The unchurched has been defined to mean "an adult (18 or older) who has not attended a Christian church service within the past six months" excluding special services such as Easter, Christmas, weddings or funerals. The Barna Group reported that there were 75 million "unchurched people" in the United States as of 2004.
In the US the Episcopal Church (TEC) is facing a major challenge. Virtue Online reports that TEC faces inevitable collapse with 'collaboration plans afoot in many dioceses'. The report continues: "Financial challenges and membership decline are a common concern across TEC. The language is about 'collaboration'. When things get worse, it is called 'juncturing'. When the diocese eventually dies, it is called merging."
The Church of England is in a flap leading Giles Fraser to write in UnHerd in response to Justin Welby's claim in July 2012 that "We don’t preach morality, we plant churches. We don’t preach therapeutic care, we plant churches":
"The Church is abandoning its flock. The CofE's great leap forward will cull clergy and abandon parishioners.
"The latest Great Leap Forward for the CofE looks like this. Get rid of all those crumbling churches. Get rid of the clergy. Do away with all that expensive theological education. These are all 'limiting factors'. Instead, focus relentlessly on young people. Growth, Young People, Forwards. Purge the church of all those clapped-out clergy pottering about in their parishes. Forget the Eucharist, or at least, put those who administer it on some sort of zero hours contract. Sell their vicarages. This is what our new shepherds want in their prize sheep: to be young, dumb, and full of evangelistic… zeal."
The Church in Wales had its great leap forward in 2012 following a Review by the former Bishop of Oxford, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, and others. Little time was lost in the establishment of Ministry Areas (Recommendation VI) but consideration of whether the Church in Wales is best served by six dioceses with three administrative centres or whether it would be more effective to reduce to three dioceses, together with four area bishops is, as far as one can tell, in the long grass.
In a Province the size of some dioceses one has to wonder why the Church in Wales needs so many bishops. Monmouth managed without for months as is St Davids where it emerged that the current holder spent much of her time tweeting to advance her socialist agenda before being signed off on extended sick leave.
Meanwhile the new unchurched are worshipping at home.
The question should read "With which Church are you worshipping?"
ReplyDeleteThey have abandoned basic grammar as well as basic Theology.
Perhaps the question was posed by one of the "dumb and young" who know no better?
DeleteHmmm ... while of course there are people who "feel unable in all conscience to remain in an organisation that they no longer recognise as the Church they joined", there's nothing to stop them transferring their allegiance to a church of another tradition. If they, having left the CofE/CinW, are abandoning the churches altogether, one needs to ask why. Is it because they have got fed up of the argy-bargy that bedevils so much church life, or been so hurt by peoples' behaviour, and don't want to risk getting involved in it again in a different setting? Is it because their faith is so much bound up in one particular Christian tradition that they cannot conceive of joining a community from a different one, whether that be RC, Orthodox or Nonconformist? Have they moved house (or otherwise changed their circumstances) and "lost the church-going habit"? Is it even that their faith has, for whatever reason, slowly withered away and they prefer to use "the Church" as the reason for that happening when in fact there may be a multitude of other factors involved? Alan Jamieson wrote a fascinating analysis of "church leavers" called "A Churchless Faith" - yes he was looking at evangelical churches in New Zealand rather than Anglican churches in Britain but much of what he says is still applicable: https://www.alisonmorgan.co.uk/Books/Jamieson%202002.pdf
ReplyDelete'If they, having left the CofE/CinW, are abandoning the churches altogether, one needs to ask why.'
DeleteI suspect that you might get a whole raft of different answers to that question. And of course some haven't abandoned Anglicanism altogether, but remain on its fringes, sadly, angrily, resentfully - maybe a mixture of all those and more. I can only answer for myself.
I couldn't stay within mainstream Anglicanism because by the 1990s it had clearly reneged on certain central aspects of the beliefs which it had proclaimed when I first approached it as a curious but genuine enquirer only thirty years earlier. And, in addition, in the new Anglican context it's rather hard, simultaneously, to maintain your genuine convictions along with 'the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace' - the model, surely, of the common life in the Body of Christ - when the consensus within your communion is to strike out on a course which isn't one which you can sincerely follow.
So what next? I couldn't become a Roman Catholic because I can't intellectually swallow the doctrine of 'the universal jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome, which has never been accepted across catholic Christendom and still isn't. Unsurprising, given the flimsiness of the case for it.
