The current state of the Anglican Church of Canada

On church collapse, evangelism, and inclusion

What is the current state of the Anglican Church of Canada?

Last August, David Goodhew published a piece in The Living Church’s Covenant blog entitled “The Collapse of the Anglican Church of Canada,” in which he argued, as the title suggests, that its state is poor indeed. In fact, he argued the Anglican Church of Canada is the first province of the Anglican Communion to have collapsed. He pointed out a sharp decline in Average Sunday Attendance but stressed that attendance decline along with financial woes are “lagging indicators.” Rather, he argued that the “key metrics” of ecclesial health are baptism numbers and age profile – and that on these measures the ACC has already collapsed, with no recovery in sight. He blames this decline in particular on the Anglican Church of Canada’s progressivism, and in particular a focus on progressive causes which led to individual discipleship and church growth being minimized. The ACC may still have the outer trappings of a church – bishops, diocesan and national bureaucracies, church buildings – but apart from a few pockets of vitality, it is dead.

This piece, perhaps unsurprisingly, sparked a number of responses. Sharon Dewey Hetke sought to nuance parts of Goodhew’s analysis but fundamentally agreed with it. In response, she called for a return to a focus “on the gospel and the teaching of Scripture, not on secular causes” and noted with hopefulness that leaders in the Canadian church seem to be more committed to “core teachings like the necessity of faith in Christ, the Virgin Birth, and the physical resurrection of Christ.” Even in the light of overall collapse, she argued, there are opportunities to nurture the remaining pockets of vitality in the ACC. Cole Harten wrote about the Reimagining the Church commission of which he is a member, appointed to discuss needed changes to the national structure of the church. Such structural changes, he suggested, are necessary but not themselves a silver bullet for church decline. What we really need to do is to “stay focused on prayer, preaching, and teaching the Bible, focused on discipleship and evangelism, focused on Jesus” – and to want to grow, for the sake of lives transformed by the Gospel.

Most recently, a few days before Christmas, Emilie Smith published a response entitled “It’s Not Dead.” As the title suggests, this is the only piece to seriously take exception with Goodhew’s analysis. Of course, Smith grants that the statistics around decline are accurate, but she asks, “are these indicators a true picture of the status of the Anglican church within Canadian society? Or are they a sign of a repositioning of the place of all churches in a pluralistic, multicultural world?” She draws upon interviews with Archbishop Lynne McNaughton, bishop of the Diocese of Kootenay, and Bishop John Stephens of New Westminster to attempt to refute Goodhew’s argument. From McNaughton’s work in Kootenay, she argues that the church in Canada is not dying but thriving – albeit in a new way, renouncing nostalgia for the “false and unhealthy model” of the church of the “postwar baby boom” and instead paying attention to what God is calling the church to be today. She argues that Goodhew’s blaming of the ACC’s progressivism for its decline is vague and unclear, and in fact Canadian Anglicanism’s attempts to move beyond its colonial past in reconciliation with First Nations, to fully include women and LGBTQ people, and to advocate for creation are not distractions from the Gospel but a faithful living out of it. “The humble embracing of the matters of the world is the very heart of our mission,” she argues. The numerical decline, while real, does not seem to be an adequate measure of the ACC’s health – rather, its moving beyond the oppressive church models of the past and its new flexibility and attention to God’s mission of addressing contemporary social, political, and environmental crises is the real measure of our church’s thriving.

I wanted to write a little bit about this exchange, and especially the final piece by Smith. Because while I share with her some important commitments around inclusion in the church, her piece encapsulated many of the things that I find most frustrating about conversations concerning church decline: an attempt to reframe our church’s failure at making disciples as a new way of being church, a lack of clarity about whether or not being a Christian really matters, an abandonment of the church’s historic mission of Gospel proclamation, an unhelpful discussion of the relationship between various forms of liberalization and ecclesial decline. And so I decided to write a little bit about it:

The numbers are really bad.

First, I think it’s worth spending a little time with the demographic realities that we’re dealing with. I want to start with some graphs to make more concrete the scope of decline about which we are talking.

