On blame vs responsibility

A subsidiary note on 'The Current State of the Anglican Church of Canada'

Just after Christmas, I published a piece here about the contemporary Anglican Church of Canada, in which I argued that ‘collapse’ was not too dramatic a word to describe its state. I’m very thankful for the conversation about it that followed, both here on Substack and in various social media venues. In this piece, I want to provide a brief note of clarification in response to an objection that is frequently made both about this piece and my other writings on church decline.

My writing evidently sometimes reads as though I am laying all of the blame on the church for its decline, as if I think that no explanation for mainline numerical collapse is needed or appropriate beyond our lukewarmness and apostasy. And my analysis thus seems to leave out some significant drivers of our decline, factors that have less to do with our own action or inaction than with much deeper intellectual, cultural, social, and political changes: secularization, changing immigration patterns, declines in birthrates, the decline of associational life, etc. And if indeed I am oversimplifying my analysis in this way, making our decline entirely our church’s fault, I risk making already demoralized clergy and lay leaders feel even worse by casting undeserved blame.

It’s an objection that I take seriously, and that it has been offered repeatedly is a sign that I been insufficiently clear in my writing. And so to rectify matters, I want to make a distinction between blame and responsibility and suggest that church decline is not entirely our fault, in a moral sense, but is nonetheless our responsibility.

Now, I do think that there are some reasons for our failure for which the church is indeed morally blameworthy. Readers of my work will be unsurprised by the litany here: a frequent failure to take evangelism and discipleship seriously,¹ our institutional refusal to hold our ministers accountable for proclaiming the doctrine they swore to uphold,² our inability at times to articulate why being a Christian specifically matters,³ and so on. These things are our fault, and we need to ask for God’s grace to repent and amend our lives.

That said, I also don’t deny that churches in the West are facing strong cultural headwinds that they weren’t a century or even fifty years ago. I have read my Charles Taylor, after all. Today, the default mentality among many people in the West is to find Christian claims quaintly anachronistic at best and harmful at worst. Churchgoing is no longer socially rewarded and in some spheres even somewhat socially sanctioned. Organizations of all sorts are struggling with declines in membership. Changes in birthrates mean fewer babies born and thus fewer new Christians. This is all true. Indeed, it may well be the case that the churches of a half century ago were not much better at the sorts of things which I described above as our blameworthy failures, but the broadly different environment allowed the churches to still have full pews and Christian education classrooms. And I freely grant that these broader changes are not the fault of the contemporary church in any straightforward way, morally speaking.

However, even if these changes aren’t our fault, I do think that figuring out how to address them, how to tell people about Jesus and bring them into a life of faith and discipleship even today, very much is our responsibility. Likewise, our posture towards the reality of decline is our responsibility. We can, and should, have a good analysis about the specific conditions that make Christian belief and practice hard today. But the question is what we do with that analysis.

I think there’s a temptation in a lot of mainline circles to mourn with Matthew Arnold the inevitable “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the receding sea of faith, to treat the decline and even disappearance of our churches as a tragic but unchangeable fait accompli. People openly look forward to a smaller church and argue (as I noted in my piece on the ACC) that its earlier numerical strength was just a reflection of its wicked cooperation with the powers that be. Talk of growth or renewal is often met with suspicion as overly evangelical, overly capitalist (the logic here is unclear to me), or both.

I don’t mean to be too hard on people who struggle with this sort of sad resignation. Oftentimes this attitude is, I think, a very understandable response to seeing attempt after attempt at doing new things and drawing in new people fail. But I don’t think ultimately that it’s an attitude we Christians can take. For, as I said in that earlier piece, if we really believe that it matters whether or not people are Christians, if our churches are really the normative means that God uses to bring people to new life in him, then the emptying out of our churches is a disaster. The reasons for the emptying may not entirely be our fault, but it is certainly our responsibility to think about how to address them.

As I’ve mentioned before, prior to ordination, I was an organizer with Unite Here, the hotel workers’ union in the US and Canada. Now, there were and are a lot of reasons that the US labor movement has been in long-term decline. These reasons often have very little to do with what one individual union did or failed to do, but with broader political and economic transformations — and if unions in the 1940s or the 1960s or the 1980s could have made better decisions, that’s hardly the fault of union leaders today. We Unite Here organizers were very clear about the hostile environment to union organizing. You’d go mad otherwise. But we emphatically did not (as, I regret to say, much of US labor more-or-less has) simply mourn the changing times and reconcile ourselves to declining into irrelevance. No: precisely because we believed that organizing workers into strong unions was vital both for the welfare of workers themselves and for the long term transformation of North American political economy towards something more just (most of us were socialists of one stripe or another), we took it as our duty to figure out how to organize even in difficult circumstances.

And I believe it is because of this conviction that Unite Here has consistently been a bright spot in the rather dim picture of the US labor movement. It remains a fairly small union, but it is one of the few that grows. It has organized the legendarily powerful Culinary Union in Las Vegas which represents workers in the Vegas casinos — and this despite the fact that Nevada is a “right-to-work” state with legislation particularly hostile to union organizing. It has organized low-wage, relatively unskilled workers who are typically understood as the most difficult to bring into unions. It hasn’t been easy, and it certainly hasn’t returned labor to its glory days of yore. But it really has made a difference.

What I wish for the mainline church today is a similar conviction of the utmost importance of figuring out how to evangelize and nurture Christian living today. Surely we should be at least as devoted to this as my old Unite Here comrades and I were to our work, if we really believe that new life in Christ is essential for both this life and the next! We can and should have a careful and realistic analysis of the challenges of the current environment, absolutely. Yes, we can and should recognize that it is entirely possible to do all the ‘right’ things and not be successful. But we should do this analysis not to let ourselves off the hook, but to make us more able to meet the challenges of our environment, trusting all the while that the Spirit can and does work new faith in people, even here. Because the current state of the church isn’t entirely our fault — but it is our responsibility.

May God give us all the grace to meet this responsibility and go with joy into his vineyard.

1. See, for example:

2. See, for example:

3. See, for example: