This is highly significant, both for Canada and for other Western provinces following its trajectory.

The Data

Here are the data for average Sunday attendance:

2001    162,000

2019    87,000

2022    65,000

These are truly remarkable numbers. A church already in steep decline saw that decline speed up during COVID. Attendance in 2022 was 40 percent of attendance in 2001. And between 2019 and 2022, the ACoC lost a quarter of its Sunday attendance.

There is online worship, but this remains extremely hard to measure, and other metrics tell a similar story.

The church is not only smaller, but is also much, much older. Here is the data for baptisms — and it is worth looking at a longer run of years to see the true extent of the fall:

1961    44,416

1981    23,334

2001    13,304

2019    4,784

2022    3,583

By 2022, the number of those ACoC baptized has fallen by 90 percent compared to the number it baptized in 1961. And the pace of decline has grown more rapid in recent years. Baptisms have fallen by nearly 75 percent since 2001. ACoC congregations now have very few children in them and very few people coming to faith in them. The collapse of baptism is an extinction-level event.

Some will reply, “But what about St. Whomever’s?” Of course, there are pockets of vitality in the ACoC. Not every church will shrink at once. But the overall trend is overwhelming.

Most of the ACoC church buildings in use in 2000 are still in use today. But the church is not primarily masonry, and baptisms are a fundamental metric of its vitality. There have been debates about when the ACoC will cease to exist. In baptismal terms, it no longer meaningfully exists now.

What Is the Truth ?

First, this is not a church “in decline” or “close to collapse.” This is what collapse looks like. Ecclesial collapse includes large falls in attendance and financial woes. But these are lagging indicators. The key metrics are the numbers of those being baptized and whether a denomination has a healthy age profile, rather than one in which the bulk of congregations are of a certain age. By these indicators, ACoC has already collapsed. It is far too convenient to say “numbers don’t matter” or “decline is inevitable” or that “the kingdom” can be advanced even when congregations are shrinking.

Second, all the trends show that this decline will continue.

Third, the New Testament places a hugely high value on the local church. The same is true of the vast majority of the Christian tradition. To assume that congregations are dispensable, or that their value lies primarily as a base for activism for other causes, chimes with secular individualism, but it is the antithesis of Scripture and the historic teaching of the church.

Fourth, the Christian church has consistently taught that congregations are the primary basis for mission. If you want to change a place, you form a community of believers in that place. Not external, parachuted in; but incarnated, enfleshed, there. Not the least of the tragedies related to the ACoC’s collapse is the effect this has on other aspects of kingdom ministry — such as serving the poor and seeking the welfare of the wider community. Empty pews disable such ministries.

Some Signs of Hope

There is much more to Canadian Christianity than the ACoC. There has been rapid population growth in Canada, largely fueled by migration. Coupled with a declining birthrate in the existing Canadian population, this means Canada is changing very rapidly. Canada has one of the highest rates of immigration in the Western world. And migrants to Canada are much more favorable to Christianity than its existing population. The bulk of black migrants (74%) describe themselves as Christians. This is helping fuel the growth of many Canadian churches.

Canada is home to many migrants from countries with strong Anglican churches, such as Nigeria, Ghana, and Congo — yet African Anglicans form a tiny part of the ACoC. Canada’s massive immigration is a potent fuel for congregational life across the nation, even if this has passed by the ACoC.

Linked to migration (though not wholly due to it), there have been large rises in the numbers of Canadians who are Orthodox or belong to non-historic denominations. Census data show that Roman Catholicism in Canada has declined, but noticeably less than the ACoC, as a percentage of Canadians. Roman Catholicism has shown a degree of resilience that the ACoC has lacked.

Canada’s Christians[2]

2001                            2021

ACoC                          2.3 million                  1.1 million

Catholics                     12.8 million                10.8 million

Orthodox                     495,000                       623,000

Other Christians          780,000                       3.3 million

Canada has seen much secularization. But many churches in Canada are doing much better than the ACoC.

