Commentary
By David W. Virtue
www.virtueonline.org
June 8, 2010
Predicting the future is risky, dangerous and, many might think, futile. Many surprises will be in store for the Anglican Communion. We don't know what surprises tomorrow will bring. It is foolish to pretend that we do.
The Anglican Communion is in a state of paralysis with a deeply conflicted Archbishop of Canterbury and a Covenant that provinces like New Zealand and Canada as well as liberals in the U.S. believe will not draw or hold the Communion together. The trend towards entropy continues.
The following trends can be detected even as a majority of the Global South provinces say they are in either impaired or broken communion with the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada.
1. The demographic weight of global Anglicanism has already shifted to the Global South and will only increase in the coming years.
2. 80% of the Anglican Communion is evangelical, black, female and under 30.
3. Western pan Anglicanism is in decline and within 30 years (at the present rate of decline) the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada will be mere shadows of their former selves.
4. Between one half and two-thirds of all Episcopal dioceses will be forced to juncture with another diocese in order to survive.
5. In Canada in 1961, 1.3 million people attended an Anglican Church; in 2001, 658,000 attended; and in 2009, 325,000. A simple three-point graph shows that, if nothing changes, by around 2040 there will be one person left.
6. The Episcopal Church had 680,000 people (ASA) in 2009 though it claims more than two million members. At the present rate of decline, by 2050 TEC will be well below 100,000.
7. Conversely, the rise of the Global South through vigorous evangelism will continue unabated. New dioceses, more bishops and archbishops will be consecrated over the next ten years dwarfing Western Anglicanism.
8. Millions of Africans, Asians and Latin Americans will find Christ and be added to the church. More formal ritualistic churches (Roman Catholic) will lose members to more evangelically experience-oriented churches (Pentecostal). Anglicanism has the ability to bridge both.
9. The Global South’s increasing concern for social justice, already evident in such countries as Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda, will only intensify. Calling out government corruption, already addressed by Anglican leaders in countries like Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya, will continue apace.
10. The Global South will increasingly influence public policy and government reform in their countries, even as mainline Christianity in the West grows more irrelevant in the [naked] public square.
11. The role of the See of Canterbury will grow increasingly more irrelevant and a new vibrant see could be established in Alexandria, Egypt, leaving Canterbury to wither and die.
12. The Anglican Consultative Council will cease to be relevant to the Global South AND to emerging evangelical Anglicanism in North America. That process has already begun. ACNA is not interested in seeking recognition from the ACC.
13. The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) will continue to grow and within a quarter of a century will, in all likelihood, pass The Episcopal Church in Average Sunday Attendance.
14. The Jerusalem Declaration will be the norm for orthodox Anglicans and not the Covenant.
15. The Lambeth Conference (if there is another one) will be irrelevant to evangelical Anglicans across the Anglican Communion. Most will not attend. Some 300 bishops absented themselves at the last Lambeth Conference.
16. GAFCON will replace the Lambeth Conference.
17. Women’s Ordination will continue to be a sticking point for orthodox Anglicans, but conflicting groups will live uneasily with each other over the issue believing there are bigger issues at stake.
18. Pansexual behavior will not be on anyone’s radar screen.
19. Many provinces in the Global South, Nigeria, for example, will be financially self sufficient and no longer depend on, need (or take) financial support from North American liberal provinces. Nigeria is already in a position to fund poorer African Anglican provinces.
20. The Global South will not allow themselves to be manipulated by or held captive to TEC money.
21. TEC will also have less money to throw around as millions will have been spent on lawsuits retaining churches that will, in time, be sold for pennies on the dollar to evangelical mega-churches, Muslim groups and saloons. (The latter is PB Jefferts Schori first choice).
22. Most Episcopal seminaries (9 out of 11) will either cease to exist for lack of students or the funds to support them or be forced to juncture together in order to survive. Liberal, pansexual theology will not play in churches that want a different, more coherent message around core gospel truths. Succumbing to classic theological liberalism is a dead end street for Generations X and Y and the Millenials who will show little or no interest in issues that have affected baby-boomers.
