Anglicans are wrestling with 'climate change' in their pews: Will they adapt and survive?

Journalist Michael Kinsley famously added a twist to American politics when he redefined a "gaffe" as when "a politician tells the truth -- some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say."

As the Rev. Neil Elliot of the Anglican Church of Canada discovered, this term also applies to religious leaders.

After seeing 2018 General Synod reports, the denomination's research and statistics expert produced an analysis that included this: "Projections from our data indicate that there will be no members, attenders or givers in the Anglican Church of Canada by approximately 2040."

Reactions to his candor varied, to say the least.

"I think of it very much like … people's responses to climate change," said Elliot, updating his earlier remarks in a video posted by Global News in Canada.

Signs of church "climate" change? In the early 1960s, Anglican parishes in Canada had nearly 1.4 million members. But that 2018 report found 357,123 members, with an average Sunday attendance of 97,421. The church had 1,997 new members that year, while holding 9,074 burials or funerals.

Canada's national statistics agency reported that 10.4% of all Canadians were Anglicans in 1996, but that number fell to 3.8% in 2019.

People have one of three reactions when faced with these kinds of numbers. The first "is denial. People are saying, 'We're, we're … It's not happening,' " said Elliot, while counting the options on one hand. "Then there's people who say, 'We can stop it.' And then there's people who say, 'We can adapt.'

"The adapt language is much more rare and I'm only starting to hear it on the media in the last few months. … That's what I'm trying to get us to do within the Anglican church. It's, 'How do we adapt to it?' not, 'How do we stop it?' or … people burying their heads in the sand."

Years ago, while I was still an Episcopalian, I tried to get a circle of clergy and journalists to collaborate on what I thought would be a classic work of religion-marketplace humor.

The basic idea: The creation of the definitive collection of jokes about Episcopalians and their unique approach to Christian life and culture. As one priest put it, the Episcopal Church is “NPR at prayer.”

The book never happened, but I learned lots of jokes that I didn’t know in all of the basic categories, from “how many Episcopalians does it take to change a light bulb” quips to jokes featuring “Episcopalians at the gates of heaven and/or hell.” But here was my favorite joke, as I heard it in 1993 (but with a few updates):

The year is 2030 … and two Anglo-Catholic priests in the back of National Cathedral are watching the Episcopal presiding bishop and her incense-bearing wife, an archdeacon, process down the aisle behind a statue of the Buddha, while the faithful sing a hymn to Mother Earth.
"You know," one traditionalist whispers, "ONE more thing and I'm out the door."

The whole point was that it’s hard for religious communions to die. In the end, there are always reasons for true insiders to hang on and hope the pendulum swings back their way.

But I remember that someone else had a joke — I don’t remember how it went — that centered on the idea that, after a few more decades of declining statistics, Anglican churches would be empty, except for elderly clergy at the altars whose salaries would be paid with endowment funds.

That joke cuts to the heart of the news story discussed in this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).

As background, here is the top of the Religion News Service story I critiqued in an post with this headline: “Canada's Anglicans are vanishing and RNS can't find any conservatives to debate the reasons why.”

(RNS) — A “wake-up call.”
That’s what Archbishop Linda Nicholls, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, called a new report showing there may be no members left in the mainline Canadian denomination in 20 years.