"About 80 per cent of our churches are the wrong sort," he conceded. "The fact is that most people want to go to a church where something's happening. Success breeds success...Eighty per cent of Methodism is slap bang in the middle of those two phenomena."
Despite the difficulties, Atkins said he remained "very energised" about the future of Methodism.
He encouraged more churches to develop their children's and youth work as a means of attracting more people.
"If you've got a church that says, 'We've got no young people, as soon as we've got some we'll provide something for them,' the likelihood is that things will stay as they are. If you are a church that's got none [young people] and you begin to put time, energy, resources and advertising into running things, you stand a greater chance of getting some."
Atkins also asked Methodists to return to their missionary roots.
"One of the things I have been trying to say this year is just pause long enough to ask, 'Why are we here? What are we supposed to be doing? Who are we?' These are seminal questions for potential renewal.
"I'm trying to say that Methodism is a missionary movement in its guts and DNA. You can't lose that or conveniently forget that and be truly and authentically Methodist."
Atkins continued by warning that so long as Methodism "forgets or live in a way that belies the fact that it is a missionary movement then I think it moves towards extinction, if not numerically, then of its usefulness within God's purposes anyway".
"While Methodism rediscovers that it is to be a missionary movement offering Christ, proclaiming that Christ died for all ...holding a view of holiness that is intensely personal but deliberately communitarian, if it rediscovers in the 21st century what that looks like and begins to embody it, you can forget about extinction."
He concluded by urging Methodists not to focus on survival or preservation as its core purpose.
"Is Methodism heading for extinction? Some parts of Methodism, yes. Other parts of Methodism, no," he said.
"The passage in the Gospel, where it says that those who try to hold onto their lives will lose them, but those who give their lives for My sake or the Gospel will find them, works denominationally. If we try and hold on like some preservation society for a great, wonderful era then we will move towards extinction.
"If we lose ourselves in pursuit of a new discovery of who we are in our guts and our ecclesial genes, extinction won't happen. It will simply become a non-thought through issue because we will be too busy being the people that God wants us to be."
