[LINK] "Anglican Church facing the threat of extinction"

[rfmcdonald]

The Globe and Mail's Michael Valpy reports that Canadian Anglicanism faces a grim future. Small comfort that its is shared by most other established Christian denominations.

The Anglican Church in Canada – once as powerful in the nation's secular life as it was in its soul – may be only a generation away from extinction, says a just-published assessment of the church's future.

The report, prepared for the Anglican Diocese of British Columbia, calls Canada a post-Christian society in which Anglicanism is declining faster than any other denomination. It says the church has been “moved to the far margins of public life.”

According to the report, the diocese – “like most across Canada” – is in crisis. The report repeats, without qualification or question, the results of a controversial study presented to Anglican bishops five years ago that said that at the present rate of decline – a loss of 13,000 members per year – only one Anglican would be left in Canada by 2061.

It points out that just half a century ago, 40 per cent of Vancouver Island's population was Anglican; now the figure is 1.2 per cent. Nationally, between 1961 and 2001, the church lost 53 per cent of its membership, declining to 642,000 from 1.36 million. Between 1991 and 2001 alone, it declined by 20 per cent.

Regular attendance is declining at all Canadian Christian churches, except for the Roman Catholic Church, whose small increase is attributed to immigration.

But Anglicanism's problem is aggravated because it is primarily a tribal church, the offspring of the Church of England. It has traditionally been home to Canadians of Anglo-Saxon descent who increasingly have no ethnic identification with the church, said religious studies professor David Seljak of St. Jerome's University in Waterloo, Ont.

A similar problem burdens the Presbyterian Church – offspring of the Church of Scotland – which is losing adherents almost as quickly as the Anglicans.

Prof. Seljak explained that members of families who have lived in Canada for three generations or more increasingly self-identify as “Canadian” rather than with their pre-Canadian ethnic origin. And Canadians increasingly say they're generically “Christian” rather than Anglican, Presbyterian or Pentecostal.

Moreover, while the two ethnic groups, English and Scots, are declining as a proportion of Canadian society, the two tribal churches have limited appeal to Canadians of other origins, apart from those who encountered missionaries – for example, Canadians of Caribbean, Korean or African descent.

While the close linkage of Anglicanism--like other Christian denominations--to ethnicity is certainly a problem, the worldwide Anglican communion extends far beyond the Anglo-Saxon sphere, extending deep into Africa where more Anglicans live than in England. At least in theory, there's no reason why Canadian Anglicanism might not be refreshed by new waves of Anglican immigrants, if perhaps only for a generation or two.