The Living Church

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Church of England backs same-sex blessings and the elite press yawns, once again

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Church of England backs same-sex blessings and the elite press yawns, once again

What we have here is a battle between two relevant parables linked to a major religion-beat story.

The first is that classic ducks analogy. You know the one (care of UsingEnglish.com): " If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck"

In other words, if the Church of England narrowly approves the use of stand-alone (that’s crucial) rites to bless same-sex relationships, then that is the visual equivalent of same-sex marriage rites. Cue the “duck.”

It’s safe to say that a formal, honest change in Church of England doctrine on marriage would be the last straw for the stressed-out Anglican Communion causing a schism that would probably end up in the lap of King Charles III. At this point, Global South leaders — representing about 75% of Anglicans in pews — have already proclaimed that it's time to start cutting the ties between the "Canterbury Communion" and the rest of the Anglican Communion.

Does it matter that the technically evangelical Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby abstained from the vote? Click here for a conservative Anglican news-you-can-use collection of his actions on this issue in the past.

So the walking duck image is certainly relevant, in this case. However, this brings us to an image that I have used several times here at GetReligion — with Anglican news events, even. I am referring to the “lighthouse” parable and, dang it, it’s relevant once again

As the story goes, this lighthouse had a gun that sounded a warning every hour. The keeper tended the beacon and kept enough shells in the gun so it could keep firing. After decades, he could sleep right through the now-routine blasts. Then the inevitable happened. He forgot to load extra shells and, in the dead of night, the gun did not fire.

This rare silence awoke the keeper, who leapt from bed shouting, "What was that sound?"

Now, once upon a time, almost anything that Anglicans and/or Episcopalians approved on LGBTQ+ issues was automatically one of the year’s most important mainstream news reports. Ditto for actions by Pope Francis or Catholic leaders in once-important lands (think Germany).

Now, this no longer seems to be the case.


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Global South Anglicans cut their ties to Canterbury? Maybe that's a news story worth ink

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Global South Anglicans cut their ties to Canterbury? Maybe that's a news story worth ink

One of the most depressing things about being a reporter these days is trying to accept the fact that we live in a split, divided, warped news marketplace in which stories that, in the past, would have been Big News for everyone are now “niche” news items that half of our journalism culture feels totally comfortable ignoring.

This happens on the journalist “right” as well as the journalism “left,” or whatever word people are using instead of “left” these days.

This just in: One of the world’s great Christian traditions — the global Anglican Communion — ran into a wall late last week. The big idea: Anglican leaders from nations that represent about 80% of all Anglicans regularly IN PEWS — as opposed to being names on membership lists that may or may not be relevant — voted to cut the ties between Canterbury and the most of the Anglican Communion.

I’ve been watching for elite media coverage all weekend. Here is a Google News file with logical search terms. Please click that search, which was made Sunday night. What do you see? Obviously, at that moment, this was a “conservative” and/or “religious” media story.

You see, the Anglicans in the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) represent the growing (in some cases booming) churches of Africa, Asia and the Third World. They do not, however, represent the zip codes in which the major newsrooms of the Western world are located. They also do not represent the world’s richest Anglicans. Thus, to be blunt, what these “lesser” Anglicans say is NEWS is not news until the New York Times says that it’s news. Right?

With that in mind read the top of this report — long, but essential — from the venerable Anglican publication called The Living Church: “GAFCON Rejects Archbishop Justin Welby’s Leadership.”

On April 21, primates representing a large majority of the Anglican Communion formally repudiated the historic leadership of the See of Canterbury.


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Some trends in global Anglican Communion are starting to look rather Black and White

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Some trends in global Anglican Communion are starting to look rather Black and White

There was nothing unusual about Nigerian Archbishop Henry Ndukuba leading the 2021 dedication rites for Holy Trinity Cathedral Church, which was packed with Nigerian Anglicans and a dozen or so bishops.

But this historic service was held in Houston and the cathedral is not part of the Diocese of Texas or the U.S. Episcopal Church. Some clergy at this Church of Nigeria North American Mission event were recognized as Anglicans by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Some were not.

This puzzle became more complicated recently during Lambeth 2022, which Nigeria boycotted, along with the churches of Uganda and Rwanda. Other Global South bishops, during Lambeth standoffs with Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby over the status of doctrines on marriage and sex, declined to receive Holy Communion with openly gay and lesbian bishops.

"There is a profound asymmetric quality to the Anglican Communion, where the voice of the bulk of its membership is either absent or muted," said the Rev. David Goodhew of St. Barnabas Church in Middlesborough, England. He is the author of a series of articles about African Anglicanism for Covenant, the weblog of The Living Church, an independent Anglican publication founded in 1878.

