Why we're tempted to - and shouldn't - embrace decline

Or, what I learned at diocesan synod, with a little help from Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates

Go therefore 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. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

A few weeks ago, I heard Archbishop Shane Parker, Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, address the Anglican Diocese of Montreal’s Diocesan Synod.¹ One of the points that Archbishop Parker was keen to stress was that he thinks that the church should avoid the term growth in thinking about its goals. Growth, he argued, was unattainable, unrealistic for the Canadian present. What we should be aiming for instead is thriving, a goal which apparently has absolutely no reference to church attendance numbers.² This statement of the Archbishop’s then became something of a refrain for the rest of the meeting. People giving reports about this or that ministry would unselfconsciously use the word ‘grow’ to describe their goals but then would stop and correct themselves: “No, we shouldn’t be talking about growth, I mean we want to thrive.”

Needless to say, I found this all deeply depressing. As I’ve written at length before, I don’t really think you can make sense of the mission of the church without a call to evangelize, to share the good news of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.³ As Everett Lees put it in the interview I did with him a few years ago, before his untimely death, if we think that people having a relationship with Jesus matters, then numbers matter — and if we think that numbers matter, then decline is not something we can approach with equanimity. Given just how central the proclamation of the Gospel for evangelistic ends is to the ministry of Jesus and the early church, I’m not sure that a church that is not growing can really be said to be thriving, at least not in largely non-evangelized (or, rather, no-longer-evangelized) land like Canada.

Now, to be fair, given the demographic profile of Canadian Anglicanism, at one level the Archbishop is probably right that for the denomination as a whole growth is unlikely. Since the majority of our active membership, at least in every ACC church I’ve seen,⁴ is made up of people in their 60s to 90s, we will have to recruit a large number of new members just to break even as these people move towards their eternal reward in the next 30 years or so. But I’m rather horrified by the notion that the right response to this is to redefine success or the church’s mission in a way that has less and less to do with leading people to a living relationship with Jesus Christ.

I’ve kept mulling this over since it happened, precisely because Archbishop Parker’s statement here isn’t an outlier but is quite representative of a broader discourse about church decline in Canada specifically and in mainline Anglicanism more broadly. It is, to be quite frank, rather alienating for me to feel so out of sync with not only my church’s leadership but so many of my colleagues on this rather central question about our life as a church. I find myself often struggling to understand why this approach is so dominant, given how clearly unscriptural it seems to me to be.

I was helped a little bit by, of all things, a recent episode of the podcast The Ezra Klein Show in which Klein interviews Ta-Nehisi Coates in which the two discuss how contemporary American liberalism should respond to the Trump ascendancy.⁵ Now, for my purposes here I’m not too interested in the specifics of their debate,⁶ so much as the analytical strategies and affective postures they drew upon.

To summarize, for Klein, Trump’s 2024 victory is a sign of a deep crisis for contemporary American liberalism and the Democratic Party. More specifically, it is a failure, a sign that liberal elites (and Klein includes himself here!) had been doing politics wrong, and need to do something differently. And so this reading of contemporary American politics produces an ethic of responsibility. That is to say, for Klein, the humiliating Democratic defeat in 2024, or indeed any major political setback, is a call to strategize differently, to take honest stock of failure and figure out how to articulate a form of liberalism that can win.

Coates, however, sees things differently. He is skeptical of Klein’s tendency to read political defeat as failure. For Coates, the world is one in which the deep structures of reality (economic, social, affective) often determine political results just as much the specific decisions made by this political actor or that one. This, for him, is the story of the black political experience in the United States; both victories and defeats in the black freedom struggle often have less to do with the approaches of movement leaders than with forces entirely beyond their control. As a result, his posture is one of bearing witness, of standing up for justice and condemning injustice whether or not it is popular or a ‘good strategy’ in a given political fight. Sometimes you will win, sometimes you will lose; what you have to do is tell the truth.

Why do I bring this up? It seems to me that those parts of the contemporary church which have made peace with decline have tended to assume a Coates-ian analysis and affective style. Church decline, on this reading, isn’t necessarily a sign of the church’s failure. Rather, both growth and decline are often seen has having precious little to do with what churches actually do and to have more to do with broader social shifts. As the narrative goes, in the middle of the twentieth century, churchgoing was strongly socially incentivized and so people went; now the acid forces of secularization make religious belief incredible to most people and so people don’t go (especially in the Canadian context, references to the quite real evils committed by the church in Canadian history are usually added as additional factors keeping Canadians away). There’s really not much to be done about it; our task is simply to remain faithful, to provide Word and Sacrament ministry for whichever set of people continue to be drawn to the church, to keep the embers of faith warm until someday, perhaps, things will change.

What Coates has helped me appreciate is, first of all, what a morally serious position this can be. And I mean that in all earnestness; although I don’t entirely accept Coates’ read of the contemporary American political scene, it is clearly not just (as it is sometimes stereotyped) an evasion of responsibility. And so, by analogy, much as I sometimes worry that the posture of embracing the inevitability of decline is similarly a means to evade any fault or responsibility for our ecclesial collapse, Coates reminds me that it isn’t just or only this. There are, as Coates argues, ways that seeing every defeat as a failure that we must solve can distort our vision.