What of the Anglican Network in Canada (ANIC)? It is growing and is a significant presence in some areas (notably in greater Vancouver, where it may have overtaken official Anglicanism). But nationally, it remains relatively small and has no presence in many areas.

Conclusions

It is routinely said that churches must “move with the times,” that adapting faith is “the only way to connect with younger generations.” The ACoC shows this to be untrue.

Canada is the Titanic of the Anglican Communion. Some years ago it hit the iceberg. Since then, it has listed violently in a progressive direction. Now it is sinking beneath the waves. The figures are deeply sad, but they do not lie. And Western Anglicans would do well to learn from Canada’s baleful example. Much of Western Anglicanism is heading in the same direction, unless it changes course.

A church can have structural functionality — bishops, synods, cathedrals. But when its congregations disappear, it ceases to exist meaningfully. The Bishop of the Yukon attended and voted at the latest Lambeth Conference, yet the Sunday attendance of the entire diocese of the Yukon was 191 as of 2019. It is likely smaller now. There had been predictions that the ACoC would collapse by 2040. Those predictions were overly optimistic. The ACoC has effectively collapsed now. It contains the exterior façade of a denomination, but not the interior life that congregations constitute. There are sparks of life in the ACoC, but if you look at Canada as a whole, it has collapsed.

This is a cause for reflection, not just for Canadian Anglicans, but for all of Western Anglicanism. Canada is the first major Anglican province to collapse. But it is unlikely to be the last. Decline elsewhere — notably in Wales, Scotland, parts of England and the United States — has a similar trajectory. In these provinces, large chunks of the country have no meaningful Anglican presence, yet cathedral and diocesan posts proliferate.

Canada’s determination to be in the vanguard of progressive theology has been shown conclusively to lead to congregational collapse.

The late Tim Keller commented that the key cause of mainline decline was the tendency to relegate the gospel to second place behind other matters. Canadian Anglicanism is an example of exactly that. We can debate the merits of its stance on a wide range of issues, but what is clear is its adoption of progressive causes sidelined its attempt to call people to follow Jesus, and the formation and nurture of congregations.

Churches that intend to grow tend to grow. Canada shows that the opposite is also true. Churches whose primary intention is something other than the nurture of individual faith and congregational growth tend to decline. Making central the proclamation of faith to individuals and the growth of congregations does not guarantee congregational growth. But it is a fundamental first step to congregational growth. And, without local communities of Christians, the church ceases to exist.

[1] The most recent data come from the important work of Neil Elliot and in an article by Matthew Puddister in Anglican Journal, May 1. They are also discussed in the Anglican Samizdat blog run by David Jenkins. Neil Elliot’s blog, NumbersMatters, is also a mine of information.

[2] These numbers come from census data, which measure affiliation (those who self-identify as members of a particular faith/tradition). Affiliation is not a measure of formal membership, let alone regular attendance.

“Good blazing fires” — that’s one thing that helps if you are down. It is part of a witty, wise discussion of how to face down depression by the Anglican cleric Sidney Smith, whose life ran across the 18th and 19th centuries.

When we face an epidemic of mental illness and a febrile church, Smith’s advice and sense of humor repay study. In recent years, Anglicans have much over which they could get depressed. Smith helps us about face life’s ups and downs with faith.

Smith on Depression

Smith wrote to a friend, Lady Georgina Morpeth, who was suffering with what we would now call depression and listed 20 things that would help.

Alongside “good, blazing fires,” he recommended amusing books, seeing good friends, being outdoors as much as possible and keeping busy. He praised “short views of human life — not further than dinner or tea.”

There is a gentleness to Smith’s advice. “Don’t be too severe upon yourself, or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice.” He urged the recipient of his letter to ensure that the room where she usually sat was a pleasant place and that she avoid inactivity and try deliberately to “do good.” All valuable advice — active benevolence is a serious help in combatting low spirits. And solid common sense was spliced with gentle wit: “Don’t expect too much from human life — a sorry business at the best.”