I was dubious from the start about 'continuing Anglicanism' because of its precedents on north America where convulsive change had seized Anglicanism a full decade earlier than was the case in the British Isles. There, the dissentient 'continuers' had fragmented ever and again over doctrinal disputes which struck me for the most part as cover for the ambitions of various clerical prima donnas to rule their own increasinly small minor jurisdiction. And so it proved to be here too.
Which left the Orthodox, of whom I had early high hopes, because in north America the Antiochene Orthodox jurisdiction readily offered a home to dissentient Anglicans who felt that Orthodoxy, Constantinople-style, could offer a future; even permitting them to use familiar western liturgies as long as they were adjusted to accomodate core Orthodox beliefs.
But the emigre Orthodox communities in Britain viewed that whole venture with hostility and deep suspicion, to such a degree that the new 'western' Orthodox congregations ultimately established here swiftly abandoned thoughts of using anything other than the Byzantine liturgies. I couldn't see any solid future for them other than increasing the number of churches available to immigrants from the Orthodox world and catering for the very small number of former Anglicans who had a taste for the liturgically exotic. That too in the end didn't look like a way forward.
So I suppose that for me it was, in a sense, a matter of being 'fed up of the argy-bargy that bedevils so much church life'. However I explain it, I've pretty much ended up as a (deeply!) sympathetic agnostic. Overall, and looking back, I feel the Church didn't turn out as - based on its own self-presentation - I initially assumed it to be.
#John Ellis: I think I've made this point before, but after 40+ years as an Anglican (25 of them in holy orders) I have in retirement found a lasting home in Orthodoxy, into which I was received in 2008 at the age of 60. There are, I believe, 2 or 3 places in the UK where some sort of "western" liturgy is celebrated, but I've never had any desire to seek them out. I quickly became acclimatised to the normal Orthodox usage, which with familiarity doesn't seem in the least "exotic". A convert Orthodox priest whom I first met in my teens likened the difference between the western and eastern traditions to that between black-and-white and Glorious Technicolor -- the impression made by the Liturgy in Hagia Sophia on Prince Vladimir's envoys ("We didn't know whether we were in heaven or on earth") can be a daily reality, even in the humblest of surroundings. Two other points: (1) Orthodoxy like every other religious institution is a mixture of the human and the divine, with human failings as much evident as in any other -- but unlike in some western denominations the Faith itself is mercifully preserved from adulteration thereby. (2) With (a) increasing numbers of western converts and (b) progressive Anglicisation in expat ethnic Orthodox communities one rarely has to travel far to find services partly or wholly in English (or Welsh, if one is anywhere near Blaenau Ffestiniog). Try it!
Delete@ Matthew:
DeleteYou did make that point before and I remember it clearly. It's good to know that you were able to find a new spiritual home which, from the sound of it, has fitted - and perhaps somewhat reshaped? - your spirituality so well and wholesomely.
I don't personally know of any canonical 'western' orthodox communities in these islands - maybe there might be a few. But I do know that over the course of time none of the scattered Orthodox communities in the British Isles under the ultimate jurisdiction of the patriarch of Antioch stuck with the 'western rite', even if they began with it - the choice between that and the traditional Orthodox liturgies was from the beginning their own, following the example pioneered by the late metropolitan Philip in north America. But for all I know they may be a few under other jurisdiction of which I haven't heard.
And I wholly accept that to which you become accustomed swiftly creases to be 'exotic' - as a teenaged outsider with no roots whatever in Christian worship other than secular school assembly 'hymn/bible readin/prayer sandwiches', even traditional 1662 Anglican worship seemed a tad exotic to me at the beginning!
But I admit to being less impressed by the Liturgy of St John Chrystostom than were the Kievan envoys. Maybe this is the curse of having long ago studied liturgiology in the context of my degree; but the Byzantine liturgies strike me as no less 'encrusted' with later devotional - and often inappropriately and distractingly positioned - accretional oddments than was the Eucharistic liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer. The Byzantine 'encrustations', of course, are quite different from those of the BCP, but even so encrustations they manifestly seem to me to be.
