The Decline of the Church of England?

Is the Church of England in terminal decline? I think there are number of ways to answer that question. Decline is usually thought of in numerical terms, but I think there are other, perhaps more significant issues at play, like spiritual decline and decline in national and global significance. Reflecting on the recent data from The Bible Society's report "The Quiet Revival," it's interesting to try and get to the bottom of what the following quotes about attendance mean:

At the same time Catholicism has risen sharply and Pentecostalism has become the third biggest Christian tradition, with the share of churchgoers identifying as Anglicans dropping steadily. (p.6)

in 2018 Anglicans made up 41% of churchgoers, this has dropped to 34% in 2024 (p.18)

Perhaps this is particularly significant as the appointment of the new Archbishop of Canterbury has many questioning the future of the denomination and their future with the denomination.

Numerical

Let's consider the numerical question first. It's not hard to find statistics that point to a long term downward trend, e.g. from attendance of 1,370,400 in 1980 to 660,000 in 2015. More recently, the Church of England had a large drop over COVID. So you can find figures suggesting the drop between 2019 and 2022 was 131,000 and 2019 and 2023 was 169,000 . It's worth noting that it's quite hard to reconcile all these figures because of the methodologies used, but it's not too hard to see the general trend.

However, there are, I think, at least three important qualifiers to this story.

1. Official figues show that attendance has rebounded each year after COVID (https://www.churchofengland.org/media/press-releases/church-england-attendance-rises-fourth-year).
2. The data from the Quiet Revival is relative, i.e. the Church of England could be growing, but at a slower pace that the Roman Catholic and Pentecostal Churches. 
3. These figures don't really get to grips with how the changes work at a more granular level. For example, they don't answer even relatively broad categorisation questions, such as what is the general trend in liberal, catholic and evangelical churchmanship churches, or what is happening in urban, suburban and rural churches? The former of those questions, for me at least, begins to answer the question of what is happening to real faith in the Church of England. At least some anecdotal evidence from Church of England friends in evangelical churches points to growth and growth of the kind we see in the Quiet Revival data. The latter of those questions may be significant for a church that is committed to the whole geographical area of England. I.e. the Quiet Revival data suggests to me that the growth we're seeing might be focused in cities and larger towns and so the Church of England might have a much more diverse experience of growth and decline across different geographical areas.

Spiritual

In a sense, the much more significant issue is the growth or decline spiritually. This is very difficult to measure statistically and will, to some extent, be in the eye of the beholder. My personal view is that it is a complicated picture, but I would say the despite some positive signs, the spiritual decline is concerningly ingrained.

Let me note some of the positive trends that might be suggested first.

1. It has been noted that the radical unbelief of much liberal scholarship is less common than say the 1960-1990s. It is less common to hear completely unorthodox things on say the creedal statements now from Anglican bishops and scholars for example.
2. Evangelicals are more united and organised than they have been for some time with organisations like the Church Society for conservatives evangelicals and the Alliance for all evangelicals.
3. The strength of certain evangelical networks and thus (until relatively recently) the large number of evangelicals going through training and ordination has left a legacy of a lot of evangelical clergy in the Church of England. Just recently, an Oak Hill-trained member of the clergy, has been made a bishop.

However, in recent years there have been the obvious signs of spiritual decline.

1. The truth is that rebellion against the clear doctrine of the Bible (incarnation, Trinity, resurrection, etc.) has been replaced by rebellion against the clear ethics of the Bible. This is seen most obviously in the areas of sexuality and gender. This is just as much a challenge to orthodoxy, as it essentially undercuts the doctrine of sin and thus salvation. It is not unusual to see this rebellion among those taking the name evangelical and coming from some of the evangelical networks. We have had repeated experience of that in Rochdale.
2. With innovations such as the Prayers of Love and Faith and the liturgy around gender transition, unlike the doctrinal innovations of some bishops, clergy and scholars of the past, these ethical innovations have been codified into the denomination. It is much harder to appeal to the biblical foundations of the Church of England with these modifications.
3. Senior positions in the church have been closed to conservative evangelicals (by which I mean complementarian with respect to gender roles in church leadership) for some time. I.e. no conservative evangelical has become a bishop (apart from the flying bishop for conservative evangelicals) for ages. Given the current division in the House of Bishops on sexuality issues (which doesn't seem to be representative of either clergy or laity), it seems this might be extending to those who are conservative on sexuality, let alone the fact that the last three Archbishops of Canterbury (including Sarah Mullally) have been liberal on this issue. Even the one who apparently started orthodox (Justin Welby) changed his view.
4. These 3 points create serious problems for recruitment and retention of faithful ministers in the Church of England. This seems to be born out by the collapse of numbers in evangelical colleges (although I understand this is a broader problem than). In short, faithful people are less likely to train for ministry, less likely to stay within Church of England ministry and (I think)  less likely to stay faithful in Church of England ministry (it is debatable how possible this even is given the above).

As I say, my personal view is that this is a concerningly ingrained spiritual decline. The recent GAFCON statement separating them from Canterbury and the Church of England could be seen to take the same view.

National and Global Significance

One of the great values, especially evangelistically, of being in the Church of England was always that there was a certain national significance. As the established church, there was a certain affiliation of the population. This might be seen through sending children to Sunday School or the church school at the local level. At the national level, it was seen in  state occasions, the House of Lords and relevance to the national media.

In one sense, much of the formal structure of this hasn't changed and yet the decrease in affiliation to the Church of England across the population has inevitably caused the decrease of significance. We live in a culture where people attend church to get their children into school because of it's academic success or locality rather than send their children to a church school because they care about their child's school having a Christian ethos. At a recent Remembrance Day event I attended, it was quite clear that the (very large) crowd were attending because of their support for veterans, the services and from a sense of patriotism. It didn't extend to listening or even being particularly respectful to the vicar leading the event, which I don't think is something we would have seen a generation ago.

In the end, declining affiliation and attendance will lead to declining national significance.

Globally, the gap between the faith of the Church of England (and the western members of the Anglican Communion in general) and that of the Global South and especially those aligned with GAFCON has become so large that GAFCON has recently in effect said that the Church of England is no longer part of any true Anglican communion. That may be bold, but this separation has been going on for years. Despite repeated efforts to shore up the influence of the west, the majority of global Anglicans seem to have given up on Canterbury and the Church of England.

Is it right to talk of the decline of the Church of England then? Well from my analysis above, although in each case there are some complexities, the broad answer would be yes. The Church of England is suffering from numerical and spiritual decline and at the same time is declining in significance both nationally and globally. It seems unlikely that the new, liberal, Archbishop of Canterbury has any significant plan or resource to change that narrative, especially as she is first among equals of a majority liberal House of Bishops.