in attendance revealed by recently published statistics. Unsurprisingly, none of the clergy seem able to grasp the obvious: no one is interested in what the ACoC has to say because it has become transparently clear to all but the most gullible that it no longer believes in what it is peddling.

Rev. Alison Hari-Singh has added her voice to those looking for a culprit responsible for the ACoC’s near-death experience. Science, immigrants and scandal are easy targets even if they have, for some strange reason, concentrated their malign efforts mostly on Anglican and other mainline denominations.

What is the solution? Well, we have to “reimagine” God, his attributes and our faith. Of course, by doing so, we will end up with an imaginary god – which was what brought things to this sorry state in the first place.

From here:

We must reimagine the entire edifice of our faith, including what we mean by “God” and divine attributes of sovereignty, providence and love that we so often instinctively depend on. In short, we must embrace a radical theology of risk, unhindered by suspicion and fear of the unknown. We cannot be afraid of what Peter Berger called “the heretical imperative.” What will happen when we undertake together this fundamental reimagination? Our liturgies will become more creative. Our mission—our love for the world—will be intensified. Our imitation of Jesus will be palpable.

Recent attendance statistics from the Anglican Church of Canada predict that it will cease to exist by 2040.

Understandably, this has spread consternation amongst the clergy; no one likes to be unemployed.

The new Primate, Linda Nicholls, sees this as a “wake-up call” and asks, “what might need to be tried” to reverse the decline? I would be tempted to suggest “Christianity” if I thought it would fall on any but deaf ears.

“I don’t think they’re a surprise to anybody,” Nicholls said of the statistics in an interview with the Anglican Journal. “Anybody who’s been in the church in the pews, or as a priest, or as a deacon or a bishop has known that this decline has been happening. We see it every Sunday, we see it in lots of ways. “I think it is a wake-up call…. If people are not coming to the church and finding a place of hope and good news, then we have to ask, ‘How are we presenting that hope and good news to this current generation and time? And what might need to be tried?”

Nicholls muses that part of the problem is the “general zeitgeist”, an observation that might have some merit were it not for the fact that the ACoC has utterly capitulated to the zeitgeist: the two are marching in lockstep. In spite of the church’s eagerness to oblige, potential customers have little reason to turn to the church to have their chosen pronouns affirmed, their gender reassignment baptised or their drag attire sprinkled with holy water.

Laughably,  Michael Thompson general secretary of General Synod, put his finger on the problem without noticing he had done so. When the church busied itself with saving souls, ignoring social justice fads, parishes were full to overflowing. “Things are quite different now”, he tells us: now we hear about nothing but social justice and the pews are empty. This, he tells us is a “change for the better”.

Introducing Elliot’s presentation to CoGS, Thompson said he believed Canadian Anglicans should look at the numerical decline of their church’s membership in the context of other changes for the better.

The London, Ont., church in which he started worshipping in 1968, Thompson said, “while not filled to the point of discomfort, was full.” On the other hand, he added, “in all of the years that I attended that church…in all of the years I had attended church before then, and in all of the years that I attended church until I was in my 20s, I never once heard a sermon that made reference to God’s justice.”

He continued, “I never once heard anybody tell me about the residential schools. I never heard anything about the responsibility of the people of God to respect the dignity of every human being. It’s not that people didn’t care about those things, but those things were not tip-of-the-tongue discourse in the life of the church in which I was formed. Things are quite different now.”

In much the same vein, Nicholls has decided that the church’s main job is to fight racism. To give her credit, by 2040 she will have succeeded in completely expunging racism from the church:

The Anglican Church of Canada’s new primate says she hopes her communion can begin to fight racism within the church and society.

The Anglican Church of Canada is shrivelling faster than a slug in a bucket of salt.

As this article notes, churches are not only closing but merging. In Nova Scotia, for example, four churches have shrunk to one:

A far more common practice for congregations struggling with mounting financial obligations, aging buildings, or dipping attendance numbers is the church merger. In recent years, many Anglican churches around the country have joined congregations with others nearby, or even with local Lutheran churches. In the diocese of Qu’Appelle, a merger has been proposed that would see seven churches in the Regina area possibly amalgamated into a single congregation.

