Last summer, David Goodhew wrote for Covenant about the shrinking Anglican Church of Canada (“The Collapse of the Anglican Church of Canada,” August 5, 2024), an essay that elicited multiple responses. Sharon Dewey Hetke, Cole Hartin, and Emilie Smith all had things to say. Dr. Goodhew, however, was continuing a long-running conversation. His reflections echo other essays in 2024, notably Neil Elliott’s statistical analysis on the Canadian church’s decline. Yet statistics don’t capture the full emotional or spiritual weight of this decline.
Many within the church are deeply discouraged, not only because they fear their congregations may not exist in 20 years, but because their children and grandchildren have either drifted away or never engaged with the church at all. Too often, these younger generations want nothing to do with the church. We see women asking to have their grandchildren baptized even though the parents have no intention of ever bringing the children to church. Across Canada, beautiful church buildings are being repurposed as condominiums, while in Europe many historic church buildings function more as museums than places of worship. For the remnant, the lived reality is one of aging congregations, dwindling numbers, scarce resources, and communities largely composed of retirees.
What makes this sharp decline especially disheartening is its persistence in the face of decades of intentional renewal efforts. Movements such as the seeker-sensitive, church growth, the missional church, and attempts to return “radically” to New Testament models have all been tried, for a time. Despite significant investments of time, money, energy, and enthusiasm, the long-term effect of these efforts has been limited.
Kevin Martin, who has experienced some success in turning churches around, recently joined the conversation, emphasizing the need to rethink mission within our specific contexts. The thrust of his recent essay was on our social, educational, economic, and political homogeneity and the need to seek more diversity. Given reactions on social media, it certainly touched a nerve.
While there are occasional examples of healthy change, the broad trajectory toward decline remains. Many clergy have grown cynical, watching wave after wave of failed initiatives—quietly counting the days until retirement.
This is where Dean Martin’s call to rethink mission resonates deeply. The challenge lies in understanding mission not as a program or a possible solution to decline but as an essential and integrated part of the church’s identity and life.
What sparked the strongest reaction to Goodhew’s August 2024 essay, however, was his claim that the church’s embrace of progressive causes has contributed significantly to its decline. He argued that this focus has distracted from the church’s core mission of forming and nurturing communities of discipleship. Critics quickly pushed back, labeling the claim not only inaccurate but insensitive to the particulars of the Canadian context and the clear biblical call to address issues of injustice. Others highlighted that there are, in fact, growing and even thriving Anglican congregations in Canada. Decline does not seem to be uniform.
The debate becomes even more complex when considering “models of success” or megachurches. Dare we mention Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston, which preaches a prosperity gospel while attracting 45,000 people? The question is whether Lakewood is progressive, conservative, or neither. Perhaps it might be best identified as a remarkable expression of a particular cultural moment and context. In truth, while most churches are declining there are both progressive and conservative churches that are doing well and, in some cases, flourishing.
Focusing solely on Goodhew’s critique of progressive causes risks missing his more important emphasis, that the church has, in many places, lost its focus on forming and nurturing Christian communities. And that raises all kinds of questions about formation and the recognition that we don’t seem to know how to enable formation in our churches.
Both progressives and conservatives are, too often, forming people in ways that blithely assume or even mirror secular cultural values more than the gospel. Martin’s comments about the Episcopal Church (and the Anglican Church of Canada) being out of touch in a “post-progressive society” resonate, but I would argue that the deeper issue is a failure to discern our cultural formation. Whether we are progressive or conservative, public values are shaping our formation more than the gospel is.
In Confident Witness—Changing World, Christopher Kaiser draws on sociologist Peter Berger’s insights to expose the myth of the private-public divide: the widely held belief that we can live by one set of values in our personal lives and another in public. Kaiser challenges both progressives and conservatives to recognize how deeply we are shaped by shared public assumptions. Kaiser describes a pervasive plausibility structure made up of values like common-sense realism, pragmatism, individualism, and the ideal of personal control over our lives. These values, often seen as neutral or even virtuous, deeply influence both the church and broader culture, often blurring or distorting the gospel message.
It should be sobering that these secular values align so closely with the worldview of the Spiritual But Not Religious, as well as the Nones and Dones. It suggests that the church’s decline may not primarily be due to its failure to adapt to a changing culture, but rather because it has been complicit in aligning with a worldview that privatizes and individualizes faith.
In conservative contexts, faith is perceived as a private spiritual journey focused on a personal relationship with Jesus. In many progressive churches, the emphasis on social justice reflects our individual priorities, without deep theological grounding.
The challenge is profound precisely because we don’t see it very clearly. Public values such as the priority of efficiency, trusting our personal perspectives, and the belief that relationships (including church communities) are helpful resources for our spiritual development may seem relatively harmless or even aligned with Christian ideals to some extent, even as they hopelessly distort or inhibit our living by the gospel. All of us in the church seem, at times, oblivious to how deeply we are shaped by the culture around us.
Ironically, the path toward renewal may not begin with increasing attendance, becoming more relevant, or more effective at engaging culture. Instead, it may start with remembering who we are. This is not a call to retreat inward or disengage from the world, a rejection of mission, but a call to become more deeply rooted in the story of God’s redemptive work in Jesus Christ. When churches ground themselves in this living narrative, they are better equipped to hear God’s voice and respond faithfully to the complex challenges of our time. This rootedness fosters resilience, enabling communities to navigate hardship with a growing confidence in God’s faithfulness. It opens our eyes, and hearts, to the mystery that God brings new life even amid confusion.
This attentiveness to God’s work in our world involves more than finding novel ways to stem decline or staying informed about the injustices around us. It means inhabiting the gospel narrative through communal worship, prayer, service, and witness (consider the Book of Common Prayer). It means consistently being reformed in and through the church as we are gathered by the Spirit.
In looking to the early Church, the goal should not be to mimic all its forms but to reclaim the priority of communal life continually reshaped by our turning and returning to the good news—that Christ died for our sins, that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day, all in accordance with the Scriptures (1 Cor. 15:3-4) . This story should saturate the rhythms of our lives, that in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:19).
Repentance, this continual returning to the good news in our common life, is a pattern of reorientation toward God and his desires for us. Only from this place of deep and enduring formation in Christ are we likely to find the renewal of individuals, churches, and society. This is the renewal God has promised and continues to carry out even in the face of apparent decline.
The Rev. Dr. Peter Robinson is Professor of Proclamation, Worship and Ministry at Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto.