"If one adds up the number of bishops who didn't share Holy Communion at Lambeth … that is a very large number," he said. "I have been startled by the number of descriptions that said this Lambeth was a success. I don't know how one makes that claim when it would appear the bulk of the Anglican Communion's bishops couldn't come together to receive Communion. That looks like a disaster."

Bottom line: Global South Anglicans are experiencing a "volcano of growth" and remain "at loggerheads" with the shrinking churches of the United Kingdom, North America and other western nations. While most Global South bishops serve growing flocks -- roughly 75% of active worshipers in the 77-million-member Anglican Communion -- many western bishops lead what Goodhew called "micro-dioceses" with under 1,000 active members or "mini-dioceses" with fewer than 5,000.

The Church of Nigeria, meanwhile, claims 17 million members and the Center for Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, near Boston, estimates active participants at 22 million. The other churches skipping Lambeth 2022 were Uganda, with 10 million members, and Rwanda, with 1 million members.

The Church of England remains Anglicanism's power hub. It has 26 million members, but 2019 weekly attendance was about 679,000 -- before the COVID-19 crisis.


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These stark numbers are headline worthy: Death of the Episcopal Church is approaching

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These stark numbers are headline worthy: Death of the Episcopal Church is approaching

Last November, I wrote a post for Religion in Public with the title, “The Data is Clear — Episcopalians are in Trouble.” In it, I used survey data to paint a portrait of a denomination that was on the brink of collapse.

One of the most troubling things about the future of the Episcopal Church is that the average member is incredibly old. The median age of an Episcopalian in 2019 was sixty-nine years old. With life expectancy around 80, we can easily expect at least a third of the current membership of the denomination to be gone in the next fifteen or twenty years. That’s problematic when membership has already been plummeting for decades.

But, I came across some data in the last few weeks that I just had to look at in more depth.

Before I get into the graphs I have to give some serious kudos to the data team that works for the denomination. I have looked at the websites of all kinds of Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian and Catholic traditions over the last few years. The Episcopalians blow them all out of the water in terms of accessibility and ease of use.

Don’t believe me? Well, they have an interactive dashboard of all their churches in the United States. You can sort based on a map, church size, or amount of offering. It’s incredible and can be accessed at this link.

Let’s get down to it, though. How many people actually attend an Episcopal church on an average Sunday? I grabbed a PDF of their membership reports from here and did some quick analysis of the national trends.

In 2009, 725,000 people attended an Episcopal church on an average weekend. According to their own data, the Episcopal Church has about 1.8 million baptized members. (The denomination’s membership peaked at 3.4 million in the 1960s.) Thus, about 40% of current members attend on a regular basis. That’s been declining steadily over the last decade. A typical year sees attendance dip by 25,000-35,000 people. That represents a 2-3% year-over-year decline.

By 2019, the weekly attendance was 547,000. In percentage terms, the Episcopalians have seen their attendance drop by a quarter in just the last decade.

But, that doesn’t tell the whole story about the future of the Episcopalians.


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Another look at the soul of Gen. Robert E. Lee, as well as the times in which he lived

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Debates about Confederate monuments remain in the news and there is little sign that this story is going away anytime soon.

In fact, it could broaden. For example, there are now questions here in New York City (where I am teaching right now) about the majestic tomb of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, because of anti-Semitism. As president, Grant repented of his actions. Meanwhile, defenders of Gen. Robert E. Lee insist that he repented of his sins against the Union and took strong stands for reconciliation.

This brings we to the think piece for this weekend, which probes deeper into discussions among Episcopalians about Lee and his faith. Earlier this week I praised a Washington Post report that paid careful attention to voices on both sides of that debate in Lexington, Va., where a parish is named in Lee's honor, on the edge of the campus of Washington and Lee University.

That headline: "This is the church where Robert E. Lee declared himself a sinner. Should it keep his name?" A key paragraph:

Church debates about the name have focused on the fact that Lee chose after the war ended not to continue -- as some Southerners wanted -- an insurgency, and instead to move on, “to try and rebuild and reconcile and repair damage he had no small part in creating,” said David Cox, a historian of Lee, a former rector and current member of the parish.

An independent journal for Episcopalians, The Living Church, took the discussion of some of these issues further with an interview with Father Cox. The byline on "Drowned Out by Outrage" will be familiar to longtime GetReligion readers, since Doug LeBlanc was the co-founder of this weblog nearly 14 years ago.

So who is Cox? He is the author of "The Religious Life of Robert E. Lee," which was published in April by Eerdmans. Here is a passage that sets the tone:

When members of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis marched through Charlottesville in a torchlit parade and chanted “Jews will not replace us,” Cox said, “that had nothing to do with Lee.”


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