Magic Statistics

WORLD Magazine has honoured as its 2006 Daniels of the Year two great leaders of the Anglican Communion: Peter Akinola, Archbishop of the Province of Nigeria, and Henry Orombi, Archbishop of the Province of Uganda.

Jesus asked His disciples, "What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A man clothed in soft garments?" John the Baptist, of course, was no such man, and neither are WORLD's 2006 Daniels of the Year Peter Jasper Akinola and Henry Luke Orombi. Their biblical stands are making a difference not only in Africa but in the United States, as the crisis in the oldest American denomination reaches its climax.
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Orombi and his counterpart in Nigeria, Archbishop Peter Akinola, are among conservative prelates under fire from church leaders in the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Their particular crime is aiding and abetting congregations in the United States in quitting the United States' oldest Protestant denomination. Those congregations no longer want to submit to radical interpretations of Scripture, including the ordination of gay clergy. The conflict spiked in 2003 when the Episcopal Church consecrated the openly gay bishop from New Hampshire, Gene Robinson. The gulf has only widened since, moving the worldwide Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is part, to a likely split.

The latest development: Several dozen U.S. churches have asked for "alternative oversight" from Orombi, and the number grows almost daily. On Dec. 2 California's San Joaquin diocese—with 48 parishes and 7,000 members—became the first diocese to take the first of two steps toward ending affiliation with the Episcopal Church. This week congregants at two of the nation's largest and wealthiest Episcopal congregations, Truro Church and The Falls Church, both located in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., are voting to leave the denomination and to seek alternative oversight from the Anglican province headed by Akinola.
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With accelerated secession from the Episcopal Church underway, how did African clergymen with tribal roots and histories steeped in internecine conflict arrive in the middle of a crisis affecting a worldwide church of 77 million whose birthright flows from the Anglo-Saxon halls of Canterbury?

Can such prelates, one a carpenter and the other a high-school dropout who failed at becoming a mechanic, reach Anglicans in affluent nations while shepherding local church members whose yearly per capita incomes average out to $550? In countries where indoor plumbing and 24-hour-a-day electricity aren't yet standard?

Read the whole thing. Also see the companion article, Left behind? A Christian surge overseas creates problems for the U.S. religious left.

Previous related post: Archbishop Greg Venables: We are standing with you

The Anglican Church of Canada (ACC) does not have recent statistics for any essential numbers: priests, members, regular Sunday worshippers, regular givers, etc..  You name it, the ACC doesn't know how many they got.  The most recent data available are for 2001.

The 2007 Anglican Church Directory, an annual reference book published by ABC Publishing, in the section that normally carries national statistics, now carries a sentence that reads: “Figures will be available in 2008 after the installation of a new statistics-gathering system.” However, the same sentence, with the date reading “2007,” appeared in the 2006 directory. The church last published statistics in the 2005 directory and those were from 2001.

“I get comments from people: ‘Why don’t we have statistics?’” acknowledged General Synod treasurer Peter Blachford, whose financial management and development department is responsible for collecting the data.

Karen Evans, one of two librarians at the church’s national office in Toronto, said the library gets several inquiries each month about church numbers from journalists, students, directory publishers, other churches, members of the general public and national church staff who need accurate figures for such things as grant applications.

“People are not impressed” that the most-recent data she can provide is from 2001, she said in an interview. “People sound contemptuous, or puzzled and critical. We look like an organization that is not transparent, not self-discerning and aware."

The last comment applies to a lot of what the ACC does, but let’s not get into that right now.

Statistics Canada has counts of Anglicans in Canada, but they are derived from the census, so they also refer to 2001.  There's another problem, too.

[T]he 2001 national census reported that about two million Canadians identified themselves as Anglican, but the Anglican Church of Canada’s 2001 figures show that there are 212,577 people identified as regular givers out of a total of 641,845 people on parish rolls.

Now why would there be such a huge discrepancy between those sets of numbers? Why do so many Canadians tell the census they're Anglicans when they haven't set foot in an Anglican church for years?  Here’s a possibility, which I mentioned in a previous post: Those who identify as Anglican were most likely baptised as infants in an Anglican church, but as adults most of them have had little or no contact with the church.  Have liberal theology and gospel-free sermons driven them away?  We don’t know: Without a well-maintained database from which to do statistical analysis, it’s hard to be sure.

The Anglican Journal story goes on to describe how another Canadian Protestant denomination handles data gathering—and does a much better job of it than the ACC.

Canada’s largest Protestant denomination, the United Church of Canada, meanwhile, maintains an impressive, up-to-date directory of detailed statistics, but its collection system differs from the Anglican church.

The national office in Toronto sends its questionnaire directly to the church’s 2,300 “pastoral charges,” or parishes that may include one large church or several smaller churches. The response rate is impressive – 92 per cent – and Tom Broadhurst, information and statistics co-ordinator, and his two-person staff call parishes that have not responded. . . . Last year, he and his staff contacted more than 400 churches to verify their data.

The United Church of Canada (UCC) has an information and statistics co-ordinator with a staff of two.  Right away, it’s obvious that the UCC considers this a far more important function than does the ACC. The UCC sends questionnaires directly to parishes, whereas the ACC sends questionnaires to the 30 diocesan offices who, generally speaking, would have little idea how many regular worshippers attend services in each of their parishes.   The UCC conducts telephone follow-up with parishes that do not respond.  The ACC apparently does not.

The UCC’s system works; the ACC’s doesn’t.  Sounds like the best thing for the Anglicans to do is simply to copy what the United Church already does.

Previous related posts:

• Anglican decline not due to falling birth rate
• Anglican Journal clarifies The McKerracher Presentation
• Anglican Church of Canada on the road to extinction