I don't for a moment argue that the Eucharist shouldn't be celebrated splendidly, simply because of what it is. But equally, I don't doubt that uncouth Slavic chieftains newly settled in the steppes north of the Black Sea were overawed by the splendour of the liturgy in 10th century Hagia Sophia. However the core meaning of the Christian Eucharistic liturgy is surely to unite heaven and earth by recalling into every contemporary present moment the death, resurrection and ascension of the Representative Man who is God Incarnate and who, in his incarnation, his death and his resurrection, ever and again incorporates into himself each Christian individual who has been joined to him in Baptism - for as long as, inevitably, they exist in time rather than in eternity. Its purpose isn't to overawe savages with a display of splendour.
I entirely accept that Orthodoxy appears, these days, to be largely free of disputations about the faith itself, and also that disputes over liturgical language has never been any real issue in the Christian east as it was for so long - though not now? - in the Latin west.
But Orthodoxy now seems to me ever and again, instead, to mire itself in jurisdictional bickerings. Witness, just to take a couple of contemporary examples, the recent spat between the Moscow patriarchate and ardent Ukrainian nationalist Christians over the establishment of a Ukrainian autocephalous jurisdiction. Or, even in the last week, the clamorous objections from Montenegrin nationalists to the enthronement of a new Serbian Orthodox patriarch with jurisdiction over their land: even though he's due to be enthroned in Cetinje in Montenegro and says that he's Montenegrin, born and bred!
I'm an old feller now, and, even though it's not a strictly a matter of faith and doctrine, it still looks to me like yet more 'of the argy-bargy that bedevils so much church life', as Baptist Trainfan describes it. And by now I'm rather weary of that.
@ John Ellis: (1) As I observed earlier, the Orthodox Church is not immune from human imperfections, and the various instances of 'argy bargy' are indeed depressing and wearisome -- but at least they happen in the open, rather than being suppressed by Supreme Authority (the fact that they are allowed to happen at all is I suppose thanks to the absence of such a figure). Very little fallout from the Ukrainian or Serbian disputes affects church life here. (2) Was it the external splendour of the Liturgy in Constantinople which impressed the Kievan emissaries, or the atmosphere of participation and devotion? (3) I'm not sure I know what you mean when you talk of liturgical 'encrustations' being 'distractingly positioned', but one can pick holes in the format of any liturgical act and certainly in the way it is performed -- better to concentrate on the reality of what it effects, which is rather more of an act of God than an act of man (this I think is the crucial point).
DeleteInteresting, Baptist Trainfan. There isn't one reason for a decline in church attendances in recent years. There are all those reasons which you mention. What we have, essentially, is the culmination of (by now) several generations who have failed (in one way or another) to pass on the Faith to the next generation. In each generation since the 1950s, this failure to pass on the Faith has multiplied. There are also many sociological reasons also. In the 1970s when I first started taking church services (in many denominations in North Wales), the congregations were nearly all middle-aged - 40s upwards. By now, those people are in their 80s and 90s or have died, and there are hardly any younger people who have taken their place, particularly committed people who will be in church week-in, week-out. The inevitable result, across the board, is that there are no members left to sustain the church, and it closes. It certainly isn't to do with depopulation! What is happening sadly throughout the nation (Britain) is that as a result, the Church is withdrawing its presence from these communities. Is this to do with resources? Is there evangelism going on? Is it a case of not many people at all in our midst who believe in a supernatural God, who is Almighty and Eternal, who in His love has come into the world in the person of Jesus Christ to redeem sinners? If this is so, then there is a Christian duty on all believers to share this essential message with as many as possible, as it is to do with our Eternal Salvation. I am well aware that there are exceptions to all I have said, but sadly, they are exceptions, and our land, by now is atheistic and pagan through and through.
ReplyDelete@ Matthew:
ReplyDeleteAlas, my experience was that rather a lot of the 'argy-bargy' within Orthodoxy around the group of Anglicans exploring the Antiochene route into the Orthodox communion wasn't in the open, but appeared to be a 'behind the scenes' murmuring operation of disapprobation from other Orthodox jurisdictiond in the UK! I had this from people very much 'in the know' at the time about the discussions around what they called their 'pilgrimage to Orthodoxy'. For me what I learned was all the more convincing because it came from people wholly committed to the 'pilgrimage' come what may, and who stuck the course and established their own local Orthodox communities. But I found the apparent jurisdictional politicking disappointing and discouraging.