First, average Sunday attendance. Frustratingly, there aren’t publicly available, solid Average Sunday attendance numbers for the whole ACC until 1996.¹ But in that time, the decline is precipitous, as the graph below shows. Let’s set aside the 2022 numbers as likely still reflecting some temporary pandemic losses. From 1996 to 2019, average attendance declined by over 50%. I was born in 1991. In less than my lifetime, ACC attendance halved.

But I think that Goodhew is right that Sunday attendance is in some ways a lagging indicator. To understand the prospects of the church, as well as whether the church is carrying out its mission of leading people to new life in Jesus Christ, let’s look at baptisms and confirmations. Baptism gives us the number of people initiated into the Christian life. Confirmation gives us, at least in principle, the number of people committing to living out the promises made on their behalf in baptism; it has at least something to do with the church’s ability to nurture the baptized into a life of discipleship. Now, we should not be naïve about the fact that confirmation’s function as a coming-of-age ritual not infrequently eclipses its ostensible ecclesial function. That is, rather than marking the beginning of committed adult discipleship, confirmation all too often marks the end of one’s serious engagement with church. But certainly we should not expect that the church is adding more committed, faithful adult members than the number of confirmands in a given year.

Here we have data from 1959 on. In 2019 (again, before the pandemic), the ACC baptized 10% as many people as it did in 1959 and confirmed 5% as many. That is, one person baptized for every ten baptized some sixty-five years ago, and one person confirmed for every twenty. Just think about that for a minute. Imagine a confirmation class of twenty children at St Wherever’s in 1959. Twenty desks in a Christian education room. Now, today, on average, there would be just one confirmand. In 2017, 2019, and 2022, fewer than two thousand people a year made an adult profession of faith in the ACC, either as children raised in the church or as adult converts. There are a few more than two thousand congregations in the entire Anglican Church of Canada. This means that, on average, each congregation is baptizing around two people and confirming one a year. These are, to put it mildly, not the numbers that you can sustain a church (or, indeed, any mass membership organization) upon.

This is not just a return to the pre-baby-boom pattern, as Smith’s piece suggests. This is, as Goodhew puts it, an “extinction-level event.” If indeed making new believers and leading them in a life of discipleship is at the core of the church’s mission – as I believe it is – then it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Anglican Church of Canada has in fact collapsed.²

Yes, decline is a problem.

But of course, Smith acknowledges that the statistics concerning decline are rather grim; her fundamental disagreement with Goodhew is about how they should be interpreted. In fact, if I am understanding her rightly, she seems to be quite suspicious about the use of numbers like these as measures of whether a given church is healthy. The once-higher ACC numbers, she or her interviewees suggest, reflect a demographic blip (the baby boom) and were the product of an unhelpful (or even wicked) colonial model of being church. Indeed, our earlier numbers and strength were associated, she argues, with real failures of the church in living out its mission; she highlights the Anglican Church’s involvement in the (very real!) evils of the residential school system. Thus, she thinks, by forsaking nostalgic attachment to this earlier model, the church can go about fulfilling its God-given mission in pluralistic contemporary Canada. Numerical decline can coexist with a thriving church that is finding new and innovative ways to live out God’s mission in the world.

But unfortunately, if we think it matters that people are Christians, I don’t think we can avoid the truth that numerical decline is a disaster. Now, we can freely admit that in an earlier era where churchgoing was socially expected, people had motives other than pure commitment to God for showing up on Sunday mornings. But if we believe that God has appointed Word and Sacrament as the normative means by which the Spirit draws us to new life in Christ, then surely it is awful if fewer people are availing themselves of these means of grace. I expect that God can work with mixed and imperfect motives (if he doesn’t, I am in trouble, along with everyone else I know). If it matters that people are Christians, the number of people in our churches matters.

The Rev. Everett Lees (RIP) put it well in an interview I did with him last year:

I think that often talking about growth gets pooh-poohed in Episcopal Church circles. “You’re just about butts in pews; this is a business model of measuring success”, etc. I think some of that is just defensiveness. But I do think it is important to articulate theologically why church growth matters, what theologically sound church growth would look like. Would you say you have a theology of church growth?

