Children, Hope, and Our Declining Churches

This review discusses suicide.

P.D. James’s dystopian novel, The Children of Men, describes an unnerving world in which humanity suddenly and collectively loses the ability to procreate. Everyone is still being married and given in marriage, but copulation no longer produces children. With the last generation of children, the Omegas, in their mid-20s, the human race is headed for extinction.

Other than the absence of children, life more or less goes on, but in an eerie atmosphere. Oxford University still holds classes for its mature students, people still go to work, there is a government of sorts. For a while, life is more or less stable in the present, even if a question mark looms over the future.

Permeating all of this, however, is what James describes as an ennui universel that settles over humanity, draining the joy out of life. Without children, without a future, the meaning of life is wrung out of the surviving generations. Suicide, even mass suicides, become increasingly common.

Instead of pursuing worthy goals for the sake of posterity, those with privilege devote themselves to pursuing a life of safety, security, and pleasure. When the dreaming spires of Oxford start to crumble, there is the question of whether their upkeep is really worthwhile, given that in 60 years or so, there will be no one left to enjoy them. For Theo Faron, the protagonist, and many like him, life is an attempt to make the most of a nihilistic existence, with suicide as the logical end.

As I was reading the novel, the strange ambience of a world emptying out, a world with no children felt disturbingly familiar. At first I couldn’t place it, but then I realized: I’ve had this same feeling when looking at the future of North American Anglicanism. All of the beauty and majesty of the church’s past is remembered through our liturgy, our architecture, our tradition. And yet for many parishes and many places, there is no future because there are no children. Thus, the focus changes from handing on the gospel to fiddling with canons and prayers and slowing the decay of sanctuaries until the last gray head in the congregation is laid to rest.

David Goodhew’s analysis of the decline of the Episcopal Church, and Calvin Lane’s recent piece on the same, are reminders that our churches are not healthy. The latest ACNA statistics are perhaps less bleak, but average Sunday attendance still lags significantly from pre-COVID numbers. “Less bleak” is not the same as “encouraging.” Neil Elliott has shown us the Anglican Church of Canada is a small fragment of what it once was, with congregations still in steep decline.

When did we stop being concerned? In The Children of Men, the decline of the race is completely outside of human control. Notwithstanding the headwinds of secularism, in the church we retain so much agency. What have we done to ensure in 20 or 40 or 60 years there will be a place where our children can be formed and discipled in Christ? Where will the hear the gospel and fulfill it?

“The future of the church,” which is just another way of saying “children,” is eclipsed by our struggle to make sense of human sexuality (though I would argue the two are not unrelated) and other important issues —Hello, environmental justice! Hello, racial reconciliation! I don’t at all mean to downgrade these, but such pressing concerns diminish in meaning if there will not a be a church in a generation. Who cares how green our buildings are, how well our policies lead to integration, if there is not a soul left in the sanctuary in 40 years? North American Anglicanism will be nothing but an ecclesial artifact.

I need to qualify this.

First, I serve in a parish in which this ennui universel is not present at all. I am grateful to serve in a thriving community of Christians in which we are bucking the trends of the Episcopal Church. Some of our Sunday services are just plain old rowdy, teeming with children running this way and that.

But I’ve served in enough churches, and have had enough conversations with other Anglicans and Episcopalians, clergy and lay, to know this is an anomaly in North American Anglicanism. So many of our beloved churches are silent on Sunday mornings — not because we are arrested by the beauty of holiness, but rather because they are emptied of anyone younger than 60.

Second, as a father of four rambunctious boys, I well understand the gifts and challenges that children bring. Reading James reminds me that a childless world is quieter, more controlled, more predictable. But that safety and ease comes at the cost of so much more. Despite the challenges that children bring, they are gifts, goods, graces given by God that decenter us from the story of the church. We are only one part of that story.

We recently completed a capital campaign at Christ Church to restore our children’s ministry spaces at our historic downtown campus, and to build a new wing on or contemporary campus for children’s ministry, where we had simply run out of space.

It was so moving for me and my family to see the commitments and contributions to the campaign, especially from parishioners who did not have children, or whose children were already grown. When they were sowing prayers and finances into this project, it was not for their benefit, but for the sake of the gospel, and the flourishing of a generation they might never meet. This kind of radical hopefulness, this yes to the kingdom of God, brought me to tears.

I was almost taken aback to think that when my children have children (if the Lord allows) this will be a community in which they can raise their children in the faith. And this will be possible by the grace of God and his blessing on the hard work and planning that the people of Christ Church are doing today. The future of the church is not inevitable, but neither is its decline. The hour is late, but there is still plenty of time to sow into the future of our churches by sowing into the lives of children and children’s ministry. Who knows what kind of harvest God may bring about?