In August of this year, the parish of St. Martin’s in Chester Basin, N.S., merged its four congregations into a single church: Grace Anglican Church.

How to be positive about this? Call it the opposite of what it is! Church Planting is a scheme where a church multiplies and expands into areas where it hitherto had no presence. In one deft flourish of Doublethink, the Anglican Church of Canada has rebranded its radical contraction as “Church Planting”:

While the Anglican Church of Canada has very few home churches, Paulsen says that it is a growing category in other Christian denominations, along with church plants and new monastic-style intentional communities—or a hybrid of all three, like the communities of the Move In Movement. She even notes a case of a Baptist church in the state of Washington planting an Anglican church inside an Anglican building.

“[Church planters] are actually really interested in some things that Anglicans have to offer,” she says. “They don’t really need our buildings, but what they like is…our broad orthodoxy. They like that we’re creedal, they like that we are part of a worldwide communion. They like that we have a deep historical rootedness.”

Up until today, the last official statistics from the Anglican Church of Canada that I had seen were published 2001.

A new report has just been presented to the House of Bishops with statistics gathered from 2017.

A few highlights:

• The average Sunday attendance has dropped to 97,421.
• A previous report published in 2006 predicted the last Anglican would leave the church in 2061. That number is now 2040.
• The rate of decline is increasing.
• New programs adopted by the church have done nothing to reverse the decline.
• The Anglican Church of Canada is declining faster than any other Province other than TEC, which has an even greater rate of decline.
• The slowest decline is in the number of priests.

The entire report can be read here and the raw data is here.

Statistics report for House of Bishops

Rev Dr. Neil Elliot PhD

0) Précis

In 2018 General Synod was able to collect a complete and mostly reliable set of data for from the dioceses for the first time since 2001. The data is for the year 2017 and it shows that the decline observed in earlier data has continued.  Projections from our data indicate that there will be no members, attenders or givers in the Anglican Church of Canada by approximately 2040.

This report presents the headline data and includes diocesan decline data based on the statistics from 2001 and 2017. The report goes on to look briefly at a few of the implications of the data.  The report then suggests further work which needs to be done.  The work identified here can be done without substantial additional resources.  If there is hope in these numbers, it is the hope that some data gathering and analysis in the next few years will enable us to plan for the future and not react to it.  Through paying attention to these statistics we may discern God’s call to our beloved church in these challenging times. We believe that this could be a critical part of the work of reviewing of the church’s mission and ministry which the Primate has identified.

1) Background – Statistical projections of ACC membership previous to the 2017 data

There have been previous reports to the House of Bishops which have been identified the extent of our decline, for example the McKerracher report in 2006.   While  McKerracher predicted the last Anglican would leave in 2061, the current evidence projects that the church will run out of members in around 2040. There is no sign of any stabilisation in our numbers; if anything the decline is increasing. Some had hoped that our decline had bottomed out, or that programs had been effective in reversing the trends.  This is now demonstrably not the case.  The decline will not be a surprise to many congregations who see this happening week by week, but what the data confirms is that this decline is happening consistently across the country from BC to Newfoundland.  International comparisons suggest that the decline in the Anglican Church of Canada is faster than in any other Anglican church, although the 2018 data from the Episcopal church shows an even greater rate of decline on attendance than ours.

There are two main sources of data which show us the past trajectory:

1. i) Historical ACC statistics from 1961-2001

1962-4 were apogee of Anglican Church of Canada membership

Membership Decline 1961-2001 = 50%  in 40 years

BUT if you compare with overall Canadian population, it’s more alarming!

Membership       1961 = 1,358,459 members / 18 million Canadians = 7% of Canadians

2001 = 641,845 members / 31 million Canadians = 2% of Canadians

(2017 =  357,123 members /35 million Canadians = 1% of Canadians)

1. ii) Circulation data of Anglican Journal give figures for more recent decline. AJ circulation statistics are available for diocesan and parish levels. They have been collected through a consistent methodology of parochial data collection with the intention of distributing the diocesan newspapers.  The overall numbers are as follows:

June 1991 – 273,000 subscriber households

June 2015 – 135,500 subscriber households

Decline 1991-2015 =  50% in 25 years

Both i) and ii) project that we will run out of members in around 2040.