Shrewdly, Smith advised, “Make no secret of low spirits to your friends, but talk of them freely — they are always worse for dignified concealment.” And there is a distinctly modern feel to his urging that Georgina “attend to the affects that tea and coffee produce upon you.”

And underneath this gentle, wise, warm letter was a darker side: “Lady Georgiana, Nobody has suffered more from low spirits than I have done — so I feel for you.” For all Smith’s geniality, he knew the curse that depression is — which is why he could be shrewd on how to fight it.

And beneath all was a firm faith. “Be firm and constant in the exercise of rational religion,” he advised his depressed friend. Smith’s playful wit should never be mistaken for skepticism. In a century when unbelief was becoming chic, Sidney Smith was solid on the need for faith and the need to exercise it.

Conclusion

I had grown tired of the present with its anger and fear and lies. I was losing faith in the future. I wanted to delve into our deep past, to be buttressed and braced by history.[1]

So writes Peter Ross in his recent volume, Steeple Chasing. We can learn from those who came before us. Sure, they had their failings (and Smith’s are easy to spot from the distance of two centuries). But people like Smith lived in difficult and confusing times, and when they showed strength, they give us a steer in the difficult and confusing times in which we find ourselves.

One of the grim characteristics of our age is how desperately unfunny it is. Anglicans should pray for a second Smith, to puncture the egos of all convinced of their rectitude.

Recovery of Smith helps Anglicans learn to laugh at ourselves. With him as our companion, we grow smaller, wiser, and happier.

And when he makes us laugh, especially when we remember to laugh at ourselves, he gives us a precious inoculation against the self-important indignation that so disfigures our age and, at times, the Anglican Communion.

[1] Peter Ross, Steeple Chasing: Around Britain by Church (Headline 2023), p.5.

The Church of England is beginning to recognize that the years of COVID had a hugely corrosive effect. The church lost a fifth of its congregation members in 2019-22; more, if we just count children and families. So, quo Vadis, where does the church go next? Well, there is bad news and good news.

The Bad News

The COVID effect is substantial and long-lasting. Drilling down, there is a further cause of deep concern: vocations to ordained ministry. During the pandemic, the number of people starting training for ordained ministry has fallen dramatically. It is about 40 percent down in 2023 compared to 2019.

For stipendiary ministry, the situation is close to collapse.

Stipendiary Ordinands Starting Training in the C of E

2017    370

2018    399

2019    403

2020    417

2021    321

2022    263

2023    229

The number starting stipendiary ministry was 417 in 2020, but only 229 in 2023. So, the number starting training for stipendiary ministry fell by nearly half in three years, 2020-23. Non-stipendiary (self-supporting) ordinand numbers have been hit less hard but have still fallen by about a third.

Stipendiaries tend to be younger and non-stipendiaries tend to be markedly older, so these figures mean a further aging of the clergy, who were hardly brimming with youth to start with. This dramatic fall continues. There is little sign of any post-COVID rebound. And the conflict over sexuality in is further depressing vocations, so the decline may grow worse in 2024.

The consequences will not be felt immediately, but in five to 10 years the collapse of stipendiary vocations is utterly toxic for local churches. Without a rapid rebound, these figures mean far fewer curates from 2025-26 and far fewer incumbents from 2028 onward. There are going to be some mighty short short-listing meetings in future. To mitigate this stark picture requires action, now, in 2024.

And there are other profoundly serious consequences.

There has been a large drop in those training full time, and the drop in full-timers affects theology. Those who train for ordination part time do a fantastic balancing act, juggling study with work and family commitments. But far fewer part-time ordinands have the time to learn Greek or Hebrew or dig deep into doctrinal or historical theology. It would be an entertaining, though depressing, exercise to discover how many current ordinands can spell Irenaeus, let alone articulate what he said. The church’s ability to replenish its ordained ministry is in steep decline, but so too is its future clergy’s ability to do theology.

