The Decline and Fall of the Anglican Church of Canada

Aug 26th, 2009
Anglican Essentials

One of life’s little mysteries is that the Anglican Journal is still delivered to my door for me to peruse and inwardly digest. There is an interesting number mentioned in the September edition’s editorial – I can’t point to it because it isn’t online yet. The editorial states that there are now around 325,000 people in Canada that attend an ACoC church twice or more per month; hitherto, I had only seen the 2001 figure of 658,000 quoted.

In 1961, 1.3 million people attended an ACoC church; that means the average yearly number of those exiting the ACoC is around 20,300 people. If we assume a constant number of people exiting per year, we end up with no-one left by the year 2025.

It could be argued that the rate of decline is a better measure and that might be slowing; there isn’t much reason to believe this though, since attendance was halved between 1961 and 2001 – 40 years – and halved again between 2001 and 2009 – 8 years. the rest