Reformed Churchmen

We are Confessional Calvinists and a Prayer Book Church-people. In 2012, we remembered the 350th anniversary of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer; also, we remembered the 450th anniversary of John Jewel's sober, scholarly, and Reformed "An Apology of the Church of England." In 2013, we remembered the publication of the "Heidelberg Catechism" and the influence of Reformed theologians in England, including Heinrich Bullinger's Decades. For 2014: Tyndale's NT translation. For 2015, John Roger, Rowland Taylor and Bishop John Hooper's martyrdom, burned at the stakes. Books of the month. December 2014: Alan Jacob's "Book of Common Prayer" at: http://www.amazon.com/Book-Common-Prayer-Biography-Religious/dp/0691154813/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1417814005&sr=8-1&keywords=jacobs+book+of+common+prayer. January 2015: A.F. Pollard's "Thomas Cranmer and the English Reformation: 1489-1556" at: http://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Cranmer-English-Reformation-1489-1556/dp/1592448658/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420055574&sr=8-1&keywords=A.F.+Pollard+Cranmer. February 2015: Jaspar Ridley's "Thomas Cranmer" at: http://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Cranmer-Jasper-Ridley/dp/0198212879/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1422892154&sr=8-1&keywords=jasper+ridley+cranmer&pebp=1422892151110&peasin=198212879

Sunday, July 8, 2012

Episcopal Church's Collapse


The Episcopal Church’s Collapse

More sunny news for your Sunday morning: numbers from the Episcopal Church show a stunning collapse in church attendance between 2000 and 2010. It’s down 23 percent overall, with some dioceses in far steeper decline than that. Pittsburgh, for example, has lost 73 percent of its churchgoing Episcopalians over that time period. That’s nearly three out of four Episcopalians in Pittsburgh, gone within a decade. San Joaquin saw four out of five of its people stop coming to church in the same period.
No diocese is growing, but a handful of them — Tennessee and South Carolina, for example — kept losses down to single digits. Maybe some of you readers who are Episcopalians can explain why. It can’t be simply a Southern thing; other Southern dioceses experienced losses on par with TEC in other regions.
According to TEC’s figures, only about 700,000 Episcopalians are in church on Sunday morning. There are megachurches in suburban Dallas that have more worshipers on Sunday than most Episcopal dioceses. That’s not hyperbole.

I found this out via the blog of Sherry Weddell, the Catholic lay evangelist, who writes:
To compare, CARA estimates that on a given Sunday, there are about 22 million Catholics in the pews in the US vs. approximately 657,000 Episcopalians. In other words, there are roughly 33 times as many practicing Catholics as practicing Episcopalians.
This is not a time to gloat but to thoughtfully ponder. A group I spoke to recently about evangelization wanted to look to the experience of mainline Protestants to see what they were doing. Seriously?
If we are serious about evangelization, we would far, far better look to the experience of our evangelical brothers and sisters. 49% of American evangelicals weren’t raised as evangelicals while Catholics have the second lowest number of converts of any American religious faith.
Indeed, Putnam & Campbell, sifting the data, found that if not for the large influx of Hispanic immigrants, Catholicism in the US would be declining at a rate comparable to that of mainline Protestantism.
But no Christian church should gloat, and not just out of politeness, either. Putnam & Campbell documented that all Christian churches are seeing declining numbers. We are living through a great shift in religion and society now.

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