For one, we can look at this scripturally. In the New Testament, there are a lot of times when the apostles are counting numbers, right? The Gospel writers tell us that there are this many people who are receiving at the miracle of the loaves and fishes. In the Book of Acts, every time the Spirit shows up, there’s this many people who turn and give their life to Christ. So I think we can say, biblically, that that numbers actually do matter. It’s not that numbers matter at the top line, so that we can just sit there and say, “well, we grew x number,” but it's that each one of those [numbers] is somebody whose life has been changed and transformed through a relationship with Jesus Christ and the power of the Spirit. [Each individual story of conversion] is hard to capture in ASA, but anyone’s story is still wrapped up in those numbers. So those numbers really do matter.

After all, why does it matter that someone follows Jesus? I consider myself evangelical in that I think that a relationship with Jesus Christ is actually really important. I think having a strong prayer life is important. I think being formed by the Scriptures is important, being transformed by the sacraments is important. Those things are so vital to the good of the world. Those things inform our social and public witness. I think we've created some false dichotomies, divisions between faith and witness or faith and action, and it seems like evangelism and church growth is always the one that loses.

I think that Fr Everett is exactly correct. If we think a relationship with Jesus matters, then numbers matter – and if numbers matter, then decline matters. No number of declarations about bold new ways of being church can escape the force of this argument. We are, as a church, failing to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ in a way that moves people to follow him. This is what decline means. And this is a problem.

But, frankly, even if instead you view the church’s mission as about seeking progressive change in the world than about such a suspiciously evangelical notion as fostering relationships with Jesus Christ (more on that shortly), these numbers are still disastrous. Simply put, you can’t mobilize your people to fight for justice if you don’t actually have any people. What good is an Anglican church taking bold stands for justice if such stands are immediately ignored because the church doesn’t really represent anyone? In my years in the labor movement, the union leaders I knew were always crystal clear that staying the same size (to say nothing of shrinking!) simply was not an option for us. It is precisely because we believed that the work of social change was so urgent that we were always concerned with numbers – because more people meant more power, which meant meant a greater capacity to win good wages and working conditions.

Evangelism, discipleship, and worship are at the heart of the Church’s mission.

This leads us to what I expect is the core of my disagreement with Smith. In response to complaints that the ACC’s embracing of various progressive social and political causes has distracted it from its mission, Smith argues that such causes are in fact the church’s mission: “The humble embracing of the matters of the world is the very heart of our mission,” she writes. Now, I don’t disagree that the church needs to address matters of justice, and I expect that she and I would agree about a good amount of what justice looks like. But I worry that this account of the church’s mission puts the cart before the horse, as it were, confusing an effect of the church’s mission with that mission itself.

The point of the church, I believe, is not first and foremost seeking the amelioration of social ills. There are many organizations far better suited to such a task than the church already working at this, and, frankly the way that the church spends the most of its time and energy (gathering for public worship) has no direct impact on such evils. Nor is the point of the church to provide a sort of nondenominational spiritual accompaniment, helping people make meaning as they pass from birth to death. No! The church is here to witness to God’s saving work in Jesus Christ, to point to Jesus as God’s free gift to us, to proclaim that in his life, death, resurrection and ascension is the world’s salvation. Jesus himself tells us to “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” That is, we are sent out to proclaim the Good News and invite people into a life of following Jesus in thankful response to what Jesus has done for us – a life of worship, discipleship, and good works.

Now, because Jesus is particularly concerned with the poor, the forgotten, the oppressed, we need to be too. Certainly the church must repent of its own participation in wrongdoing and seek to address evils where it finds them. But what the institution of the church is about is not primarily organizing or agitating for justice, worthy as such activity is. In fact, there’s a weird sort of ecclesiocentrism in the idea that churches qua institutions are the proper vehicle for such political engagement, rather than that churches should form people to participate well in those institutions actually set up for such work. I fear that it often reflects a sort of embarrassment about the otherworldly end of Christian teaching (eternal life!) and the fact that churches spend most of their time on things that are, from a purely immanent, secular perspective, largely useless. But without derogating the dignity of working for social justice or even denying that churches have a role to play in such efforts, I just don’t find in the New Testament the idea that addressing social and political ills is the heart of the church’s mission. And, perhaps paradoxically, I find that in looking at the history of the church, the church has been most effective in changing society when it sees such social change as a consequence of its proclamation of Jesus rather than the very substance of its mission.

