Over 400 Anglican churches have been closed in Britain due to a lack of attendance and support from the local community over the past decade, alone.
Continuing the downward spiral for Christianity in Britain, some 423 churches, including 209 traditional church buildings, were closed between 2010 and 2019, all before the impact of the Chinese coronavirus.
The findings, which came through analysis of Church of England data conducted by The Telegraph newspaper, went on to reveal that nearly 1,000 churches have shut down in the past three decades, with 940 closing between 1987 and 2019, leaving 15,496 in operation.
The Dean of Southwark Cathedral, the Very Revd Andrew Nunn, described the number of church closers as “shocking,” saying: “I share the concern of many people that the policies that lead to the closure of churches may also mean that we will be seeing more and more changes to the parish system, which is, after all, the bedrock of the life of the Church of England for England.”
The senior Anglican priest suggested that the church closures may be more of a result of Churches being “in the wrong locations” as “communities have moved away and left the old infrastructure of society stranded”.
However, the Anglican Church has been seeing a gradual decline in worship over the past decades. The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) taken in the 2011 census estimate that 59% of the population in England are Christian, falling from around 72 per cent in 2001. If the trend continues, less than half of the population will be Christian when the 2021 census data is published.
Meanwhile, according to the government figures, Islam is the fastest-growing in the country and is currently the largest religious minority group in England. The ONS also stated that a third of those who identified as Muslim were under 16 years old.
There are no current numbers for church closures since the start of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, however, a leaked Church document from last January suggested that the virus had provided a chance to enact “radical change” to make parishes more “financially stable”. The paper suggested that the CoE should pursue more online services rather than in church gatherings in order to attract more worshippers.
In July of 2020, the Church claimed that over the pandemic that they had attracted 200-300,000 new or previously irregular online worshippers, but had possibly lost between 100-200,000 pre-Covid worshippers.
The decline in the number of churches comes as the Anglican church has taken a marked shift to the left. The ideological shift has coincided with the 2013 installation of ex-oil executive-turned-Archbishop Justin Welby, who holds the highest rank in the Church of England, except for Queen Elizabeth II.
It emerged in 2017 that the Church of England under Welby had been baptising hundreds of asylum seekers — with some alleging that this was only to help people with their asylum applications rather than for religious purposes. One church ‘converted’ 200 Iranian asylum seekers, alone.
It is believed that taxi bomber Emad Al Swealmeen was one of these alleged Christian converts but reverted back to Islam — if he ever truly left it — before he attempted to bomb a women’s hospital in Liverpool on Remembrance Sunday 2021.
During the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, several churches installed pro-BLM displays, such as a painting depicting a ‘black Jesus’ and a Salisbury Cathedral display that likened Black Lives Matter activists toppling statues in Britain to the struggle for the Magna Carta.
While pushing a pious agenda of progressivism, Welby’s Church was accused of banning the clergy from volunteering at hospitals during the pandemic, preventing sick people from “having the rituals by which your faith prepares you for death”.
Welby has also been accused of failing to notify the police about a priest who was accused of sexually assaulting a parishioner — despite Welby knowing the priest was a convicted paedophile — saying in court “it was just one person’s word against another”. Welby who was the Dean of Liverpool at the time actually banned the parishioner from Liverpool’s cathedral for being “abusive and threatening” in 2011.
Welby’s social justice agenda was cited as a central reason for former Anglican Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali’s conversion to Catholicism. Upon leaving the church in October, Dr Nazir-Ali accused the Welby-led church of “jumping onto every faddish bandwagon about identity politics, cultural correctness and mea culpas about Britain’s imperial past”.