The decline was 10% per year for 2020 and 2021. 2022 may not be much better since the two dioceses (Kootenay and Fredericton) that have produced data show an attendance decline of 32% and 37% from 2019 to 2022.

Christmas and Easter attendance for those two dioceses was down almost 50%.

It’s just as well the bishops are concentrating all their efforts on reversing this trend by authorising transgender liturgies.

The report is here and the Journal article is here.

Data for 2021 confirm attendance in the Anglican Church of Canada declined by about 10 per cent that year, after a similar drop in 2020, the church’s statistics officer says, while preliminary findings from 2022 suggest it continued in a steep decline into the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic.  

In 2019, statistics officer Canon Neil Elliot released a report that described a downward trend of 2.5 per cent per year—a rate that would see the church’s membership depleted entirely by 2040 if it continued. An update with data from 2020 showed the downward trend had accelerated to about 10 per cent that year, with data that was preliminary at the time suggesting a similar rate of decline for 2021. The latest numbers confirm the latter, Elliot says. 

It’s hard to view the determination of Western Anglicanism to impose its obsessive adoration of homosexuality on African churches as anything other than neo-colonialism.

Yet, the enduring talent of liberal clergy to see everything backwards Through the Looking-Glass results in twisting reality such that “colonialism is largely responsible for the negative attitude toward homosexuality”.

Read it all here:

Colonalism’s legacy seen in marriage debate

Raphael Hess is the Bishop of South Africa’s diocese of Saldanha Bay and describes himself as “coloured,” a term used in South Africa which means he has both Black and white ancestry. His diocese is in the minority in South Africa, having come out in favour of same-sex marriage. It’s a stance Hess describes as honouring, respecting and endorsing it while waiting for the rest of the province to do the same.

He says colonialism is largely responsible for the negative attitude toward homosexuality across Africa. “To reduce it to that only would be to simplify the issue. But certainly we inherit our laws from our colonial past because we’ve been taught that that is wrong … In Africa, those laws are still on our statute books. They weren’t invented by us.”

Some years ago I attended what was supposed to be an ecclesiastical pep talk by the then primate, Fred Hiltz. As I listened to him with drooping eyelids, it occurred to me that his delivery, reminiscent of Marvin the Robot, was not amenable to inspiring enthusiasm in others. Eventually, though, the archbishop’s eyes lit up, the voice became almost animated, the arms began gesticulating with excitement. “This is better”, I thought, we are about to hear that revival has broken out against all the odds. Perhaps someone had come back from the dead after prayer.

Alas, no. Someone had donated $160,000 to the church.

Nothing inspires activity and passion in the ACoC so much as the prospect of acquiring or losing money. Hence, with a looming $1.6 million deficit, Archbishop Linda Nicholls has appointed a committee to find radical solutions for accumulating more lovely cash.

From here:

A draft 2022 financial statement initially shared with CoGS, intended to be presented by the financial management committee, shows General Synod with a $1.6-million excess of expenses over revenues. Meanwhile, Nicholls said, statistics show the church’s membership is aging and declining. Cultural shifts in Canadian society and a newly redefined relationship with the Indigenous church, she said, also demand new ideas.

“Every organization needs to ask itself periodically whether the framework for the life of the institution is helping or possibly hindering its professed mission,” she said. The new committee would therefore be tasked with bringing recommendations to CoGS and to General Synod in 2025 to address these needs. Nicholls said it would be composed of theologians, bishops, clergy and laypeople “with a mandate to listen well and offer creative, lifegiving solutions—even radical solutions.”

The problem is the church is running out of money. The solution is a new committee.

During the years I’ve been attending an Anglican church, committees have come and gone leaving little behind them but a disagreeable whiff of empty posturing, very similar to IBM committee meetings that I attended during what passes for my career. The ecclesiastical version will, no doubt, be far more effective in inducing crippling ennui, since it will be populated by a gaggle of theologians, bishops and clergy whose tenuous grip on reality is summed up by this sentence in the article below: “The Communion has not split.”

Archbishop Linda Nicholls is suggesting “finding potentially radical solutions”. Before anyone rashly jumps to the conclusion that the Anglican Church of Canada is about to try Christianity to halt its dramatic decline, I refer you to another article, published at the same time, where Nicholls affirm[s] the dignity of LGBTQ+ people and their place in the church – which, in translation, means she affirms same-sex activity. And there is nothing less radical than that.

From here:

The church may soon have a new commission tasked with finding potentially “radical solutions” to the demographic and financial challenges that now face it, according to a proposal introduced by Archbishop Linda Nicholls, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, in her opening statement to the Council of General Synod (CoGS) March 2.

Nicholls said a new strategy would be needed for the church to go forward into the post-pandemic world. It will need to respond to challenges including financial pressure “as parishes struggle to sustain full-time or part-time stipendiary ministry and dioceses struggle to meet multiple responsibilities at local, regional and national levels.” The national church, on the other hand, is facing the challenge of supporting ministry in regions where donations do not cover expenses, she said. Meanwhile, statistics show the church’s membership is aging and declining. Cultural shifts in Canadian society and a newly redefined relationship with the Indigenous church, she said, also demand new ideas.

[…….]

But in fact, Nicholls said, “the Communion remains committed to walking together—some at a great distance, others working more closely together.

“The Communion has not split.”