The Anglican Church of Canada (ACoC), counterpart to the U.S.-based Episcopal Church, will cease to exist by the year 2040 according to numbers recently reported by the denomination. Even more dramatically, the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) is on the verge of overtaking the ACoC in attendance.
“There is no sign of any stabilisation in our numbers; if anything the decline is increasing,” noted the Rev. Dr. Neil Elliot in a statistical report presented to the Canadian House of Bishops. “Some had hoped that our decline had bottomed out, or that programs had been effective in reversing the trends. This is now demonstrably not the case.”
The report includes the first comprehensive set of official statistics since the early 2000s. Data confirms anecdotal stories from across much of the Canadian church that Anglican Christianity is vanishing there. In 1962 (the height of Anglican participation) the ACoC reported more than 1.3 million members, out of a total Canadian population of approximately 18 million, seven percent of Canadians affiliated with the Anglican Church. By 2017, Canada’s population had risen to more than 35 million (+94%) but only 357,123 members were counted on the rolls of the Anglican Church there, 1 percent of the population.
A tip of the hat to David Jenkins of the Anglican Samizdat blog: Jenkins first broke news of the report prior to its official release. Since that time, the Christian Post, Religion News Service, Virtue Online and even Episcopal News Service have posted about the numerical decline in the Canadian Anglican church.
New attendance figures are striking: in 2017, the Anglican Church of Canada had an average Sunday attendance of 97,421. For context, the Anglican Church of North America (which partly overlaps geographically with the ACoC) reported an average Sunday attendance of 93,489 this past year. The ACNA through its Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC) diocese and The Reformed Episcopal Church’s Canadian convocations now has congregations in every Canadian province with the exception of Prince Edward Island.
Obviously this comes with a major caveat: the ACNA also has congregations in the United States and Mexico, which the ACoC does not. In order to offer an “apples to apples” comparison, we can add the Average Sunday Attendance of the ACoC to the same for the Episcopal Church in 2017 (553,927) for a total attendance of 651,348 between the two neighboring churches. The ACNA’s 93,489 figure is about 15 percent the size of the combined ACoC and TEC attendance figure, but a consistent trajectory is visible: the two liberal Anglican provinces are consistently declining, while the ACNA has for its first 10 years reported consistent growth.
Attendance is one objective metric when evaluating church vitality. Figures for baptism, marriage, and total number of clergy are also relevant. According to the ACoC report, the church listed 5,441 baptisms in 2017 (down from 13,304, or 59%, in 2001) and 2,071 marriages the same year (down from 6,009, or 66%, in 2001) and 3,491 clergy (down from 3,675, or 5%, in 2001).
As Jenkins wrote, the Anglican Church of Canada is declining faster than any other Province within the worldwide Anglican Communion other than TEC, which has an even greater rate of decline.
Check out the entire ACoC report here and access the raw data here.
I don’t think it is fair to compare the ACoC and the ANiC at this time – the ACoC is still much much larger than the ANiC in terms of ASA. However, the ANiC is holding steady or slightly growing. Despite issues the ANiC seems slowly to be getting its house in order and mobilising for church planting. It may be some time before the trajectories of the ACoC and the ANiC intersect, but as the article points out there is no doubt as to which trajectory is plummeting… The remaining ‘orthodox’ in the ACoC are ingesting way too much poison laced kool-aid to remain vital into the long term. Bizarrely they are willing to ingest the poison in order to taste the sweetness of their familiar or legacy buildings… It’s a state of affairs which would not transfer to any other situation (i.e., who would remain in a home if they knew that very air they breathed was slowly killing them?) Anyway, as a member of the ANiC I regard the season we’re in as a crucible in which we have to grapple with theological and liturgical coherence and process the pain of fragmentation. Whereas it is not automatic that we’ll come out of this more rather than less coherent, I’m cautiously optimistic (and what is the choice? the Orthodox and RCs are some distance from classical anglicanism, and there are no other alternatives…). Key for ANiC will be the Episcopal elections in 2021. The die appears to be well and truly cast for the ACoC, and rejigging stats to include yoga meetings or essentially secular mom and tots gatherings won’t change that.
[…] In contrast, the U.S.-based Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) is on the verge of overtaking the ACoC in attendance, reports Anglican.Ink […]
This feels like Providential justice. The churches do worse the further they stray from the Gospel. Eventually they collapse. An orthodox denomination can buy the old churches.
Christ moves on.
Unfortunately, to date, the declining liberal denominations have frequently refused to sell church buildings to orthodox believers- preferring to sell them to developers for bars, restaurants, mansions for the wealthy, law offices, or even sell them to Islamic congregations.
But here in the Northern US (or Canada) it may be for the best if the orthodox have to build new, efficient, buildings sized to their congregations. In my last days in TEC, I attended a service with a usual congregation of 2 (3 counting the priest) in a 200,000 cubic foot church with seating for 400 on cold, snowy winter mornings. Even with very reasonable natural gas rates in that area, the entire plate and pledge in the winter months went to paying the heating bill- possible only because the later service was more popular and sometimes drew 25.