As the General Synod of the Church of England gathered once more in London on Friday, Rev Ian Paul, a member of the Archbishops’ Council challenged the agenda in forceful terms.
Suggesting that Synod had made “avoiding reality a little bit of an art form,” he claimed that the Church of England is “standing on the point of a precipice”. A precipice which could leave the subsequent generation with nothing but a “heap of ruins” to fight over.
Rev Paul suggested that the last 10 years of discussions about sexuality have left the Church “more anxious, more divided and more uncertain than ever before,” and he held out little hope that one other eight hours of debate – as scheduled next week – would offer any answers.
“Fiddling while Canterbury burns doesn’t even capture it,” he said, pointing to the true problem of a Church on the point of disintegration.
“Over the identical 10 years adult attendance has declined by 30 per cent, child attendance by 40 per cent,” he said.Â
He said that “there’s a really real prospect that ministry goes to completely collapse in large parts of the Church of England inside the subsequent five years.”
However, he was clear that decline was not inevitable.
“The Church in England is just not in decline, other churches are growing,” he identified. “But we’re reluctant to learn from them. We now represent lower than 18 per cent of all Christians in a church on a Sunday.”
This view is backed up by the Bible Society – who found that the proportion of individuals attending church modified little or no between 2018 and 2023. Their research showed 7% of the population attend church weekly and one in ten attend once a month.
In an article for Baptists Together, Mark Woods, a Baptist minister said, “In terms of overall numbers, the Church in England and Wales is just not declining. But it’s changing shape, and increasingly less white.
“However, when historic denominations extrapolate a narrative of inevitable decline from their very own difficulties, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy – who desires to take a cruise on a sinking ship?”
This is not the primary time Rev Paul has tried to attract Synod’s attention to those difficult statistics, neither is it prone to be the last. The query is whether or not anyone will listen.
“Brothers and sisters,” he finished, “if we proceed to avoid this reality, if we proceed with this fruitless conversation, that might be the legacy we leave – the Church of England – a heap of ruins for the subsequent generation. It’s as much as us.”
