http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/anglican-church-faces-falling-membership-deeper-divisions/article14450164/?cmpid=rss1
Anglican Church faces falling membership, deep divisions
More than 15,000 packed Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens. Crowds thronged the lobby of the Royal York Hotel. Two hundred reporters scrambled for news and The Globe and Mail splashed the story on its front page.
Not for the Beatles or Muhammad Ali, but a congress of the Anglican Church.
It was late summer, 1963, and the Anglican Church, bastion of the old order, was at its demographic peak in Canada. Its leaders had influence and access to power, and nearly 15 per cent of the country claimed membership in the flock. The Toronto Congress, whose 50th anniversary was celebrated this week, was something of a high water mark.
Today, the church lives in reduced circumstances. The latest figures from the National Household Survey showed just more than 5 per cent of Canadians identify as Anglican, and only a third of those are actually on parish rolls. It is also a church divided. The church now grows primarily in the global south, where congregants have been alienated by the more liberal approach to same-sex blessings and women bishops in Britain and North America. The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby recently compared the church to a drunk man staggering ever closer to the edge of a cliff, threatened by “a vast fall into a ravine of intolerance and cruel exclusion.”
The contrast between then and now was placed in sharp relief this week as Anglicans gathered to discuss the significance of the 1963 Congress and the future of the church. A crowd of 150 or so, respectable by 2013 standards, turned up at Wycliffe College on the campus of the University of Toronto to hear a list of speakers that included several prominent bishops from Africa. “We’re interested in [the Congress of 1963] as a symbol of how different our world is now,” said George Sumner, principal of Wycliffe College. He chuckles at the thought: “Fifteen thousand people and the front page of The Globe is not our world any more.”
For the rest, see: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/anglican-church-faces-falling-membership-deeper-divisions/article14450164/?cmpid=rss1
Anglican Church faces falling membership, deep divisions
More than 15,000 packed Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens. Crowds thronged the lobby of the Royal York Hotel. Two hundred reporters scrambled for news and The Globe and Mail splashed the story on its front page.
Not for the Beatles or Muhammad Ali, but a congress of the Anglican Church.
It was late summer, 1963, and the Anglican Church, bastion of the old order, was at its demographic peak in Canada. Its leaders had influence and access to power, and nearly 15 per cent of the country claimed membership in the flock. The Toronto Congress, whose 50th anniversary was celebrated this week, was something of a high water mark.
Today, the church lives in reduced circumstances. The latest figures from the National Household Survey showed just more than 5 per cent of Canadians identify as Anglican, and only a third of those are actually on parish rolls. It is also a church divided. The church now grows primarily in the global south, where congregants have been alienated by the more liberal approach to same-sex blessings and women bishops in Britain and North America. The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby recently compared the church to a drunk man staggering ever closer to the edge of a cliff, threatened by “a vast fall into a ravine of intolerance and cruel exclusion.”
The contrast between then and now was placed in sharp relief this week as Anglicans gathered to discuss the significance of the 1963 Congress and the future of the church. A crowd of 150 or so, respectable by 2013 standards, turned up at Wycliffe College on the campus of the University of Toronto to hear a list of speakers that included several prominent bishops from Africa. “We’re interested in [the Congress of 1963] as a symbol of how different our world is now,” said George Sumner, principal of Wycliffe College. He chuckles at the thought: “Fifteen thousand people and the front page of The Globe is not our world any more.”
For the rest, see: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/anglican-church-faces-falling-membership-deeper-divisions/article14450164/?cmpid=rss1
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