A demise sooner or later. . .

I read up on more death knells for the Anglican Church (except, perhaps, in Africa).  It seems that the thing keeping the Church of England going is not the devotion of those in the pews but its place as a quasi-governmental unit.  In Canada and the US, the support of tax dollars is not there to prop up what is in demise but the largess of bequests means the money may enable the structure to hold up long after most of the people are gone.  To be sure, there are pockets where the Anglicans are fairly dynamic but they are too few and far between to be much more than an anomaly.

There is the interesting prospect that the Church of England may recede into obscurity only to be replaced by Roman Catholicism.  Well, the old C of E had about a 500 year run.  Sadly, it is undone from the inside out and not by attack from those on the exterior of the life of that communion.  Liberal theology, skepticism about the Scriptures, and a social gospel that has replaced helping with saving have seen the numbers of people in the pew diminish to less than 2% of the population.  Roman Catholics are fewer in total numbers but their people attend much more regularly.  I have not even mentioned the numbers of Muslims and their vitality.  

It would be interesting to see how the head of a future Church of England (the divorced and remarried Charles) might actually preside over its death -- only to see Rome ascend.  Wouldn't that be interesting!  Sadly, Lutheranism is barely a blip on the radar there -- even though Lutherans had some historical influence over the break between Canterbury and Rome.  But perhaps we should not be so quick to predict a death.  As G.K. Chesterton said in The Everlasting Man, “Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”  

I do not expect the good ole C of E to rise again but God is full of surprises just when you think the faith down and out.  However, if the C of E were to rise again, it would require a wholesale change of theology and this would be hard to predict.  No church has ever arisen from the ashes of modernism by taking a liberal or progressive highway out.  These have always been dead ends.  You would think a historian or two might warn church bodies so inclined.  But where people hear again the Word of the Lord preached faithfully, well, who knows?  Chesterton is right.  Christianity has died and God has raised it so many times already that we should not close the door yet.  Nevertheless, Christ did not rise to crown the individual king of anything so there is a long way to go before any signs of life might appear in anything remotely Anglican.