May God continue to bless the faithful vicars of Christ who happen to be in the Church of England (CofE).

The others, sadly, are destroying our established church in the way that John MacArthur warned about more generally in 1998.

On January 25, 2022, Dr Jim McConalogue wrote an article for Comment Central on the same topic: ‘The Church is to blame for its own decline as a moral leader’.

Dr McConalogue begins by detailing the number of church closures in recent years (emphases mine):

A recent Telegraph investigation this month into Church of England data found that more than 400 churches have closed in a decade. The data showed that 940 of its churches were shut between 1987 and 2019 – 423 of them were closed between 2010 and 2019. Across the Church’s 42 dioceses, it marks a drop of 6 per cent fewer churches.

The flight from faith is being further marked by the number of people describing themselves as Christian falling to only just over half the population (51 per cent), the lowest level recorded. In general, of those in their twenties, 53.4 per cent say they have no religion; for those in their sixties, it is about 27.1 per cent, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Spirituality that centres on holiness has gone out the window. Socio-political causes have replaced the quest for sanctification:

Last year, a team of researchers – including myself – investigated the scale of Clergy support for radical progressive activist agendas throughout the 42 dioceses, which had some remarkable findings.

Over eight in ten of the dioceses appoint clergy who advocate radical racial justice claims or express concerns for ‘institutional’ or ‘systemic’ racism. Just under 90 per cent of those racial justice activist claims – all described in our report – came within the first six months of the UK racial justice campaigns in May 2020, following the national Black Lives Matters protests in the United States. Similarly, just over seven in ten of the dioceses appoint clergy who promote climate activism and ecological warnings, including calls for the recognition of a climate emergency.

The common denominator has been a widespread acquiescence by the clergy setting aside ordinary human values and the Church’s moral message in favour of the adoption of questionable, unevidenced narratives deployed by the so-called progressive movements of the day.

The unqualified reception of unchallenged ideas is not specific to the Church even though it has a unique impact on their members – it continues to be symptomatic of what is happening throughout civil society. It depends upon telling reasonable citizens they must comply with those narratives in order to survive and thrive.

During the height of the pandemic in the summer of 2020, the CofE’s churches were closed. Zoom services took place. What were the messages given at parish level? Did they offer solace and comfort to those who were worried about coronavirus or who were grieving over their ailing or dead relatives? No. The CofE messages given during this time — I have my own email collection of them from church — were about combating racism.

McConalogue concludes:

The resolution to the Church’s moral panic may more likely be found in its own faith, in being thoughtful and less fearful – and not in the faulty mantras of identity-based progressive movements. The Church must look beyond superficially appealing to ‘slicker models of evangelistic marketing’ and instead recognis[e] the place of the faithful, as [the Revd] Giles Fraser has argued. It is those faithful people who attend church to say their prayers who are at the centre of each of the parishes.

Let us examine what happened in the CofE in 2021, still during the pandemic and when churches had reopened.

In April, an Anglican contributor to The Conservative Woman considered that the CofE had ‘cancelled’ her and others who had worshipped faithfully week after week:

Those who turn up every Sunday and other days, having voluntarily cleaned the building, arranged the flowers, rung the bells, read the lesson, served the tea and biscuits, given lifts and devised and delivered the parish mag in all weathers. Belittled and scorned for serving their community with humility and kindness, they may be forgiven for wondering what on earth they have done to deserve such a barrage of hostility and condemnation.

… Some of us have had enough. Instead of promoting this country as an open, tolerant and democratic society, the Archbishop and his colleagues are presiding over a church in its death throes. Supine before the forces of a minority of myopic and divisive far-Left activists within the Church, they have cancelled those many disaffected Anglicans, mystified by a sustained barrage of unwarranted recriminations, who have left the church they once loved and now feel they have no spiritual home.

In the summer of 2021, the CofE hierarchy and the General Synod decided to plan how to do church differently. It wasn’t the faithful who were being sidelined, but also some clergy. Furthermore, church buildings would have to go. Zoom church could continue with a few ‘hub’ churches remaining open for those who were fortunate enough to live nearby. House churches would be the place of worship for most Anglicans in England.

Part of the hierarchical narrative is that our national church, which originated in England, is somehow an ‘inherited’ church that needs to reinvent itself. Good grief:

The Synod’s goal is to close existing churches, create 10,000 home churches and get rid of ordained priests, termed as being a ‘limited factor’. The home churches would be lay-led. This might be a developing strategy for nations on other continents, but surely, the CofE’s infrastructure is already in place — and has been for centuries:

This model is not appropriate for England, already established in structure and in law.

How can a lay minister, not an Anglican norm, administer the Sacraments? Such a person would have no spiritual authority.

The Revd Peter Anthony disagrees with the plan:

The next tweet has a more detailed view of the overall plan. Egregious:

The Revd Philip Murray explains why house churches are, rightly, no longer the norm in the West:

The Revd Giles Fraser, a former Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral and current Rector at the south London church of St Mary’s, Newington, London, wrote an article for UnHerd, a publication he co-founded: ‘The Church is abandoning its flock’.

His article begins with this:

“We don’t preach morality, we plant churches. We don’t preach therapeutic care, we plant churches.” Justin Welby, July 2021

There are some forms of Christianity that exist only in order to reproduce. Christians are here to make new Christians who, in turn, are called to go out there and make even more new ones. The purpose of church life is to beget more church life. Randy for converts, these good shepherds admire the sheep in the pews principally for their reproductive qualities. And you can tell it’s these sorts of Christians that are now running the show in the Church of England, because those of us who are deemed to be infertile or firing evangelistic blanks are being slated for the knacker’s yard. The latest group to be targeted for a cull are the clergy themselves. In more senses than one, we are being directed to Genesis chapter nine, verse seven: “Go forth and multiply!”

