Anglican Church facing the threat of extinction – The Globe and Mail.
This article helps to highlight the type of change that is happening in the United States as well. Canada is ahead of the curve. The United States however, is in an exponentially increasing curve.
The focus in this article is the Anglican Church although Presbyterianism is noted as well as on the same apparent time-table. There are several things taking place in these trends beside just the diminishing of institutional churches that stand out to me. First, the Anglican Church is tantamount, at least for the the early history of Canada, to a state church (the French Canadian heritage identifies, of course, with the Roman Catholic Church.) Canada is demographically undergoing a very clear change in ethnic demographics and it’s noted in this article that cultural identification with the Anglican Church is diminishing to where it is almost non-existent. Toronto, the economic and cultural center of english-speaking Canada, now has more than 50% of its current population born outside of Canada.
The combination of these factors have a prediction, not from naysayers cheering the demise of the Anglican Church, but from within the Church itself that if these trends do not change, the Anglican Church in Canada will cease to exist within the next generation. As a former Canadian who was raised until the age of 12 in the Anglican Church, this is an astounding turn of events.
The conventional wisdom may leap to the conclusion that this is a trend indicative of a general decline in religion overall. Indeed, the response of the denomination to its remaining congregations to “…abandon their sedate, clubby Anglican culture and get their behinds off pews to evangelize in shopping malls, homes and workplaces” is particularly revealing to me. Institutional churches in the US are not as far along in their decline as what is evidencing in Canada currently, and it may be that there will be key differences in what plays out here, but there is no question that similar dynamics are at work with observations from George Barna (a recognized leader in church polling) to where over 1,000,000 people per year are leaving institutional churches and over 15,000 christian workers are leaving full-time ministry every month. The immediate response might be, like the Anglican Church, to attempt to change the internal culture of the church and move away from the “county club” mentality of many institutional churches, but I think there is far more at work here than just that.
It’s not just the fringe components of institutional churches that are “falling away.” Many leaving the Institutional Churches are leaving not as an expression or a result of a loss of faith on their part, but a deliberate choice to leave in favor of other forms of community that are growing but outside the usual measurements that institutional Christianity lends itself to. It’s relatively easy to measure growth and health in this area when you have factors such as church attendance, money in the offering plate, size of physical church plants, number of Christian workers and the number of programs available and participated in within the organization. New forms of association are springing up however that do not lend themselves to these approaches. Simple Church or Home Churches are increasing while institutional churches are waning. Organic fellowships and social networking as a support or even in some cases as a primary means of association are increasing. It’s possible that we’re seeing something of a sea change every bit as significant as the protestant reformation which in part arose from the revolutionary introduction of mass literacy and publishing.
Rather than attempting to motivate their clannish congregants to get out and evangelize, it may be that institutional churches are going to have to catch on to the writing on the wall and purpose to make some very deep and significant changes and perhaps listen to what those who are leaving are saying and not assuming they will continue to exist by some form of divine right.
For some, it may be too late. The next 25 years will be fascinating to observe in this and many other realms.
