The Last Anglican
At the rate the Anglican Church in Canada is losing members, by 2061 there will be only one person left in the church, says a Canadian marketing expert (see Ted Byfield, "Oh, Canada! The land of emptying churches," Dec. 10, http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47835). An examination of the membership rolls of parish churches showed that membership in what was once Canada's biggest denomination has shrunk 50 percent over the last 40 years--from 1.3 million in 1961 to 642,000 in 2001. Byfield attributes the decrease to the church's ongoing departure from Christian teaching: "the acceptance of serial marriage," ordination of women, and "finally to the acceptance of homosexual practice." Well, don't say Peter Akinola, the Anglican bishop of Nigeria, didn't warn you. We don't have the figures for Canada, a much more energetically secular society than ours, but we do have figures that tell us that here in America, as membership in the theologically flaccid "mainline" churches declines, membership in denominations more devoted to the Word of God continues to increase dramatically. Makes you wonder when the leaders of the mainline churches will put two and two together.
