Canada: The State of the Local Church, Part 1 - Is the local church disappearing?

January 13/2010

Excerpt:
As a general rule, the strategic plan asserted that to be sustainable, a parish requires a minimum of 100 active adult members and weekly attendance of 70. Financially, a parish with a building and one priest requires about $130,000-$150,000 annually, or about 130 parishioners contributing regularly.

Judged by these criteria, the plan revealed that almost three quarters of the parishes in the New Westminster diocese may be unsustainable: 25 percent have Sunday attendance of less than 50, and another 47 percent have 51-120 attenders.

What does this mean for the local church? Is it a dying institution? Are these disappearing local churches further evidence of the decline of mainline denominations? Is the neighbourhood church being replaced by some other form of church? the rest