What is the current state of the Anglican Church of Canada?
Last August, David Goodhew published a piece in The Living Church’s Covenant blog entitled “The Collapse of the Anglican Church of Canada,” in which he argued, as the title suggests, that its state is poor indeed. In fact, he argued the Anglican Church of Canada is the first province of the Anglican Communion to have collapsed. He pointed out a sharp decline in Average Sunday Attendance but stressed that attendance decline along with financial woes are “lagging indicators.” Rather, he argued that the “key metrics” of ecclesial health are baptism numbers and age profile – and that on these measures the ACC has already collapsed, with no recovery in sight. He blames this decline in particular on the Anglican Church of Canada’s progressivism, and in particular a focus on progressive causes which led to individual discipleship and church growth being minimized. The ACC may still have the outer trappings of a church – bishops, diocesan and national bureaucracies, church buildings – but apart from a few pockets of vitality, it is dead.
This piece, perhaps unsurprisingly, sparked a number of responses. Sharon Dewey Hetke sought to nuance parts of Goodhew’s analysis but fundamentally agreed with it. In response, she called for a return to a focus “on the gospel and the teaching of Scripture, not on secular causes” and noted with hopefulness that leaders in the Canadian church seem to be more committed to “core teachings like the necessity of faith in Christ, the Virgin Birth, and the physical resurrection of Christ.” Even in the light of overall collapse, she argued, there are opportunities to nurture the remaining pockets of vitality in the ACC. Cole Harten wrote about the Reimagining the Church commission of which he is a member, appointed to discuss needed changes to the national structure of the church. Such structural changes, he suggested, are necessary but not themselves a silver bullet for church decline. What we really need to do is to “stay focused on prayer, preaching, and teaching the Bible, focused on discipleship and evangelism, focused on Jesus” – and to want to grow, for the sake of lives transformed by the Gospel.
Most recently, a few days before Christmas, Emilie Smith published a response entitled “It’s Not Dead.” As the title suggests, this is the only piece to seriously take exception with Goodhew’s analysis. Of course, Smith grants that the statistics around decline are accurate, but she asks, “are these indicators a true picture of the status of the Anglican church within Canadian society? Or are they a sign of a repositioning of the place of all churches in a pluralistic, multicultural world?” She draws upon interviews with Archbishop Lynne McNaughton, bishop of the Diocese of Kootenay, and Bishop John Stephens of New Westminster to attempt to refute Goodhew’s argument. From McNaughton’s work in Kootenay, she argues that the church in Canada is not dying but thriving – albeit in a new way, renouncing nostalgia for the “false and unhealthy model” of the church of the “postwar baby boom” and instead paying attention to what God is calling the church to be today. She argues that Goodhew’s blaming of the ACC’s progressivism for its decline is vague and unclear, and in fact Canadian Anglicanism’s attempts to move beyond its colonial past in reconciliation with First Nations, to fully include women and LGBTQ people, and to advocate for creation are not distractions from the Gospel but a faithful living out of it. “The humble embracing of the matters of the world is the very heart of our mission,” she argues. The numerical decline, while real, does not seem to be an adequate measure of the ACC’s health – rather, its moving beyond the oppressive church models of the past and its new flexibility and attention to God’s mission of addressing contemporary social, political, and environmental crises is the real measure of our church’s thriving.
I wanted to write a little bit about this exchange, and especially the final piece by Smith. Because while I share with her some important commitments around inclusion in the church, her piece encapsulated many of the things that I find most frustrating about conversations concerning church decline: an attempt to reframe our church’s failure at making disciples as a new way of being church, a lack of clarity about whether or not being a Christian really matters, an abandonment of the church’s historic mission of Gospel proclamation, an unhelpful discussion of the relationship between various forms of liberalization and ecclesial decline. And so I decided to write a little bit about it:
The numbers are really bad.
