Canada is the Anglican Church’s Titanic

The Anglican Church of Canada (ACC) has collapsed, according to David Goodhew, a long-time researcher of Anglican Communion statistics and a visiting fellow of St John’s College, Durham University. “New numbers for the Anglican Church of Canada (ACoC) are out, and they show that Canada is the first major province of the Anglican Communion to have collapsed,” Goodhew writes in Covenant, a bl;og published by Living Church magazine. He describes the ACC as Anglicanism’s Titanic: “Some years ago, it hit the iceberg. Since then, it has listed violently in a progressive direction. Now, it is sinking beneath the waves. “

“Here are the data for average Sunday attendance:”Here are the data for average Sunday attendance:
• 2001    162,000
• 2019    87,000
• 2022    65,000

“These are truly remarkable numbers. A church already in steep decline saw that decline speed up during COVID. Attendance in 2022 was 40 percent of attendance in 2001. And between 2019 and 2022, the ACoC lost a quarter of its Sunday attendance.”

Goodhew’s numbers come from Neil Elliot, stats officer for the Anglican Church of Canada, who has worked hard to improve that church’s reporting and an article in the Anglican Journal, the official national newspaper of the church.

Baptisms have fallen by 75 per cent since 2001. This is a church with few children.

“First, this is not a church ‘in decline’ or ‘close to collapse,'” Goohew writes. “This is what collapse looks like. Ecclesial collapse includes large falls in attendance and financial woes. But these are lagging indicators. The key metrics are the number of those being baptized and whether a denomination has a healthy age profile rather than one in which the bulk of congregations are of a certain age. By these indicators, ACoC has already collapsed. It is far too convenient to say “numbers don’t matter” or “decline is inevitable” or that “the kingdom” can be advanced even when congregations are shrinking.

“Second, all the trends show that this decline will continue….

“A church can have structural functionality — bishops, synods, cathedrals. But when its congregations disappear, it ceases to exist meaningfully. The Bishop of the Yukon attended and voted at the latest Lambeth Conference, yet the Sunday attendance of the entire diocese of the Yukon was 191 as of 2017. It is likely smaller now. There had been predictions that the ACoC would collapse by 2040. Those predictions were overly optimistic. The ACoC has effectively collapsed now.”

Goodhew attributes the decline to the church shifting left. In 2002, the year before Canada’s southern neighbour, the Episcopal Church, elected the Anglican Communion’s first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson, the Diocese of New Westminster (centred on Vancouver) adopted same-sex blessings, which prompted a walkout led famously by J. I. Packer.

“Canada’s determination to be in the vanguard of progressive theology has been shown conclusively to lead to congregational collapse.

“The late Tim Keller commented that the key cause of mainline decline was the tendency to relegate the gospel to second place behind other matters. Canadian Anglicanism is an example of exactly that.”

There’s been pushback from some Canadian correspondents at the Thinking Anglicans website.  

One objection is that a similar decline has occurred in two adjacent dioceses (regions) in Eastern Canada. One of these, New Brunswick, does not have same-sex marriage, but its neighbour, Novascotia-Prince Edward Island, does.

Another suggested cause of decline is the Indian residential school scandals, which bankrupted one diocese and tarnished the church’s reputation. One correspondent pointed to the collapse of evangelism as another reason for the rapid decline. Rising secularism has also been seen as a possible cause of decline.

Goodhew points out that the fledgling Anglican Network in Canada, a diocese of the breakaway Anglican Church in North America, “is growing and has a significant presence in some areas (notably in Greater Vancouver, where it may have overtaken official Anglicanism). But nationally, it remains relatively small and has no presence in many areas.”