Then there’s geography. The overwhelming majority of stipendiary candidates are training in the golden triangle of Oxford, Cambridge and London. Far fewer stipendiaries train in the midlands and north of England (where roughly half of the English live). Only 129 out of 592 (just over 20%) stipendiary ordinands were training north of Cambridge in 2022-23. It has long been more difficult to find stipendiary clergy to serve in the north of England; that is likely to grow much worse, since people tend to take up posts in regions nearer to where they trained.

The main causes of the slump in ordinand numbers is the combination of COVID with the profound divisions over the Living in Love and Faith program. Before 2020, ordinand numbers were gently rising and growing younger, on average. A church facing sharp decline due to the pandemic has torn lumps out of itself dealing with a profoundly divisive matter at the same time. We should not be surprised that the numbers of those offering themselves for ministry in that church then dropped off a cliff.

Before the pandemic, the church had been seeing a growth of ordained vocations and a slightly younger age profile of ordinands, so things could change in the coming years. However, the situation now is far worse than before COVID. The church is markedly smaller, markedly older, and markedly more divided.

The church faces a choice between finding some kind of modus vivendi on sexuality or the possibility that this near-collapse in stipendiary ordained ministry becomes the new normal. Any modus vivendi requires a recognition that the church is deeply divided and people of both integrities must have room to hear and follow a call. There is no point telling orthodox ordinands to become liberal or telling liberal ordinands to become orthodox. We have to find a way to respect the other’s theology and ministry and leave the future trajectory of the church to God. And we’ll need the structures to enable that to happen. And if we can’t do that, there may not be a future trajectory of the Church of England.

At a recent ordination of priests in an English diocese, the diocesan newspaper noted in passing that the average age of candidates was 70. This is where we are headed, if nothing is done.

Some may opine that we can get by with fewer, older non-stipendiary clergy. This is delusional. Stipendiary clergy, especially younger stipendiary clergy, are vital if the church is to connect with those under pensionable age, if the church is to arrest its decline and begin to grow. If the current trends persist, the church will, in most places, be a tiny remnant or be wholly absent in 20 years.

The Good News

Having spilt much ink on church numbers, I have to say that these data are as bleak as I have ever seen. But there are some reasons to be cheerful.

Let me take you to Glasgow, the largest city in Scotland and one of the largest urban areas in Britain. Church of Scotland parishes in Glasgow are shrinking dramatically, as are most other historic denominations (including Glasgow’s Anglican churches). Contemporary Scotland is cited by academics as an example of unprecedentedly rapid secularization.[1]

But a recent Aberdeen doctoral dissertation by Sheila Akomiah Conteh showed that 110 new churches were founded in Glasgow between 2000 and 2016. Their Sunday attendance is 9,000 or more people (incidentally proving that the current official attendance data for Scottish churches are a serious undercount).[2] These new churches are highly diverse ethnically and, in the main, growing. Most are more robust than many historic congregations, and look likely to be around a good while. Judging by the baleful trajectory of the historic denominations, these new congregations will become more and more significant for Christian witness in Glasgow as the years progress.

Alongside other studies of cities like London and New York,[3] Glasgow shows that what goes down can go up.

Quo Vadis

The Church of England took one heck of battering from COVID. It lost one in five of its Sunday worshipers. Children and families were hit even worse. That battering includes a deep decline in numbers of ordinands and the near-collapse of stipendiary ordinands, made worse by the division from debates over sexuality.

So, quo Vadis? One option is to treat decline as inevitable, as the result of ineluctable social forces over which we have no control. This has a seductive attractiveness. If we think we can do nothing about decline, we can lie back, with a comforting glow of martyrdom inside, relaxed in the belief that we are being faithful in unpropitious times.

A second option is to look hard at what has happened. There were many good things going on in the Church of England pre-COVID. They could sprout up again. We should also look hard at what is happening to the church due to the ongoing conflict over sexuality. The church’s infighting will lead to its oblivion in many places if it continues as it is. There are many keen younger Christians, who could lead churches. But they are likely to lead churches outside the Church of England or not offer for church leadership at all, given its current state.