But secondly, and more critically, hearing Coates articulate his sense of his own political identity reminded me of the tempting affective power of this sort of stance, a stance that resonates suspiciously well with some of our favorite narratives of heroic last stands. See, for the the mainline churches, weird amalgamation of fashionable progressivism and hidebound conservatism that they are, treating decline as inevitable enables one to simultaneously inhabit right- and left-coded types of tragic heroism. You get to be the defender of old traditions and folkways, sadly watching the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the Matthew Arnold’s sea of faith, a last adherent of the Old Ways which the kids these days, too obsessed by their TikToks and brunches and immediate gratification, simply do not appreciate. And you get to be the prophet of social justice, standing unbending against those who would adulterate Christianity, be it with with conservatism or popular culture, and reading your unpopularity as a sign of your purity. Doing exactly what you’re doing now, you can be the Army of the West surrounded by Sauron’s forces at the Black Gate — you can be the Spartans at Thermopylae — you can so many strikers or civil rights advocates facing machine guns or fire hoses or police batons — simply put, you can stand athwart history yelling “stop”, and you can do it with 1960s folk revival songs on your lips. This is heady stuff.

But here’s the problem: what if your church’s decline isn’t so much because of vast, tectonic social forces beyond your control so much as poor preaching or an unwillingness to evangelize or the lack of a good visitor follow-up program?

One of the strangest things about hearing Archbishop Parker matter-of-factly state the growth is probably unattainable is that I serve a growing church. We aren’t growing by leaps and bounds, and to be sure we face the same basic demographic reality (an overwhelmingly elderly congregation) that the rest of the ACC does. But we are growing. People are finding their way back to Jesus after a long time out of the church; people are finding their way to Jesus for the first time and being baptized as adults. And we’re not doing anything particularly extraordinary either. Our preaching is Jesus-centered; our worship is reverent; we have a good number of social and Christian education offerings; we follow up with visitors. And…people are coming, and meeting Jesus, and having their lives transformed by the Spirit’s power.

Now I don’t mean to suggest that broad structural forces (of secularization, the decline of in-person community, etc.) matter not at all; I’ve read my Charles Taylor too! Nor do I mean to suggest that faithfulness necessarily leads to growth in every case. It is, after all, God who gives the growth. But I worry that we are, as a tradition, much too quick to adopt the tragic pose of heroic faithfulness against inevitable defeat rather than asking if there are simple things we could be doing differently that might (by the Spirit’s power) make a difference. I have a conversation that I’ll post here in the next few weeks with the Rev. Dr. Chris Corbin, about (among other things) some really exciting work that he’s doing tracking the churches in the Episcopal Church that are seeing consistent growth. It turns out that doing very basic, nuts-and-bolts things like a good visitor follow-up program well is strongly correlated with church growth.

And, of course, here’s the rub: I believe in the reality of mammoth social and cultural shifts that make the work of bringing people to Jesus harder, in some ways, in this time and place. But I also believe in the supernatural power of God to draw people to himself in every time and place, ours included. And I think if we really believe this, really believe that God can work in the world, we can’t just situate ourselves as tragic victims of the vicissitudes of fate.

On one hand, this is scary. It means that church decline may be, if not our fault, at least our responsibility — something that we need to be regularly praying about, begging God to change, asking for wisdom, courage, and discernment to know what we need to do to faithfully proclaim the message in this time and place. It means that church failure really is possible.

But on the other hand, it’s tremendously exciting. The doxology after communion in the Book of Alternative Services quotes Ephesians 3:20: “Glory to God, whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Glory to God from generation to generation, in the Church and in Christ Jesus, for ever and ever. Amen.” How amazing would it be if we approached questions of church growth and decline as though this were actually true?

1. For those who have had the good fortune of escaping such meetings, let me tell you: the work of middle judicatory church governance, while doubtless necessary, is rather stultifying. At this synod meeting, the only real matter of interest was a resolution from the floor calling on the diocese to divest from Israel. The debate was made somewhat ridiculous by the fact that no one was quite sure whether the diocese was in fact invested in any Israeli companies. But all the same, it was a morally serious discussion. The outcome was…less so. Any worry that the diocese could actually commit itself to a definitive, particular moral judgment was obviated by an amendment which changed the resolution to a universal call for the diocese to divest from all weapons manufacturers, everywhere in the world. The diocese already does not invest in the arms trade, so as far as I can tell this resolution will change precisely nothing about our investment practices — but it passed unanimously.

2. This is not a one-off comment from our primate, either; not an ill-chosen dichotomy deployed as part of some off-the-cuff remarks. He made much the same statement in an interview in Canadian Affairs shortly after his election: “As for the future of the Anglican Church, Parker said he will never use the word grow; those days are over.”

3. For one example, thinking about the ACC specifically, see here.

4. Unfortunately, the ACC does not collect or publicize the same amount of demographic data that the Episcopal Church does, so I’m forced to be somewhat anecdotal here.

5. Yes, dear reader, I confess that I listen to that particular exemplar of middlebrow US liberalism. In my defense, I think that Klein’s interviews on non-political topics are often quite arresting, and the political discussions are a good barometer of mainstream center-left opinion.

6. If you’re interested, I found neither of their positions particularly satisfactory. While I think that Klein is basically right to see the 2024 election in particular as a sign of weakness and failure on the part of elite American liberalism and the Democratic Party in particular, it is striking that the only thing that he can ever imagine doing differently is tacking right. Meanwhile, Coates’ stubborn refusal to surrender what he sees as core issues of justice, even when unpopular, is certainly laudable. But his refusal to admit the existence of a censorious style in elite American liberalism is a bit silly, and his tendency to ascribe liberal defeats almost entirely to deep-seated structural forces strikes me as an overreading of the evidence.