23. The Internet will play a bigger role in theological education.
24. With the dawn of the 21st century, new political forces will see Christian and Islamic leaders banging heads over issues like law and the place of religion in civic life.
25. A globalized economy, the biotech revolution, movements of mass migration, and the rise of militant Islam will face an aggressive Christian evangelism from Global South Anglicans.
26. Western liberal Christianity has nothing to offer in these religious wars (Islam vs Christianity) except acquiescence.
27. TEC will be irrelevant, if not history, on any of these issues and will have nothing to contribute that is vaguely relevant to the discussion. The Global South will ignore them.
28. The Millennium Development Goals, argued for by both the UN and Western liberal churches like TEC, will not be met. No one will care.
29. Aging Episcopalians will care more about Medicare, Social Security and their Pensions than saving the whales in Alaska, Antarctica or saving the world for God. (The latter being Jefferts Schori’s fantasy world). They will watch National Geographic reruns on TV while taking their Alzheimer’s medicine.
30. Rowan Williams will be disgraced for his handling of, and failure to deal with, the heresies and apostasies in some regions of the Anglican Communion.
31. The Global South will thoroughly reject the notion that one can have privately held beliefs separate from publicly uttered statements about homosexuality (upholding Lambeth 1:10 while participating in gay Eucharists). Cognitive dissonance will not be acceptable.
32. Williams’ successor will be deemed irrelevant if he is not an out and out Evangelical. The Global South will not take anyone seriously who sits on the throne of Canterbury who is not committed to Holy Scripture as normative in the life of the church, preaches the gospel and has the Great Commission at its heart. Pansexual behavior is dead on arrival.
33. The Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church will pick off remaining Anglo-Catholics. To all intents and purposes, Anglo-Catholicism will cease to exist. “Anglo-Catholics” in North America will, in the future, be Evangelical Catholics in name with many holding some aspects of charismatic theology if not worship forms. Most will belong to the ACNA. The Pope’s offer of an ordinariate will affect only a handful of Anglo-Catholics. Most will ignore it.
34. The Continuing (Anglican) Church movement will not be cohesive enough to pull off an Anglo-Catholic coup d’etat for remaining Anglo-Catholics. Many Anglo-Catholics will quietly convert to Rome.
35. EVANGELISM in the Global South as defined by the Great Commission will dominate Anglican theology. Western “evangelism”, defined in socio-political terms, will become irrelevant to the discussion.
36. The Global South will not confuse the need for “personal salvation” from the need for good works and will not submit the latter to the former.
37. Liturgical changes will be adapted to cultures, but will not deviate from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.
38. A secularized Europe will be the object of evangelistic outreach by pan African Anglican evangelists much to the annoyance of dying Western liberals who have no message significantly different from the culture.
39. Post modernity will not escape an emerging Africa, but Africans have already begun to adapt. Post modernity has yet to take hold and while Africans have yet to feel its full impact, there will be some fallout. Western Anglicans will gloat and push for greater pansexual acceptance as post modernism takes hold. They will not succeed.
40. Islam will wipe the floor with Western liberal Christianity because it has compromised itself to the point of theological irrelevance and incoherence.
41. The surprise element is forthcoming changes in the Church of England.
42. A surprising amount of change will depend on July's debate at the General Synod in York. If the CofE can retain within itself the orthodox constituencies, there is a good chance the CofE will continue to head in an orthodox direction, and the next ABC (probably in 2015) may turn out to be someone capable of exercising the kind of leadership the Global South would like to see.
43. If the liberals succeed in July in passing the next stage of the women bishops’ measure without any provision for the orthodox, the CofE will implode as rapidly as the ACoC has done over the last ten years.
44. Within 25 years, the Church of England could see an Evangelical renaissance with liberalism in eclipse as church attendance slips well below the one million mark. A revival is a distinct possibility.
45. The deeper question is if the Global South is willing to wait another five years to see if the next ABC turns out to be orthodox, or will it begin to take decisive actions which separate it from Canterbury? That is the $64,000 question.
46. Fundamental doctrines will be reasserted even as evangelists look for creative ways to spread the gospel to generations of post-modern, post-Christian young people.
47. The Global South rocks, it also rules. Get used to it.
END
No comments:
Post a Comment