The shrinking Church of England?

The story of the decline

This story was chosen because the data was available and shows the tail end of the steep decline many churches in the UK suffered in the 60's, so there is no implication in using this data that the Church of England (CofE) is somehow much worse than the other UK Churches. The data was not collected on a uniform basis, so while it may lack some accuracy it is thought to be a good indication of long term trends. The question is how many peeople go to Church today? Over the 35 year period from 1971 to 2006 the Church of England has declined by 43% while the population of the UK grew by 9.37%. Put these statistics together and the share of the population going to the Sunday service in the CofE fell by 52% between 1971 and 2006.

Church of England attendance

Source:Church Society website www.churchsociety.org

Downloadable chart

More evidence of the decline

This picture is of another activity, the rate of infant baptisms. Once again it was chosen because the data was available and because it goes back to 1902. Not perfect data because there were two changes in the way it was collected that needed adjustments to be made:

  • To plot a chart the period between readings was equalised because chart plotting software will give a non-linear X-axis if the data is not equally spaced and the resulting chart can be very misleading. These adjustments were made by leaving out some data and moving others by straight line interpolation to arrive at a 10 year spacing.
  • In the statistics from 1902 - 1976 the figures are infant baptisms and for those of riper years. In the statitistics from 1992 infant is taken to mean aged under 1, a second figure is given for ages 1 to 12 and this was used to correct the infant figure to make them comparable to the 1902 - 1976 statistics. This probably inflates the figure for more recent baptisms but does give a fairer comparison.

Church of England Baptisms

Source:Church Society website www.churchsociety.org

Downloadable chart

As an activity bapsims would seem to be a good indicator of the UK population's churchgoing and although the data may not be accurate it does depict the trend we are interested in. As the data is baptisms per 1000 births, it is not effected by changes in the birth rate such as the post war baby boom or growth in the population. What the chart shows is a dip during the second world war then a post war resurgence followed by a steep and steady rate of decline. At the peak in 1950 about 67% of infants were baptised, but today it is less than 20% and falling.

How should we react to this data?

With grim figures like these there is understandably a desire on the part of the leaders of the church to either ignore them or put the best face on them. Yet if the leadership will not react, who will? The average Churchgoer has no power on their own to do anything about it, nor do they posses the facts that would motivate them to action. Plotting a course to safety is a leadership function and when we follow God's lead we should see blessings.

In 2006 the attendance was down just -1% on 2005, but when you understand the average annual drop on the attendance trend chart is only 1.2% a year it does not seem so significant. Yet in a report in the Times online 23rd December 2007 it quoted a CofE spokesman who said 'attendance figures for Anglicans had generally stabilised since 2000.' In practice the decline in usual attendance between 1999(there is no data for 2000) and 2005 was on average 1.85% per year which is above the 1.2% average for the peroid 1968-2005, which leaves you wondering what the CofE spokesperson means by 'generally stabilised?' Most people would take it to mean there was no more decline.

Should we move the goal posts?

The argument from the CofE is for a wider measure of attendance that includes activities outside Sunday attendance. They argue that this would be more accurate because it reflects changes in our culture, but in doing so we will inflate the attendance figures by including people who do not show the same level of commitment as those who attend on Sunday. Many of these weekday activities are not new, so why include them now?

Cofe Weekly verses Sunday attendance

Source:Curch Of England websitewebsite

Downloadable chart

The chart ahows both weekly and Sunday attendance figures from the CofE website. If we were looking for a more honest measure of Church attendance then using the adult figures would seem a more representative figure. Children who attend may have little or no say in their attendance and should not be counted as believers. It should also be noted that slower rate of decline in weekly attendance is largely due to recent increase in the percentage of Children at a time when the percentage of Children attending on a Sunday is falling.

Challenges that lay ahead

To say that the decline is over would seem premature. With the average age of Churchgoers over 50 and rising steeply the, future of the Church looks far from certain. The influence of the new atheism, as championed by Richard Dawkins, is strong in our increasingly secular( materialistic and therefore pagan ) society and at the same time Islam is growing fast. The Archbishop of Canterbury's recent speech on the inevitability of Sharia Law in Britain has caused a self inflicted wound that had some people are calling for his resignation and the end of the CofE role as the established Church. Even the Queen expressed her concern at the damage to the CofE.

