Are we all doomed?

In the words of private Frazer:



Several people have looked at the decline in attendance in the Church of England and projected forward to the date of extinction:

Church Growth Modelling gives around 2040 for the death of The Church in Wales, The Scottish Episcopal Church and The Episcopal Church in the US. The Church of England, starting at a higher numerical base, dies beyond the edge of the graph, sometime around 2100 perhaps.

The Spectator is more pessimistic (which may not surprise anyone). Damian Thompson projects that 2067 will be the date on the Church's tombstone.  He says:

That is the year in which the Christians who have inherited the faith of their British ancestors will become statistically invisible. Parish churches everywhere will have been adapted for secular use, demolished or abandoned. 

... Christianity is dying out among the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic inhabitants of Great Britain. The Gospel that Augustine and his 30 monks brought to England when they landed at Ebbsfleet in ad 597 is now being decisively rejected.

Of course, projections are not predictions. No-one knows what will happen between now and then. Will the effect of Reform and Renewal lift the leading edge of the graph and send it upwards? Will the impact of discussion about deep change lead to depression and hasten decline? Or will none of it make any difference?

Maybe the decline won't be steady at all. Implicit in the larger scale statistics is a picture of support ebbing away like a receding tide (it's gone a long way out from Dover Beach by now). 

But actually, for the most part, we belong to and worship in small semi-discrete units: parish churches. Here I suspect the pattern of decline is more or less steady until there comes a tipping point - where members' time, money and energy is no longer sufficient to sustain the building, services and clergy. One congregation I knew gave up when there were four people left, another had eight.

In other words, the long downhill slope ends suddenly as we fall over the cliff, like this (entirely imaginary) graph.

On this scenario projections from earlier data could even look somewhat optimistic.

Death (and resurrection?)

We do not have to accept less of the same, and may not be able to.

Perhaps 1: in the face of apparently inevitable obliteration, those who remain refuse to accept it. Maybe this will force a radical revision of the Church - it's shape, structure, role and mission. This in turn may tear the church apart if its current divisions are stronger that what holds it together.

Or 2: (I think more probably) minorities may be torn away, leaving a smaller continuing core.

However it happens, and whoever claims legitimate succession, in effect a new church (or churches) will be born from the ashes of the old.

Or 3: even more pessimistically, perhaps at some point in this century the Church of England will simply implode. Perhaps its internal divisions will prevent adequate revision. It might collapse like a burst balloon, as one too many parish church closures triggers an unstoppable cascade of others. At which point those who remain may say to themselves 'that's it. God has abandoned us.'

Or 4: they may say: 'time for a new start'.