In mainline contexts, we are often uncomfortable talking about evangelism or discipleship. Sometimes we seem to be nervous about the idea that it really matters whether someone is a Christian, so long as they have a source of meaning in life and are committed to the cause of justice (as I’ve written about before). But I just don’t think we can make sense of Jesus’ life and teaching without the idea that being a Christian matters, that Jesus calls people to follow him, specifically. If we (the Anglican Church of Canada, but also mainline Christianity more broadly) are going to survive – if we deserve to survive – we are going to need to recover the message that is a scandal to a pluralistic age: that in Jesus, specifically, uniquely, God’s nature and will are revealed because Jesus is God incarnate, that in Jesus alone can be found new life now and forever, freely given to all. And we are going to need to recover an understanding of the church as fundamentally about proclaiming this wonderful truth.

Does progressivism cause ecclesial decline?

Now, I want to turn to the part of Smith’s intervention which I do find helpful. I think she is right to note that Goodhew posits an association between a vaguely-defined progressivism and ecclesial decline without really demonstrating it.

But in fact, theological conservatism by itself is no silver bullet solution to ecclesial decline. As Smith notes, the Diocese of the Yukon in the Anglican Church of Canada – one of the dioceses whose decline Goodhew particularly focuses upon – is actually known for theological conservatism. Moreover, more conservative Canadian churches are not necessarily thriving. Roman Catholicism is struggling mightily, especially but not only in Quebec. The Lutheran Church of Canada (the LCMS in Canada) saw a 30% decline in membership from 2010-2022, although it is worth noting that baptism and confirmation numbers were quite steady from 2010 until the pandemic. And indeed, baptism and confirmation numbers have been in decline in the ACC since at least the early 1960s, a time which, if Pierre Berton’s The Comfortable Pew is to be believed, was hardly a time of extreme progressivism in the Anglican Church of Canada (although the fact that his book was commissioned by the hierarchy does perhaps hint at where the winds were blowing…). Changes in birthrates and a secularization that has affected all Christian denominations in Canada are important parts of the story; theological or social or political liberalism simply is not the sole driver of the emptying out of the Anglican Church of Canada.

Further, I would want to affirm strongly that a commitment to the full inclusion of women and LGBTQ people or a concern for reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Anglicans does not prevent one from taking the basics of discipleship and evangelism seriously.³ I think Goodhew is right as an empirical matter that many of the churches that are loudest in embracing these positions seem to struggle to articulate why being a Christian uniquely matters, and thus struggle with both evangelism and retaining their own members. I think we see this in Smith’s own response and her construal of the church’s mission. But I don’t think this is inherent in embracing any of these ‘progressive’ positions. Rather, the promise of what is loosely called ‘inclusive orthodoxy’ is a full-throated Christian proclamation, rooted in Scripture and the creeds, alongside precisely this sorts of commitments and concerns. I think that the onus is on those of us us who fall in this camp to, as it were, prove Goodhew wrong, to prove that the association between liberalization on certain secondary (though important) issues and decline into theological mushiness and irrelevance is not a necessary one.

What is to be done?

How, then, are we to do this? If our mission is to baptize and make disciples, and we take an honest look at our church and see that we are failing at this mission, what comes next other than despair? I of course don’t have all the answers, and I certainly want to affirm that it is possible to be faithful, be rooted in Christ, and still see decline. The headwinds of secularization are real, and even more than that, it is the Spirit who gives the growth; there is no perfect technique for automatically producing faithful disciples. But at the same time, I don’t think that evangelism and forming disciples is impossible in Canada (or in the United States or Europe) – such a claim actually strikes me as blasphemous, a denial of the Holy Spirit’s power to grant the gift of faith when and where he wills!

