Church of England proposal seeks to rent out poorly attended churches, wait for "future growth'
To be debated at the Synod this week, the plan promotes allowing churches to “lie fallow,” suggesting that such a move will “enable the church and community to remain open to new opportunities for witness and service as circumstances change.” This concept is not about hibernation but rather a form of “waiting on the Lord,” allowing churches to reopen when the time is right.
However, this new approach comes against a backdrop of a steep decline in church attendance over the past decade. In June, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby characterized the drop in church attendance during his tenure as a personal “failure.”
In 2013, the average Sunday service attendance across the CofE was a little over 1 million. By 2019, this number had dropped to 854,000, a decline of over 15%. A further decline occurred in the wake of the pandemic, with a report by the Diocese of Oxford estimating that attendance in October 2022 was at 81% of 2019 levels.
The issue of declining numbers extends beyond church attendance.
According to CofE data analyzed by The Telegraph, 423 churches closed between 2010 and 2019, with nearly 1,000 churches closed from 1987 to 2019. This decline has brought the number of operational churches down to around 15,496.
Simultaneously, Christianity’s overall share of the population in England and Wales has dropped. According to the Office for National Statistics, Christians made up 46.2% of the population in 2021, a decrease from 59.3% in 2011.
https://www.christianpost.com/news/churc...d-out.html
To be debated at the Synod this week, the plan promotes allowing churches to “lie fallow,” suggesting that such a move will “enable the church and community to remain open to new opportunities for witness and service as circumstances change.” This concept is not about hibernation but rather a form of “waiting on the Lord,” allowing churches to reopen when the time is right.
However, this new approach comes against a backdrop of a steep decline in church attendance over the past decade. In June, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby characterized the drop in church attendance during his tenure as a personal “failure.”
In 2013, the average Sunday service attendance across the CofE was a little over 1 million. By 2019, this number had dropped to 854,000, a decline of over 15%. A further decline occurred in the wake of the pandemic, with a report by the Diocese of Oxford estimating that attendance in October 2022 was at 81% of 2019 levels.
The issue of declining numbers extends beyond church attendance.
According to CofE data analyzed by The Telegraph, 423 churches closed between 2010 and 2019, with nearly 1,000 churches closed from 1987 to 2019. This decline has brought the number of operational churches down to around 15,496.
Simultaneously, Christianity’s overall share of the population in England and Wales has dropped. According to the Office for National Statistics, Christians made up 46.2% of the population in 2021, a decrease from 59.3% in 2011.
https://www.christianpost.com/news/churc...d-out.html
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