Yet the CofE has its own internal problems caused by the ordination of gay Bishops, and the proposal to introduce women Bishops in England. Nither of these are small problems, if you judge by the amount of news they generate. The CofE often seems to be on the verge of schism over deep differences in points of view. The Church Society puts the increase in the rate of decline in attendance that stared in 1993 down to the ordination of women priests. While those in favour of women's ordination had anticipated an increase in attendance the graph shows a steeper rate of decline. Furthermore an article in the Telegraph on 6th of February 2004 revealed that the number of priests that left the CofE due to the ordination of women was at least 430 and the cost of compensation was £26M.

Good news for the feminists came in the recent statistics for ordination. Thanks largely to a steep (42%) decline in the number of male stipendiary ordinands over the period from 2000 to 2006, the percentage of female priests ordained exceeded 50 for the first time in 2006.

CofE Ordinands by gender & type

Source:Church Of England website

Downloadable chart

Key:

  • Stipendiary = ordinand that receive a stipend
  • Non Stipend = ordinand that do not receive a stipend (part time)
  • OLM = Ordained Local Ministry. A ministry that is focused upon a particular community in a Diocese(part time)

In 2006 the percentage priests who were female was 17.5% and it is expected to exceed 25% by 2010 and match them by 2025. It would seem that, by the steep decline of male ordinations, the rate of increase in the proportion of women priests will speed up and make the introduction of women bishops inevitable. Yet on 2nd April 2008 the Church of Wales rejected the bill for the introduction of women Bishops, because to do so would have sanctioned what they regarded as institutionalised schism. An articlin in the Daily Mail on the 1st July 2008 reported that more than 1,300 clergy have written to the Archbishop of Canterbury saying they will defect from the Church of England if women are consecrated as bishops. On 7th of July 2008 the Archbishop of Canterbury argued in the Synod for a hard line, with no concessions for the Anglo-Catholics, on a vote for women bishops and that is the way the vote went. It seems there is no place for Anglo-Catholics in the new CofE, and the Vatican has made it clear that the ecumenical position has been damaged. As with the vote on women priests we can expect a many of the 1300 Anglo-Catholic priests to leave the CofE for Rome before 2014.

GAFCON 2008

Gafcon 2008 LogoThe Global Anglican Future Conference or GAFCON took place in Jerusalem between Friday 20thJune and Sunday 30thJune and was attended by over 1000 lay and ordained deligates including 300 bishops. It may not be a schism but, in creating a new authority under which orthodox evangelical in the Anglican communion can practice and preach the full gospel, it comes very close.

GAFCON arose from the broken communion between revisionist liberals and orthodox evangelicals. While the last straw may have been the ordination of a practising homosexual Bishop in the USA it is not an anti GAY movement, and the Jerusalem Declaration makes that clear. GAFCON represents a failure of existing Anglican structures, loss of moral influence for the Archbishop of Canterbury as head of the worldwide Anglican communion, and the rise of a new global outlook (i.e. less Anglo-centric) that gives more voice to those provinces in the Southern Hemisphere where the Church is thriving. While some Churches in Africa have doubled there membership in 10 years, the Church of England, which on paper has 26M, will struggle to get 0.74M people to attend on a usual Sunday. Looking at the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury from the Global South's point of view, why should a secular atheist UK government elect the leader of the worldwide Anglican Church and why should he allways be British? Viewed like this the problems in the Anglican communion are seen as a question of a structure that needs revision.

A post GAFCON press conference in London was expecting an attendance of 400 reached 750 with more unable to be accommodated. It starts a process by which Anglicans in the UK can find out what the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FOCA) might offer them and represents a rallying point for orthodox evangellicals in the within the Church of England. Just as the Archbishop of Canterbury used a hard line approach against the anglo-catholics over women bishops we can expect Bisops to use the same hard line tactics over FOCA members as did those in the USA. If so it would seem that orthodox evengelicals have two choices: give up being orthodox evangelicals or join a split along the lines of that in the USA.

Conclusions

There are consequences for recent actions and these show a breakdown in communion between parts of the CofE. The ordination of women Bishops and GAFCON are the events that reasulted in the orthodox Anglo-Catholic and orthodox evangelical wings of CofE moving away from the authority in Canterbury.

If the baptism data trend is accurate then it tells us is that a long term decline of the CofE started after the second world war and continues today. We also know from a European study that this is a decline that the Church has suffered in many parts of Europe and that Churches in the UK are amongst the leaders in this decline. Neither the trend for attendance or baptisms suggest that direction that the CofE is going has made any improvement. The fact that the decline has continued for so long suggests that Church leadership has been and is probably still at a loss for what the cause is and therefore what the solution might be. It would also seem that, whatever the ailment is, the churches in the UK (including CofE) have a worse dose than those in most counties in western Europe.