Western Christianity isn’t dying out from natural causes. It’s committing suicide
by Tim Stanley, Telegraph:
There’s nowhere more relevant to the modern world than Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. This Episcopal church advertises yoga and is totally non-judgmental (there’s a photo on its website of a man dressed as a nun) and I bet a fun time was had by all at last week’s Global Climate Action Summit Multi-Faith Service. You can watch a video online: down the aisle come clerics, musicians and men on stilts dressed as trees. Notice though, as the camera pans out, that the congregation is a bit thin at the back. And old. It’s in desperate need of some new sap.
The wider Episcopal church is facing extinction: just 500,000 attend its services on a Sunday, which an internal report calls a “profound and shocking decline.” Its sister church in England isn’t doing much better. The latest figures suggest that Church of England affiliation has halved since 2002 and that only 2 per cent of young people call themselves Anglican. This is despite the CofE spending decades chasing cultural relevance. At the weekend, there was a discussion in this newspaper about whether or not God has a gender. “I don’t want young girls or young boys to hear us constantly refer to God as he,” said Rt Rev. Rachel Treweek, the Bishop of Gloucester, because that might alienate people.
The Rev doesn’t need to worry because no one is listening. Those of us who are Christian (I’m a Catholic and we have just the same problems as the Protestants) blame our falling numbers on everything but ourselves, from immigration to the internet. The truth is that Western Christianity isn’t dying out from natural causes or murder. It’s committing suicide.
The roots of the rift between liberal and conservative wings can be traced back decades but the current crisis erupted in 2003 when the US branch of Anglicanism – The Episcopal Church (Tec) – ordained its first openly-gay bishop, Gene Robinson.
Conservative Anglicans believe this goes against the teaching the Bible but liberals say Christianity should be inclusive.
Several Anglican churches, particularly in Africa and Asia, have since broken ties with The Episcopal Church, as well as the Canadian branch of Anglicanism, over the issue of homosexuality.
A new, more conservative, breakaway church has also emerged in the US and Canada known as the Anglican Church of North America (Acna).
Matters came to a head in 2008 when many conservatives boycotted the Lambeth Conference, the once-on-a-decade global gathering of bishops, because Tec was present.There have been several initiatives intended to heal the rift since them, all of them largely ignored.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, now want to overhaul Anglicanism into as a loose confederation to enable disagreement with full schism.
[…] If trying to be relevant to a shallow popular culture worked, church attendance would’ve risen since the Sixties or even stayed the same. It’s plummeted. And the few who do still loyally show up to communion aren’t there to talk about zero hour contracts. That’s God’s time.
This article may also be read in the Sydney Morning Herald.
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