And we should look hard at Glasgow and London and the many other places where congregations have proliferated in the late modern West.

We do not have to decline. We do not have to become a church of geriatrics. There is a path towards the flourishing of Anglican congregations in 21st-century England. IThe question for the Church of England is is that a path we dare to take? The church in England has a future; whether the Church of England has a future is more difficult to say.

[1] Professor Callum Brown has recently argued that this is making Scotland a profoundly secular country: “There’s been nothing like it in recorded history.”

[2] The thesis is available through the University of Aberdeen.

[3] See, for example: Mark Gornik’s The Word Made Global: Stories of African Christianity in New York City (Eerdmans, 2011); David Goodhew and Ant Cooper, The Desecularisation of the City: London’s Churches, 1980 to the Present (Routledge, 2019).

Canterbury Cathedral makes the CofE appear impressive, but appearances can deceive. The Diocese of Canterbury had 1,600 children in Sunday worship in 2019, before COVID. By 2022 it had 1,000 children in Sunday worship. That’s nearly a 40 percent drop.

Long-term decline coupled with COVID has left much of the church in deep trouble. Yes, there are wonderful pockets of vitality, but their number is shrinking. The new data show that, during COVID, the condition of much of the church has moved from serious to critical.

The End of Sunday

The latest C of E data are just out, covering 2022. Here are the overall figures for Sunday attendance in the Church of England since 2000.

Usual Sunday Attendance (all ages)

2000    950,000

2010    799,000

2019    680,000

2022    549,000

Sunday attendance has nearly halved since the millennium. A church that had long been declining has seen the decline dramatically speed up during COVID. The latest data, covering 2022, are crucial because they give us a clear sense for the first time what COVID did to the church. The data from 2020 and 2021 were so affected by COVID they cannot easily be used. By 2022 most churches were doing in-person worship, and those who wished to attend could do so. The evidence is that those who had not come back by 2022 were not going to come back in significant numbers.

Online worship? The figures for this are rightly described as the wild west of ecclesial data-gathering. It is impossible to know exactly what they mean, and church leaders cannot put too much weight on them. The advent of online church has value, but has proved compatible with dramatic congregational decline in the C of E and elsewhere, and there is no reason to think that this will change.

What this Looks Like on the Ground

Here are figures for a handful of dioceses, which give a sense of the effects of such decline on the ground.

Usual Sunday Attendance                              1990                2019                2022

Bath and Wells                                                 33.5k               16.9k               14.3k

Manchester                                                        35.1k               18.4k               14.0k

Ely                                                                        17.7k               13.6k               11.2k

Southwark                                                         40.5k               31.6k               25.2k

London                                                               51.8k               53.6k               43.4k

You can see the deep fall in Sunday attendance over recent decades and how this sped up since COVID. All dioceses have lost between a fifth and a quarter of their Sunday worshipers, between 2019 and 2022.[i] And this accelerated deep pre-existing decline. Some dioceses, like Bath & Wells and Manchester, have lost 60 percent of their Sunday congregations since 1990. Some, like London and Ely, have done less poorly, but all have seen a sharp drop since 2022.

There are other metrics for measuring attendance. They have their virtues, but also their vices. The great virtue of “usual Sunday attendance” is that it offers a long run of years of data. And it is easy to collect. There are other measures, but they generally offer shorter runs of data and, in some cases, are highly complex to calculate, raising concerns about the reliability of data. And the other metrics support the attendance trends given above.

Here is “leveling down” in action. For several decades, the Diocese of London held out against the rest of the church and actually grew (modestly). At last, it has come back into line. London is now declining as fast as everywhere else. London used to be an embarrassment for many C of E bishops. Why did it keep growing, when every other diocese was shrinking? This is an issue no longer. Every single C of E diocese is shrinking.

Beyond that, there are wider trends. Some of the smaller rural dioceses have shrunk less. But don’t be fooled. This is because they already had a tiny number of children and families. And it is children and families who have been most likely to stop attending during COVID.