For a Canadian context specifically, this article in the Anglican Journal is a good place to start. It looks at examples of growing Anglican churches and notes that they share a strong desire to grow, a commitment that evangelism and growth really are central to their obeying Jesus’ command.⁴ It’s worth asking ourselves how we might nurture such a desire, such a commitment in ourselves and in our congregations.

I’d also like to recommend two books written by Americans on the basis of empirical research there. To be sure, the American and Canadian contexts are not the same – but I am confident that much of the advice applies across the border as well. Martha Grace Reese’s Unbinding the Gospel is the outcome of a Lilly Foundation study of evangelism in mainline church contexts specifically. She examines mainline churches that regular baptize adults. She focuses on this rather than just, say, membership gains because in churches that baptize infants, adult baptism indicates people that are actually converting to Christianity as adults rather than, say, simply moving from one church tradition to another. She explores the attributes that they share and offers advice to churches looking to train up people in sharing their faith. Growing Young, then, is not specifically about mainline contexts but broadly looks at what churches that attract a large number of young people do. I’m also very fond of this interview I did with Fr. Everett Lees before his untimely death, and The Living Church has a regular series called “In Search of Growth” looking at growing Episcopal churches.

I fear that Goodhew is correct and Smith is wrong: the Anglican Church of Canada is currently in a state of collapse. And where it leads the way, other provinces of the Anglican Communion are likely to follow. But we worship a God who heals the sick and raises the dead! And I believe that there is hope even for us. I pray that we avoid the soothing analyses that our precipitous decline is just a new way of being church, tell the truth about our state, and recommit ourselves instead to being a church centered on the proclamation of the Gospel, on evangelism, discipleship, and worship, not just for the sake of preserving our tottering institutions (many of them will probably fail regardless) but for the sake of welcoming people into saving relationship with Jesus Christ.

1. Frankly, spending time with ACC data has made me all the more appreciative of the Episcopal Church’s robust and transparent church data. For a while, the ACC measured Easter communicants, then began to move towards measuring average Sunday attendance but many dioceses failed to report numbers until, as noted above, 1996.

2. Incidentally, I took a particular look at the Diocese of Kootenay, because Smith’s piece lifts it up as an example of Anglicans thriving in a new situation. Unfortunately, if we grant that numbers have at least something to do with thriving, it is hard to argue with the statement made by a diocesan working group in 2022 that “the institution of the Diocese of Kootenay – as it exists today – has entered a palliative state.”

ASA held fairly steady from the 1970s into the early 2000s; we then don’t have data again until 2017 by which point it had declined by over 40%, and by 2022 it had declined by nearly half again (hopefully a good part of this is a temporary pandemic decline!). Baptisms, however, were tending towards decline from the beginning of the period we have readily accessible statistics for, the late 1960s. The diocese was baptizing just over one hundred per year by the break in the data in 2001; since 2017, no more than fifty people have been baptized per year and in fact the trend (admittedly without many data points) is sharply negative.

I do not mean to pick on this diocese; I expect its numbers are not much worse than average. And I don’t doubt that there are many faithful clergy and laity living Christian lives of faith and service there. Thanks be to God for them! But I don’t think it’s credible that (as Smith argues) this is where we should look to find a thriving Anglican future.

3. I appreciated Sharon Dewey Hetke’s hope, from a conservative/traditional perspective on sexuality questions, for “better relationships across disagreement” between conservatives and those who “by all accounts have a strong faith in Jesus and who uphold the Creeds but with whom theological conservatives will have serious disagreements — based on Scripture and received tradition — on sexuality and other issues.” I agree with her that this will indeed important for the future of the Anglican Church of Canada, and would suggest that the work of the Episcopal Church’s Task Force on Communion Across Difference might be a useful resource.

4. “That’s a key thing the congregations that are still growing have in common, says Bowcott: a theology of evangelism that prioritizes forging meaningful ties between a church and the community it serves.”