Canadian Churches Facing Major Decline

A report presented to the Anglican Church of Canada’s House of Bishops suggests that some denominations may soon disappear in Canada completely, reports Ekklesia.

|TOP|Data published by Keith McKerracher, a retired marketing expert who serves as a church adviser, shows a huge drop in the number of Anglicans in Canada between 1961 and 2001 from 1.36 million to 642,000, a decline of 53 per cent.

The report also said that at the rate that the Anglican Church in Canada is losing members – around 13,000 each year – it is “facing extinction by the middle of this century”.

According to Mr McKerracher’s research statistics, the United Church of Canada has also fallen from 1.04 million to 638,000 during the same period – a loss of 39 per cent.

And during the same period the Presbyterian Church in Canada suffered a loss of 35 per cent, the Baptists 7 per cent and Lutherans 4 per cent.

The cause for the decline has been attributed to the rising increase in personal and eclectic religion among people in the Western world, with a similar rise in holistic spirituality.

|AD|Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance (OCRT) claims that “small non-Christian faith groups are increasing in number and popularity in Canada,” reports Ekklesia.

OCRT also claims a significant rise in the number of people without religious affiliation.

A recent report on church attendance in Ireland showed a similar trend, with the Presbyterian Church of Ireland seeing a drop from 50 per cent to 40 per cent between 1989 and 2004.

The report ARK, a joint initiative between Queen’s University and the University of Ulster, ‘Driven to disaffection: Religious independents in Northern Ireland’, found that in the 1951 census only 221 described themselves as freethinkers, in comparison to 11.5 per cent of the participants in the Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey describing themselves as religious “independents”.

The reasons attributed to this development includes lifestyle changes such as extended years of education and delayed marriage, known as the “cohort explanation”, which will see the proportion of those without a religion gradually increase as each succeeding age group enters the adult population.