Posted on 07/14/2011 6:09:32 AM PDT by Cronos
The Church of England will no longer be “functionally extant” in 20 years time according to some projections, a member of the General Synod has warned.
The Rev Dr Patrick Richmond, from Norwich, told members of the Church’s national assembly that they were facing a “perfect storm” of ageing congregations and falling clergy numbers.
The average age of congregations was 61, with many above that, he said.
“These congregations will be led by fewer and fewer stipendiary clergy ... 2020 apparently is when our congregations start falling through the floor because of just natural wastage, that is people dying.
“Another 10 years on, some extrapolations put the Church of England as no longer functionally extant at all.”
The first Church Estates Commissioner Andreas Whittam Smith said the demographic “time bomb of 2020” for Anglicans was a “crisis”,
“One problem may be that decline is so slow and imperceptible that we don’t really see it coming clearly enough,” he said.
“We know about it in theory but we don’t really know about it in practice.”
He added: “I wish that all of us would have a sense of real crisis about this.”
(Excerpt) Read more at yorkshirepost.co.uk ...
I have heard that. But identifying allowing contraception as the precipitous watershed event in the life of a church is absurd, imho. It ignores the true root causes, which in the case of the vibrancy (or lack thereof) in a church is loss of focus on the good news.
Well, I only gave that from what I’ve read, not experienced. Religion is getting to play an increasing role in Russia. This is also seen in the number of people attending Divine liturgy each week
Acceptance of this means inevitably that it's ok to have sex without thinking, so sex outside marriage is ok, so living in gets to be ok, so homosexual sex is ok, so gay marriage is ok. Someone can be at one end of the scale and not agree with the other, but I'm talking about society as a whole or even take Anglicanism and the UK in particular -- it moved from the point in the 30s when it accepted contraception, right through to now "gay marriage"
I really, really believe the preponderance of television has had a big role to play in that.
Congratulations! Though the LCMS (as well as all other conservative Churches) should make more efforts to get a younger crowd. The 20 somethings (and I’m a fine one to speak, being a 33 year old!) are too easily grabbed by liberal Churchs. Bring them back to conservatism, don’t give up!
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