As to 'encrustations', I mentioned previously that there might be a curse engendered by having studied liturgiology in distant years, if only that doing so makes you look at rites critically as well as devotionally. I very much valued the Church in Wales's first experimental Eucharstic rite which was authorized for use, if I recall rightly, in 1967, because it so effectively restored and recaptured the original 'shape' of the liturgy.Chancellor Parry, who headed the Standing Liturgical Committee at the time, was accorded the particular credit for that, as liturgy was his scholarly field. For me the defect of the Orthodox liturgies is that the basic 'shape' is blurred by rather a lot of later devotional accretions - often beautiful in themselves, but distractions from the flow of the action of the rite.
The first experimental Eucharistic rite was in 1966. I share your views entirely. This rite did indeed 'restore and recapture the original shape' of the liturgy. It is, as you rightly say, thanks to Chancellor W.D. Parry for this. He was indeed a very scholarly and godly man, and was my father confessor for a number of years. As much as I value the BCP, I believe this 1966 rite does succeed in putting things in the right 'order' liturgically. I believe this 1966 service should have been kept. The 1984 service, which is very much the same service, has had a little tinkering done to it linguistically, changes, in my opinion which were not needed.
Delete#John Ellis: Sorry this is rather a long time after your comment of 27 August, but I think this article received today (quite coincidentally) from a traditionalist RC priest friend might be of some relevance: https://onepeterfive.com/the-priest-praying-for-himself-at-mass/
DeleteI moved away from Wales in the summer of 1984, just before the liturgy was changed; but we were all made quite aware of what was to come. And I recall, back then, a lot of Anglicans in the pews expressing your view that 'this 1966 service should have been kept'.
ReplyDeleteThe hierarchy's only - and to my mind rather odd - response to that was that the 1966 liturgies were by definition 'experimental' and thus, by definition, couldn't be declared permanent; or, indeed, have their experimental use permitted for rather longer, because their permissive time had already been extended for longer than originally envisaged.
Which struck me as a strangely legalistic approach the the process of determining the liturgy through which the church worships together. Very nearly two years ago we took a short midweek late summer break in Llanidloes, and on a gloriously warm and sunny day we betook ourselves down the road to explore Llandinam. I was curious, for sure, to see the birthplace which David Davies, the developer of Barry Docks, apparently loved so much, and see his imposing statue there.
But rather more than that, I wanted to visit the church where Chancellor Parry had ministered for rather a lot of years, and recall his contribution to the heart of the life of Welsh Anglicanism in more hopeful times than the present! And I did just that.
I was also in on the change from 66 to 84, and was similarly unimpressed by the reason given. What was worse than the alterations to the rite itself was the introduction of a new and poorly-conceived eucharistic lectionary, with collects in which in almost every case the Addressee was accorded a third- rather than second-person verb. It could, however, have been worse; for a few years before that I had been serving curacies in England whose staple fare was the ASB, with its dismal Sunday "themes". There was (and is) a logic to the scheme in the old BCP of which the revisers seem to have been unaware -- see this most interesting article: http://www.lectionarycentral.com/trinity/Phillips.html.
Delete@ Matthew:
DeleteI have to admit that I didn't study the 1984 book very closely once I'd seen that it altered the officiant's greeting and the people's response from V. 'The Lord be with you' R. 'And with thy Spirit' to the extraordinarily maladroit V. 'The Lord be with you' R. 'And with your spirit'.
Personally, I was largely indifferent about the issue of using modern English: I was happy either way, and could see a point to both sides of that particular debate.
But you either stick to the traditional language or you adopt genuine contemporary language: you don't attempt somehow to straddle the two. V. 'The Lord be with you'; R. 'And with your spirit' was frankly absurd. Who on earth would say that?! If you're going to use modern language, then use it, but make it authentically modern.
Sadly Chancellor Parry had retired by 1984, and no longer presided over the Liturgical Commission. Had he still been there, I truly believe the malapropisms which dismayed both you and me wouldn't have got through!
When the RCs revised their Mass in 2013 they substituted ‘and with your spirit’ for ‘and also with you’. The Church in Wales did the exact opposite when they moved on from the 1984 Prayer Book to modern language liturgy!
ReplyDeleteAlthough the new RC liturgy addresses God as ‘You’, like the 1984 book it has adopted a hybrid language, half modern half archaic. It doesn’t work. They have ended up with the sort of grammatical errors there are in the 1984 book. To quote last week’s RC collect: ‘O God, who console the sorrowful….’
The Observer
I agree with you entirely.
Delete