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| About a quarter of the young adults who dropped out of church said they disagreed with their church’s stance on political and social issues. Photograph: Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images. Source: The Guardian |
The above image is from a Guardian article Losing their religion: why US churches are on the decline.
Christian Today has summarised a data set from the 2021 Census which reveals that "Christians are the oldest on average among people of faith in England and Wales. The average age of a Christian is now 51. By contrast, those describing themselves as Muslim had the youngest average age of 27 years old, followed by those who reported "no religion" - 32 years old."
People of faith are lumped together as though there is little difference between them. That was the position of the newly elected bishop of Llandaff when she responded to a question put to her by the Secretary General Muslim Council of Wales Abdul-Azim Ahmed on the BBC's 'All Things Considered' on the census results and the 'growth of minority religions across Wales' in particular.
Bishop Stallard said that she had always been helped and encouraged by people of faith of diverse traditions. She had spent a lot of time as a student studying Hinduism and Buddhism and had been encouraged in her faith by a Muslim sister. A great comfort for persecuted Christians living at the sharp end around the world!
Presumably the bishop had so little time for biblical study that she skipped over "I Am the Way, the Truth, and the Life" and the the Great Commission: Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
The Bible counts for little in new Anglicanism other than to provide an opportunity to take passages out of context to provide some phoney legitimacy to the latest hot issue such as Living in Love and Faith (LLF) which many bishops are eager to endorse without any theological reasoning, probably because there isn't any.
By contrast a small group of bishops has published a 'short theological summary of the doctrine of marriage as the Church of England has received it'.
Hooray for them but too little too late as the census figures indicate. Without younger people replacing the aged Anglicanism will surely perish.
