From here:
The Church of England attracts fewer than 800,000 worshippers to its churches on a typical Sunday, according to new estimates yesterday.
Numbers in the pews have fallen to less than half the levels of the 1960s, the count showed.
The signs of continuing decline in support for the CofE follow census evidence of a widespread fall in allegiance to Christianity, with numbers calling themselves Christian dropping by more than four million in a decade.
The Church’s figure for ‘usual Sunday attendance’, the method used since the 1930s to measure congregations, found CofE churches had 795,800 worshippers on Sundays in 2012. The numbers were 9,000 down on the previous year.
They indicate that repeated efforts by the Church to modernise its services and its image – through a series of modern language rewrites of its prayer book, attempts by its leaders to appeal to supposed public concern with poverty, and efforts to make its government more efficient – have not succeeded in drawing young people.
The statistics upon which this article is based can be found here. Here is the graph of “usual Sunday attendance”:
I must admit, the decline is not as precipitous as I had expected; not nearly as severe as in North American Anglicanism. The Anglican Church of Canada, presumably to save itself the embarrassment, has not published detailed attendance figures since 2001.
The Anglican Church of Canada has been on the decline since 1965. In Canada, more than 85% of people do not attend church on Sunday mornings. Thom & Joani Schultz’s Why Nobody Wants to Go to Church Anymore (2014) address issues that may be driving people away. They also offer some solutions for bringing people back to church.
A little while back I happened across something that caught my attention. It was in 1964 that the Anglican Church of Canada began thinking about dropping the 3rd Collect for Good Friday from the Worship Services. Something to do with not wanting to offend the Jews, because within this Collect we pray for the conversion of non-Christians to the one true Faith. Now the ACoC has Canons that prohibit the use of this Collect and prohibit from being printed in any new printings of any of its service books, including the Book of Common Prayer. Coincidentally (or perhaps not) 1964 was also the year that the ACoC reached its peak membership.
It seems to me that some dropped the 3rd Collect for Good Friday because they believed all the Jews would be converted in the future. They rejoiced when the state of Israel was created in 1948. In reality, 20% of the population in the new state were Christians in 1948, but today’s Christian population is below 2%, and 80% of these believers are Arab Christians.
If the Anglican Church were true to its doctrines and upheld both the authority of Scripture and the uniqueness of Jesus Christ, the attendance probably would be constant at worse. Tragically many so-called bishops including the Primate, no longer worship our Lord and Saviour but pretend to do while worshipping “political correctness” and doing whatever seems to be popular at the moment.
It is somewhat more damning when one considers that the Church of England is woven into just about everything in British official life. The rituals and traditions of parliament have a rich church history, and royal weddings take place under the watchful eye of archbishops. Town names, and cultural works – like Shakespeare – are infused with church references and issues.
The school system is still infused with a substantial residue of Christianity. Yet despite the vast social and historical advantages, it is unable to sustain itself. Unfortunately, one suspects its remedy will not be a wholesale cleansing of the temple, or the casting out of the homosexual clergy and the pagan worshippers, but rather a tried-and-true application of “more of the same”.
The reasons for this, I believe, are really rather simple. When Jesus is demoted from King of kings to rural hippie; when there is more affection for green windmills on hills rather than building Jerusalem under the dark satanic mills, why should it continue. It has no unity, no purpose, and even its leaders are ambivalent to the point of indifference upon what it supposedly proclaims.
Unfortunately, so true….