The most spectacular falls are in some urban dioceses like Manchester and Liverpool. Both have half the number of Sunday worshipers now, compared to the beginning of this century.

Here’s one intriguing shift: The Diocese in Europe used to be regarded as a minor player in Anglicanism. But, post-COVID, the dioceses of Worcester, Newcastle, Portsmouth, Hereford, Truro, and Carlisle are all smaller than the Diocese in Europe in their Sunday attendance.

The End of Children in the C of E

The data are worse when you look at children. Sunday attendance for children is 23 percent down, overall, between 2019 and 2022.

But the figures in some dioceses were much worse. As noted, the Diocese of Canterbury had 1,600 children in Sunday worship in 2019. By 2022 it had 1,000, nearly a 40 percent drop. Many other dioceses are not far behind. Hereford “only” dropped from 500 to 400 children, across all its churches, 2019-22. Hereford has 399 churches. In 2023, it is likely that Hereford has more church buildings than it has children inside them, on an average Sunday across the entire diocese. Whilst the average fall in English child Sunday attendance is 23 percent, many C of E dioceses lost a significantly larger proportion of children in Sunday worship during COVID.

The bulk of adult believers come to faith in the first decades of life. Things were bad regarding children in worship before COVID. In large swathes of England, the church now has no children in its churches on a Sunday. This is moving beyond decline and toward extinction.

This bleak picture is backed by other figures. There is a measure called average weekly attendance. This tracks worship with children that happens both on Sundays and other days of the week. Child average weekly attendance across England dropped 28 percent between 2019 and 2022, decline of over a quarter in three years. By the average weekly attendance measure, the number of children in the church halved in the decade up to 2022.

The net result is that the church has markedly aged since COVID. Those that are left are, on average, old. Worshiping communities markedly aged during 2019-22, with 36 percent of the church being over 70, whereas 13.5 percent of the population of England are over 70.

Where Next?

Where the C of E goes next can be seen by looking at other denominations in England.

The United Reformed Church was the main home for Presbyterians and Congregationalists in England. It is leading the trend of mainline decline. In 1972 it had 192,000 members. By 2022 it had 37,000 members. In 50 years, it has shrunk by over 80 percent. The bulk of its existing churches are small and elderly. This is what ecclesial collapse looks like. British Methodism is on the same path.

The trajectory of the church will take a little longer, but in many places it is the same trajectory.

As congregations age, they struggle to fill key posts — wardens, treasurer. They stop being composed mostly of people in their 70s and become composed mostly of people in their 80s — and then they stop. There comes a point when decline tips over into being unviable and that point is at hand for many congregations.

This won’t happen everywhere immediately, but it is happening and at speed. Remember that in 2000 there were nearly double the number of Sunday worshipers in the church compared to 2022. In 2006, there were roughly double the number of children on Sundays in church, compared to 2022.

Don’t be deceived by the splendor of Canterbury Cathedral. The 40 percent fall in the number of children at worship in the Diocese of Canterbury shows the underlying reality.

Decline existed before COVID, but COVID has put it on steroids. It led to the largest fall in C of E attendance in the last 100 years. The damage is particularly marked with regard to children and families. This vital sector has been hit hardest.

The British Government is conducting an inquiry about lessons to learn from COVID. The church has not followed suit. There is a sense that no one wants to face just how bad the figures are.

Following the comments of Dean Kelley and Tim Keller, I would argue that churches decline when they allow the heart of the gospel to be obscured by other matters — however laudable those other matters may be. Church leadership has spent the last year focused on sexuality. This is a major issue, but it has allowed avoidance of the bigger, existential, question the organization faces. The church cannot claim to have put its primary energy into leading people to faith in Christ and building people up in that faith. And the church has managed, thus far, to skate over the fact that it has lost one in five of its Sunday participants since 2019.

[i] There was a modest rise in attendance between 2021 and 2022, but this was to be expected, as some of those kept away by lockdown chose to return. The more important measure is the comparison between 2019 (before COVID) and 2022 (when most churches were open for in-person worship). In that case, all dioceses were substantially smaller in 2022 than in 2019.