The new growth strategy from head office is code named Myriad, Greek for ten thousand. The idea is to have 10,000 new churches by 2030, creating a million new disciples. Don’t worry about the figures too much, they are nothing more than fantasy numbers plucked from the sky. As a general rule, church growth is inversely proportional to the big talk coming from head office. Of course, we are all supposed to nod along, as if this is some fabulous, exciting initiative. As Martyn Percy, the Dean of the Cathedral in Oxford, explained, it’s becoming a bit like one of those Stalinist 10-year plans, something we are all obliged to cheer, yet one that is totally disconnected to reality.

The latest Great Leap Forward for the C of E looks like this. Get rid of all those crumbling churches. Get rid of the clergy. Do away with all that expensive theological education. These are all “limiting factors”. Instead, focus relentlessly on young people. Growth, Young People, Forwards. Purge the church of all those clapped-out clergy pottering about in their parishes. Forget the Eucharist, or at least, put those who administer it on some sort of zero hours contract. Sell their vicarages. This is what our new shepherds want in their prize sheep: to be young, dumb, and full of evangelistic… zeal.

Fraser goes on to discuss other disastrous CofE projects, including the Decade of Evangelism during the 1990s:

It was an embarrassing disaster.

He correctly tells us where this plan came from — the Archbishop of Canterbury consecrating the Sacrament in his own kitchen on Easter Sunday 2020, saying that we do not need church buildings:

… Covid has finally given its proponents the opportunity they need. When the Archbishop of Canterbury decided to celebrate and broadcast the Eucharist on Easter Day 2020 from his kitchen, rather than popping down a few stairs to Lambeth Palace’s fine 13^th-century chapel, he was clearly making a point: all those old stones are holding us back, they are unnecessary. It’s called “a new way of being church”. Our new churches will meet in people’s homes, not in churches. Around 20-30 will gather in the living rooms of the wealthiest people in the parish — who else has a living room that can sit this many people?

Fraser says that some CofE dioceses are actively culling clergy, preferring administrators instead:

Parish churches are being stripped of their clergy. The Diocese of Chelmsford is culling 61 posts by 2021 with a further 49 under threat by 2026. Others are following suit. But as these “limiting factor” clergy are being culled, central funds are being directed towards new evangelistic initiatives through what is called Strategic Development Funding from the £9 billion piggy bank held by the fabulously wealthy Church Commissioners. Dioceses can now apply for money from a £45-million pot set aside to support this new look C of E. And many of the new jobs that are being funded are not for parish-based clergy, but for a whole new level of managers with new-fangled titles like assistant archdeacon and mission enablers. This is the mechanism by which the church is being transformed. Even those Bishops that want to resist this dismantling of traditional structures are being out manoeuvred.

Not surprisingly, some clergy are clearly unhappy:

If you are not a part of the great push forward, you are just so much baggage. Little wonder there is now a white-hot anger within the rank and file of the priesthood. Consider this from the former Dear of Exeter Cathedral, Jonathan Draper.

“It is ironic, of course, that these proposals are being pushed by those who have both presided over the church’s decline and had the long and expensive theological education which they would jettison. There is nothing from the leadership of the church that reflects on their own part in decline, their own ineptitude, bullying, sense of entitlement, and in the failure to connect with the very people they would like to see fill the houses of the sufficiently wealthy in this brave new ecclesial world.”

I have never seen this level of fury from within the church during my 25 years as a priest.

Fraser says that the CofE must return to its roots in faith and not be ashamed about why it exists:

The Church feels like a gauche teenage boy going out to the pub deliberately to find a girlfriend, covering himself with cheap aftershave and rehearsing his unconvincing chat-up lines. It’s all so cringeworthy and needy. The way you make yourself attractive to others is by being fully yourself, and having confidence in what you are – even if that is a little strange and different. It’s when you stop obsessing about attracting others that you become more attractive to them.

But also, the church is not called to be successful. It is called to be faithful. I would prefer for us to die with dignity, being faithful to our calling, rather than to turn ourselves inside out trying to be superficially attractive, thus abandoning the faith as we have understood it. Indeed, the Bible is full of stores of the faithful remnant. In Biblical theology, the remnant are those faithful people that survive some catastrophe. Today, these are the people who come to church, faithfully to say their prayers — people of devotion and not necessarily of evangelistic vim and vigour. They are the beating heart of the parish. Eleanor Rigby, Father McKenzie: these are my heroes. And long term, these are our most effective evangelists. I am deeply offended that they are now called passengers.

He concludes:

We won’t be saved by panicky spread-sheet evangelists, Indeed, we must be more of what we have been called to be – more thoughtful, more prayerful, less fearful, more obedient to God’s call. We are resurrection people after all. Institutional death should hold out no terror for the faithful. And it will only be this lack of fear that can make us attractive once again.

Tremendous — and true!

Meanwhile, other concerned clergy teamed up with the laity to mount a resistance: stand for the General Synod.

The Revd Marcus Walker encouraged the opposition movement, called the Save the Parish network:

Not surprisingly, by August 2021, the CofE and certain media outlets tried to smear Save the Parish:

I will have more on this next week, all being well.

For now, this is just an introduction to what is happening in the home of Anglicanism. May the good Lord graciously help the faithful oppose the hierarchy.