I know… I know… never talk about religion… but this is not strictly about what individuals believe, rather it is about organisational failures and poor leadership generally. It is at the heart of the decline of the Church of England, even taking into account the overall pressures from an increasingly secular society.
A damning view that the Church of England is ‘sinking in its own irrelevance’…
Let’s begin. Out of 85 million who identify with the Anglican Communion, 25 million are represented by the Church of England. Yet denomination membership in the UK has halved from 3.4 million in the 1960s to 1.6 million in 2020 and regular attendance at Church of England services has fallen by 40% to 600,000 since 2009. Incredibly, only 14% of the UK’s population identifies with the Church of England. The grim list of statistics goes on.
The barrier to a solution to this decline, of course, is that numbers are religious power and of the 85 million Anglicans globally, many are based overseas with very different views on a variety of issues, most notably social liberalism. In an attempt to keep everyone on board, successive Archbishops of Canterbury have often sat on the fence on controversial issues to keep the church together. It therefore stands for less and less.
It has certainly hastened the decline of Anglicanism in the liberal West. It has led to the Church following rather than leading on a range of social issues, appearing out of touch, old fashioned and, in some cases, downright cruel. It is, in a damning recent quote, ‘drowning in its own irrelevance’.
And this has culminated in a hopelessly contorted position on gay marriage in churches announced this week. Whilst a majority of the UK population supports same-sex marriages wherever, including a majority who identify themselves as Anglicans, Church of England bishops, after five years of debate (!), have just refused to back gay marriage in churches but still back clergy blessings of civil same-sex marriages. This comes from an organisation that only allowed the ordination of women priests in 1992 and female bishops in 2014…
The distinctly anaemic current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, believes in keeping his views on same-sex marriage secret whilst in post. What sort of leadership is that?
Deep down, the Church of England’s approach is never going to solve the rift between theological conservatives and pro-equality progressives.
Despite the power in numbers of followers, is it time for honest debate and a possible Anglican split? The time for sitting on the fence is surely over on key issues wider society has already resolved in its own mind. Otherwise, the Church of England will continue to sink.
Inside Right Politics 