TEC after COVID

Data from TEC and the ACNA’s congregations in the United States for 2022 has just become available.[i] The 2022 data is far more significant than that for the previous two years since, through it, we can see much more clearly COVID’s effects on church life. Briefly, the ACNA has largely rebounded after COVID, but TEC has not. TEC’s attendance made a modest recovery in 2022 compared to 2021. But, overall, the attendance of TEC churches in the United States is way down, compared to before the pandemic.

TEC Average Sunday Attendance

2000    857,000

2010    658,000

2019    518,000

2022    349,000

The 2022 data is crucial because it gives us a realistic idea of what COVID did to TEC. The data for 2020 and 2021 was distorted by the disruption of COVID and it was impossible to know whether the huge drop in attendance in 2021 was a blip or sign of things to come. The year of 2022 was not wholly normal, but it was a lot closer to normal than the previous two years, and the data from that year has a greater solidity to it.

It was the first year since COVID when most people could reasonably get to in-person worship. All the evidence suggests that those who had not returned to Sunday worship by 2022 are unlikely to do so in the future — at least not in significant numbers.

At first glance, the 2022 figures look positive for TEC. Attendance rose by 56,000 persons compared to 2021. But the data from 2021 was deeply depressed by the pandemic. The more important comparison is with 2019 — the year before COVID. And TEC attendance in 2022 was 169,000 lower than in 2019, down by nearly a third.

It is also important to remember that TEC was in long-term decline for many years before COVID. Having lost 339,000 attendees between 2000 and 2019, it lost a further 169,000 from 2019 to 2022. This means that TEC’ s Sunday attendance is now well under half what it was in 2000.

The rise in TEC attendance in 2022 compared to 2021 was, to use the crude metaphor beloved by the stock markets, “a dead cat bounce.” It reflected how the easing of COVID restrictions meant some worshipers resumed attendance. It was a blip, which has not interrupted TEC’s long-term severe decline.

What of online attendance at worship? The figures for this have been well-described as the wild west of ecclesial data gathering. It is impossible to know exactly what they signify, and church leaders cannot put too much weight on them. The rise of online church has proved compatible with dramatic congregational decline in TEC, and there is no reason to think this will change.

TEC had 6,736 parishes and missions in 2011, but 6,249 in 2022. In other words, over 500 have been lost in just over a decade. The closure of churches, like financial giving, is a lagging indicator of decline. It is the final result of trends across decades. It is highly likely that there is much more of this to come. It also shows us that, despite talk in TEC of starting new congregations, few have actually started, and those that exist are having minimal effect on the overall shrinkage of TEC.

The chances of attracting people back after 2022 are low. Those who have been lost during the locust years of COVID are, as occupants of TEC’s pews, probably gone for good. There may have been things that could have been done to prevent such hemorrhaging, but it is largely too late to do such things now. And as an aside, senior leaders of TEC and across Western Anglicanism as a whole showed a staggering lack of concern about how to reconnect with the masses of its members who dropped away during COVID.

Individual parishes largely had to figure it out for themselves. Some did good work, many more struggled. The massive decline of TEC during COVID should not be seen as some unstoppable calamity, about which the leaders of TEC could do nothing. There is striking variation between TEC dioceses in the degree of bounce-back from COVID, some dramatically growing in 2022, others changing little. This deserves serious scrutiny. Not every denomination has been effected to the degree TEC has. Rather, in significant measure, the huge size of TEC’s decline during COVID was due to the inaction or dubious actions of the senior leadership.

How does the ACNA Compare?

It is an uncomfortable question, but how is the ACNA doing in the United States? Many in TEC will resist such a comparison. But hard data contains hard truths. The ACNA and TEC are rivals. But they are also very similar in liturgy, polity, and heritage. And their comparative trajectories tell us significant things about the strategies their leaders have followed and about their likely future trajectories.

