In 2019, the church’s statistics and research officer, Canon Neil Elliot, predicted that the Anglican Church of Canada would cease to exist to exist in 2040. The prediction was based on a yearly attrition of 2.5%. Members are now leaving at the rate of 10% per year, making the church’s demise in 2040 look optimistic.
The reasons we are given for the accelerated decline are COVID – of course – and an overall de-Christianising of Canada. These are both legitimate points.
Notably absent from the diagnosis of the malaise is any hint of self-refection on the possibility that the Anglican church may have taken a wrong turn at some point. That its attempts at being more worldly than the world, gayer than Peter Tatchell, more trans than Caitlyn Jenner and altogether queerer than TNT Men cavorting at the Toronto Pride Parade, just isn’t working.
The whole thing is worth a read at The Journal:
The Anglican Church of Canada is shrinking faster than it was in the years before a much-discussed 2019 report, recently collected data suggest.
According to the church’s statistics and research officer, Canon Neil Elliot, metrics of church size including electoral rolls and distinct identifiable donation sources show membership dropping by about 10 per cent nationwide during 2020, and prelimary data suggest a similar decrease in 2021.
The findings follow Elliot’s 2019 extrapolation, presented to the Council of General Synod (CoGS) that year, which projected that if the church’s rate of membership loss continued there would be no one left by the year 2040. But the rate of decline during the pandemic years is considerably higher than the membership loss of around 2.5 per cent per year the church experienced in the years leading up to COVID-19, Elliot says. The precise reasons for this accelerated decline are unclear, he adds.
Some church leaders, however, say there’s more to the church than the number of its members—and numeric decline is no reason for despair.
“The church absolutely will be smaller, we absolutely know that … I think it’s too simplistic to simply say we’re dying. I think we’re going through an age of transformation,” says Peter Misiaszek, director of stewardship for the diocese of Toronto. “And that age of transformation will mean fewer parishes, but hopefully healthier parishes.”
Elliot adds that it’s important not to blame the shrinking of the church on anything its clergy or parishioners are doing—or failing to do. Rather, he describes the phenomenon as part of a “spiritual climate change,” which is affecting not just the Anglican church, but religious communities across North America and Europe, too.
