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| US Presiding Bishop Schori wore her Hindu-embracing garment for one appearance. Very mod, but pagan. |
WARNINGS: HUGE DECLINES
Recent statistics reveal the Anglican Church of Canada is in huge decline. New independent surveys show the ACoC has experienced a huge decline over the past 40 years.
Over the period of 1961 to 2001 the ACoC has lost 53% of its members, with numbers declining from 1.36 million to just 642,000. Furthermore the survey suggested that the decline is accelerating. A retired marketing expert, Keith McKerracher carried out the report and said the ACoC was declining much faster than any other church. "We're losing 12,836 Anglicans a year. That's 2 percent a year. If you draw a line on the graph, there'll only be one person left in the Canadian Anglican church by 2061."
The decline has coincided with the liberalization of the Church views over the past four decades; something that has also been witnessed in the Episcopal Church USA. Ted Byfield, a long-time observer of Canadian culture, who has published a weekly news magazine in Canada for 30 years and now serves as general editor of The Christians, a 12-volume history of Christianity, has suggested that this liberalization of the Church is the core reason for the decline.
McKerracher also said that he did not believe that the Anglican leaders in Canada would respond in any significant way to the findings. "The church is in real crisis. They can't carry on like it is business as usual. They talk things to death. And my impression is that the bishops are not going to go around telling priests to shape up."
Evangelical Anglicans in Canada have been warning church leaders for years that the ACoC was in deep spiritual trouble with no proclamation of the gospel except for a list of social justice objectives.
More recently, Anglicans were warned that they must "change or die". A trio of bombshells dumped on their doorsteps came with the explosive message: become more like evangelical churches in style in order to survive.
Critics on one side are resisting change entirely; on the other, they suggest something must also be done about theological content. The Rev. Dr. Gary Nicolosi cogently asked, "Can We Handle the Truth?" and "Why the Church Must Change or Die."
A number of prominent Anglican leaders have left the ACoC, including the Rev. Dr. Marney Patterson President of Invitation to Live Ministries.
Patterson, an evangelist with the Anglican Church in his book Suicide: the Decline and Fall of the Anglican Church of Canada? , says denominational statistics show that Canada's second-largest Protestant church has lost 267,000 members over the past 30 years, and shut down 523 parishes between 1995 and 1997.
"I don't believe we have more than two or three years to make changes; otherwise the ball game is over. The church has 20 years at the outside. By that time we will be a chapel rather than a church, and it will last only until the old faithful die off," he said. The Anglican Church of Canada has only a short time to save itself from oblivion, said Patterson. "Personally, I feel there is little chance it can be saved."
The formation of the Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC) was a body blow to the Anglican status quo. A number of evangelical Anglicans risked parish and pension to leave the ACoC foremost among them was St. John's Shaughnessy the single largest parish in Canada. They left with more than 2,000 parishioners, income the Diocese of New Westminster can never recover from. Others have launched out on their own in church plants to once again proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ to a lost denomination and country steeped in social issues but who have lost sight of Jesus as Savior and Lord.In a touch of irony, when the ACoC met recently at a Joint Assembly of Anglicans and Lutherans, they offered up as their inspirational theme, "Together for the Love of the World."
Bishop Mark Hanson, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, challenged the members of Joint Assembly with some tough questions. "The question before us these days is, 'what shall be the face of Christianity in North America in the next 10 years? Shall it be an increasingly vanishing face? Or shall it be the face of a cairn?'" he asked, describing the importance of stone cairns for travelers needing directions. "A cairn is a gathering of stones scattered but then piled up, and a cairn can have two functions. It can be a monument, a memorial to the past or it can be a pointing of the way."
The deeper truth is that these liberal bodies seem both unable and unwilling to change their ways and they continue to ignore the call of the Great Commission. As a result, they will continue to whither and die. The pile of rocks (cairns) left, along with the churches they have sold to evangelical churches, social service agencies, start-up storefront businesses, saloons and more WILL be their future.
No new parishioners, closing churches, dying dioceses and less income means less for those now retiring. While the church wants to love and save the world, it apparently can't muster enough dollars to save its own people and itself.
