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.”
Would not a most fitting mode of conveyance have been a U-Haul…as in purveyors of “false doctrine”?
As for the proposal of “house churches”, they have not worked well in the Peoples Republic of China…because of “sound doctrine”.
On the issue of the necessity of a national church, the example of UCC provides little useful counsel; since her 1925 Incorporation by Federal Law, Reformed/Scriptural as in Presbyterian doctrine and its cognate polity, became subject to Caesar,
now mirroring our current Caesar in matters anti-Scriptural;
all under the specious aegis of the “National Office of Vocations”
…parse Cultural Marxist Politburo slack on spiritual discipline.
It is as simple as this — when you feed the weeds and ignore the plants the plants will NOT survive. It is the same with the ACoC. It is determined under the current APOSTATE leadership to feed and endorse false teachings while destroying any semblance of true CHRISTIAN doctrine. In the end the ACoC might be rich from a real estate perspective with all the empty buildings but it will be totally dead and all the APOSTATE clergy including the so-called bishops will be out of work.