In 2013, the first year when we have plausible data for the ACNA, it had a Sunday attendance of around 64,000 in the United States. TEC in 2013 had a Sunday attendance of 624,000, ten times higher. The ACNA Sunday attendance in 2022 was 71,000. This is down, compared to 78,000 in 2019. So the ACNA lost about 10% attendance by 2022, whereas TEC lost around a third of its Sunday attendance in the same years. TEC’s Sunday attendance in 2022 was 349,000, compared to 518,000 in 2019. This has a marked effect on the comparative size of the ACNA and TEC. In 2013 the ACNA was 10 percent of the size of TEC, in 2022 the ACNA was 20 percent of the size of TEC.

But members of the ACNA have no cause to feel smug. The ACNA’s attendance rose significantly as a percentage up to 2019, but the rise was from a modest base (and was in significant measure due to “transfer growth” from the majority of TEC’s Diocese of South Carolina choosing to join the ACNA). From 2019 to 2022, the ACNA’s loss was modest, bearing in mind the scale of the shock of COVID, but it was still a loss. More importantly, even if you add together ACNA and TEC’s attendance for 2022, you get a figure far smaller than that for American Anglicanism 10, let alone 20, years ago.

What about Nigerian Anglicans?

One large wild card is the future trajectory of Nigerian Anglicanism in the United States. There is a large and growing African Anglican diaspora in the United States, the largest segment of which is Nigerian. It is energetically planting churches across the country. Reliable data is hard to come by (and researching America’s Nigerian Anglicanism should be an urgent priority for scholars of American Anglicanism). Moreover, such churches are structurally amorphous. They have been part of the ACNA, then separated from it and some have rejoined it. But whatever the ecclesial banner under which they operate, they are usually more vigorous than TEC’s congregations. Such congregations have tended, largely, to serve expatriate Nigerians. But regardless of whether they continue in that manner, this sector of American Anglicanism is growing.

TEC shows deep concern about ethnicity as an issue, but when it comes to attracting people of color into its pews, it has made limited progress, despite the huge diversification of many parts of the United States in the last decade, a diversification that continued during COVID. Many African Anglicans have moved to the United States in recent years, but few have made their ecclesial home in TEC.

When Will the ACNA overtake TEC?

In 2013, the ACNA’s attendance equated to around 10 percent of TEC. As of 2022 its attendance is equivalent to over 20 percent of TEC. In under a decade, it caught up on significant ground. If Nigerian diaspora Anglicanism is factored in, the gap is closer still.

The gap remains wide, but we should note that the decline of TEC also has a lot further to go. The drop in ordinands and decline of TEC’s seminaries are canaries in the mine. The ACNA’s growth before COVID and markedly better recovery from COVID compared to TEC suggest that the gap will close much more in coming years.

When will the ANCA overtake TEC? It is reasonable to predict that the ACNA could overtake TEC in the next 20 years, perhaps sooner. Between 2010 and 2019, TEC’s Sunday attendance dropped by 140,000, significantly falling most years. If that pre-COVID decline resumes with the same trajectory, the ACNA will likely pass TEC in about 20 years, somewhere around 2042. That would happen even if the ACNA shows no growth during that time. If the ACNA were to grow in coming years, that would hasten the point when it becomes the largest section of Anglicanism within the United States. And if you factor in Nigerian diaspora Anglicanism, that could happen significantly faster still.

Given that the ACNA did not exist before 2009, readers of this article may wonder, “can these things be?” But the onus of proof lies with those who expect TEC to remain the biggest Anglican kid on the block. For that to happen, one of two scenarios must come to pass. Either TEC must arrest its long-term decline (and the data from 2019 to 2022 shows that such decline just grew significantly worse) or the ACNA must collapse (and the stress-test of COVID showed it to be much more robust than TEC). So, will the ACNA overtake TEC? The answer is yes, if current trends continue. When will it do so? Not soon, but not that far away either.

[i] The data quoted refers only the congregations of TEC and the ACNA found in the United States. Congregations outside the United States have been excluded from the data.