Christianity at risk of dying out in a generation

[SecularMotion]

Christianity is just a “generation away from extinction” in Britain unless churches make a dramatic breakthrough in attracting young people back to the faith, the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey has warned.

Clergy are now gripped by a “feeling of defeat”, congregations are worn down by “heaviness” while the public simply greets both with “rolled eyes and a yawn of boredom”, he said.

His comments at a Christian conference came as a stark report laid before the Church of England’s General Synod warned that its position as a “national institution” will be in doubt if numbers in the pews drop much further.

The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, also underlined the scale of the crisis telling members of the Synod they must “evangelise or fossilise”.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/10458380/Christianity-at-risk-of-dying-out-in-a-generation-warns-Lord-Carey.html

[exboyfil]

1. Money Quote

He called for an ambitious campaign aimed at the “re-evangelisation of England”, on a par with the ministry of the northern saints such as Cuthbert, Hilda and Aidan who spread Christianity in Anglo-Saxon times.
The Synod responded by voting to set up a committee.

[struggle4progress]

2. They could go back and try the original charter again. IIRC it was something like:

Head off down the road, without any money or spare clothes, and tell everybody to love their neighbors as much as they love themselves. And don't only say that: live it, and be doggedly persistent about it. You may be mistreated or even killed, but never be afraid: just be sure always to return good for evil, because this is the one and only way

I know it doesn't not sound particularly promising, but it did actually captivate much of the ancient world

[AtheistCrusader]

3. I wonder how many years in the future Facebook will support scheduling an event.

The party planning is going to take a while.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. At least 14 years since Carey first said that in a speech

George Carey has been saying that the Church of England is "only one generation away from extinction" for years: the earliest reference I can find comes from 1999, when he was still archbishop of Canterbury, and made a speech with that exact phrase in it but even then it was old. He also said then that the country was "growing allergic to religion and even serious thought". This was his way of reflecting on the catastrophic failure of the "Decade of Evangelism" he proclaimed in the nineties, which had seen average Sunday attendance fall by nearly a quarter, while the average age of churchgoers for the first time rose away from that of the country as a whole.

The phrase is a piece of evangelical jargon that is meant to make youth workers feel important by stating the obvious as dramatically as possible. But this weekend, speaking at a Christian conference in Shrewsbury, something went wrong. Like a hypochondriac told by the doctor that he really has got cancer, the former archbishop finds that the worries that have comforted him for years are suddenly, horribly frightening.

The evidence for the danger that the church is in comes most clearly from surveys carried out for the Westminster Faith Debates by Professor Linda Woodhead of Lancaster University. The crucial figure is the change in attitude from older to younger people. Asked whether they thought the Church of England was a positive or negative force in society, a majority of those over the age of 40 had no opinion, though of those who did, most thought it was positive. That is the age group that Carey (78) grew up with. Anyone now 50 or 60 will have been in the target demographic for his youth work when he formed his ideas as a vicar in Durham.

But among younger people the picture is different. Indifference diminishes, and is partly replaced by a belief that the church is actively malevolent. Whereas only 12% of the over-40s regard the church as a negative force in society, this proportion nearly doubles – to 21% – among the under-24s.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/19/church-of-england-sick-of-itself

[Humanist_Activist]

5. Sounds to me like he likes to be an alarmist, I mean, its true the CofE is dying, just taking a...

lot longer, 3 generations or so, probably, and even then, I'm sure it will still exist as a marginal minority religion among all other marginal minority religions, atheism and various types of "spiritualism" and superstitions.

[rug]

6. Fat chance.

[Iggo]

7. Not bloody likely.