Church Of England Crack-Up
from The American Conservative:
Anglicans in Britain have crossed a rainbow Rubicon.
This pleases nobody. Pro-LGBT Anglicans rightly ask why gay relationships are good enough to bless, but not good enough to solemnize as marriage. Trad Anglicans rightly ask why, if gays cannot be married because homosexuality is a sin, the Anglican Church is nevertheless blessing something sinful.
They’re both right. This compromise makes no sense. The center cannot hold. If the progressives accept it, it’s because they understand that this is how it goes — it’s the next step to full affirmation. This is also a sign to every other church in the West today: there is no way to fudge this issue, or to avoid it. It must be faced. Either the Bible’s prohibition on homosexual acts because they are sinful is valid, or it is not. It cannot be valid sometimes, and in some places. There is no middle ground.
What’s bizarre as an outsider is the obsessional attention the Church of England gives to this issue at a time when it is declining so fast that is on track to go extinct by 2060. I’m not kidding: it will be dead within a generation or two. And so will the Catholic Church in England, according to a data modeler. Excerpts from The Tablet:
Hayward also estimated the extinction date of each church by factoring in loss of membership due to ageing.
“The Church of England and Catholics should last until the second half of the century. However, they need to take urgent action now. Stemming losses is not enough. None of us can prevent ageing,” he writes. “Sadly, the immediate future looks bleak for the Church in Wales, Church of Scotland, Episcopalians, Methodists, and older Welsh nonconformists.”
According to his model, both the Church of Wales and the Church of Scotland could be extinct within the next 30 years. He projects the Catholic Church and the Church of England to die out sometime between 2060 and 2070.
Hayward highlights churchmanship as a possible contributing factor, comparing churches that are more evangelical against those which are more liberal. “All the evangelical denominations are growing, except for the Brethren,” he writes. “By contrast, all the mixed denominations are declining, with the liberal ones declining the most. Is this because evangelical beliefs on judgement, salvation and Jesus as the only way drive their members to seek converts? Do liberal Christians have insufficient theological reasons to want to spread their faith?”
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