First, I think it’s worth spending a little time with the demographic realities that we’re dealing with. I want to start with some graphs to make more concrete the scope of decline about which we are talking.
First, average Sunday attendance. Frustratingly, there aren’t publicly available, solid Average Sunday attendance numbers for the whole ACC until 1996.1 But in that time, the decline is precipitous, as the graph below shows. Let’s set aside the 2022 numbers as likely still reflecting some temporary pandemic losses. From 1996 to 2019, average attendance declined by over 50%. I was born in 1991. In less than my lifetime, ACC attendance halved.
But I think that Goodhew is right that Sunday attendance is in some ways a lagging indicator. To understand the prospects of the church, as well as whether the church is carrying out its mission of leading people to new life in Jesus Christ, let’s look at baptisms and confirmations. Baptism gives us the number of people initiated into the Christian life. Confirmation gives us, at least in principle, the number of people committing to living out the promises made on their behalf in baptism; it has at least something to do with the church’s ability to nurture the baptized into a life of discipleship. Now, we should not be naïve about the fact that confirmation’s function as a coming-of-age ritual not infrequently eclipses its ostensible ecclesial function. That is, rather than marking the beginning of committed adult discipleship, confirmation all too often marks the end of one’s serious engagement with church. But certainly we should not expect that the church is adding more committed, faithful adult members than the number of confirmands in a given year.
Here we have data from 1959 on. In 2019 (again, before the pandemic), the ACC baptized 10% as many people as it did in 1959 and confirmed 5% as many. That is, one person baptized for every ten baptized some sixty-five years ago, and one person confirmed for every twenty. Just think about that for a minute. Imagine a confirmation class of twenty children at St Wherever’s in 1959. Twenty desks in a Christian education room. Now, today, on average, there would be just one confirmand. In 2017, 2019, and 2022, fewer than two thousand people a year made an adult profession of faith in the ACC, either as children raised in the church or as adult converts. There are a few more than two thousand congregations in the entire Anglican Church of Canada. This means that, on average, each congregation is baptizing around two people and confirming one a year. These are, to put it mildly, not the numbers that you can sustain a church (or, indeed, any mass membership organization) upon.
This is not just a return to the pre-baby-boom pattern, as Smith’s piece suggests. This is, as Goodhew puts it, an “extinction-level event.” If indeed making new believers and leading them in a life of discipleship is at the core of the church’s mission – as I believe it is – then it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Anglican Church of Canada has in fact collapsed.2
Yes, decline is a problem.
But of course, Smith acknowledges that the statistics concerning decline are rather grim; her fundamental disagreement with Goodhew is about how they should be interpreted. In fact, if I am understanding her rightly, she seems to be quite suspicious about the use of numbers like these as measures of whether a given church is healthy. The once-higher ACC numbers, she or her interviewees suggest, reflect a demographic blip (the baby boom) and were the product of an unhelpful (or even wicked) colonial model of being church. Indeed, our earlier numbers and strength were associated, she argues, with real failures of the church in living out its mission; she highlights the Anglican Church’s involvement in the (very real!) evils of the residential school system. Thus, she thinks, by forsaking nostalgic attachment to this earlier model, the church can go about fulfilling its God-given mission in pluralistic contemporary Canada. Numerical decline can coexist with a thriving church that is finding new and innovative ways to live out God’s mission in the world.
But unfortunately, if we think it matters that people are Christians, I don’t think we can avoid the truth that numerical decline is a disaster. Now, we can freely admit that in an earlier era where churchgoing was socially expected, people had motives other than pure commitment to God for showing up on Sunday mornings. But if we believe that God has appointed Word and Sacrament as the normative means by which the Spirit draws us to new life in Christ, then surely it is awful if fewer people are availing themselves of these means of grace. I expect that God can work with mixed and imperfect motives (if he doesn’t, I am in trouble, along with everyone else I know). If it matters that people are Christians, the number of people in our churches matters.
Read it all at Draw near with faith
