{"id":27883,"date":"2020-01-08T20:40:39","date_gmt":"2020-01-09T01:40:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/?p=27883"},"modified":"2020-01-08T20:40:39","modified_gmt":"2020-01-09T01:40:39","slug":"the-anglican-church-of-canada-extinction-event","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/the-anglican-church-of-canada-extinction-event\/","title":{"rendered":"The Anglican Church of Canada extinction event"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recent attendance statistics<\/a> from the Anglican Church of Canada predict that it will cease to exist by 2040.<\/p>\n

Understandably, this has spread consternation amongst the clergy; no one likes to be unemployed.<\/p>\n

The new Primate, Linda Nicholls, sees this as a \u201cwake-up call\u201d and asks<\/a>, \u201cwhat might need to be tried\u201d to reverse the decline? I would be tempted to suggest \u201cChristianity\u201d if I thought it would fall on any but deaf ears.<\/p>\n

\"\"\u201cI don\u2019t think they\u2019re a surprise to anybody,\u201d Nicholls said of the statistics in an interview with the Anglican Journal<\/em>. \u201cAnybody who\u2019s 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. \u201cI think it is a wake-up call\u2026. If people are not coming to the church and finding a place of hope and good news, then we have to ask, \u2018How are we presenting that hope and good news to this current generation and time? And what might need to be tried?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nicholls muses that part of the problem is the \u201cgeneral zeitgeist\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n

Laughably, \u00a0Michael 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. \u201cThings are quite different now\u201d, he tells us: now we hear about nothing but social justice and the pews are empty. This, he tells us is a \u201cchange for the better\u201d.<\/p>\n

Introducing Elliot\u2019s presentation to CoGS, Thompson said he believed Canadian Anglicans should look at the numerical decline of their church\u2019s membership in the context of other changes for the better.<\/p>\n

The London, Ont., church in which he started worshipping in 1968, Thompson said, \u201cwhile not filled to the point of discomfort, was full.\u201d On the other hand, he added, \u201cin all of the years that I attended that church\u2026in 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\u2019s justice.\u201d<\/p>\n

He continued, \u201cI 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\u2019s not that people didn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In much the same vein, Nicholls has decided that<\/a> the church\u2019s main job is to fight racism. To give her credit, by 2040 she will have succeeded in completely expunging racism from the church:<\/p>\n

The Anglican Church of Canada’s new primate says she hopes her communion can begin to fight racism within the church and society.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":2,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglican-church-of-canada"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27883\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}