What is in Kelvin's Head?

I.D.

30/09/2013
Thinking Anglicans has the story that all of us in the Scottish Episcopal Church should be thinking about at the moment. One of the most important stories that concerns Episcopalians in Scotland for quite a while.

It is to do with the recent release of figures from the last census – the one that was conducted in 2011.

The figures are absolutely fascinating.

Firstly, there are a lot more people who claim to think of themselves as Anglicans in Scotland than might have been expected. However, the majority, the vast majority of them don’t think of themselves as Scottish Episcopalians.

Here are the figures:

Church of England 66,717

Episcopalian 21,289

Scottish Episcopal Church 8,048

Anglican 4,490

Church of Ireland 2,020

Church in Wales 453

Total 103,017

Now there is a lot to say and I’ll probably not say it all today.

Firstly, notice how many people in Scotland claim to be Church of England.

If we add together those making a claim on an identity that thinks of itself as Episcopal we get 29 337. That is less than half of those who claim to be Church of England.

We’ve got a wee identity crisis and we need to start to think about it.

Now, note the number of people who were actually turning up at church in the same year (drawn from the Annual Report of the Scottish Episcopal Church). This was 14 126. So about 14% of those who claim to be Anglicans in Scotland are turning up on a typical Sunday in the Scottish Episcopal Church.

We’ve got a wee turning up problem and we need to start to think about it.

Now, take a look at the number of people whom the church claims belong to it – again from the Annual Report. That same year we claimed that we had a membership of 34 916 whilst we had a communicant membership of 24 650.

For a church which is in so many places primarily a Eucharistic church (that’s what we do) then we’ve got a wee faith problem and we need to start thinking about it.

I was very keen that we discuss the church’s statistics at last year’s General Synod. We did talk about them but I’m not entirely sure we did as much with them as I had hoped we would. The Primus tried to be upbeat about them and say that you don’t learn everything about a church by its statistics and that he found things to be hopeful.

For myself, I only partly agree with him. I think there is a lot of hope about in the Scottish Episcopal Church – far more than amongst my presbyterian friends whose church, despite being many times bigger than my own, seems to be collapsing at a local level all across the country. However, I think we can learn things from numbers and I wish these census statistics had been available at Synod. I think that reflecting creatively on the numbers is something that we need to do at every synod.

Disappointingly we don’t have census figures that we can apportion to dioceses – if we did we could see positions of relative strength and look at where the church was doing least well at attracting people who not only ought to be connected to it but actually claim to government that they are connected.

Here are some hunches:
- We’ve a significant branding problem. There’s only one church of the Anglican Communion in Scotland yet even the census report (based on write in responses) has six different lines relating to us.
- Some of the people who claim to be Church of England will make their way to the Church of Scotland and never know the difference. This infuriates Episcopalians but we should be thinking about why we are so invisible to those people.
- The various diocesan mission schemes that are underway are not working terribly well and not likely to work terribly well. They all seem to have been devised by people who are living in an age before the internet began. None are using particularly well, the central tool that people use to drive trade, create impact, generate conversation. Until we start to get this right we are going to decline. Individual churches which opt out of this are opting out of survival.
- We need to talk about our identity in terms relating to various levels of debate about Scotland and England. A long time ago, Canon Alice Mann (who helped us so much as a Province) said that we needed to do a lot more work on this. We’ve not done it and we are suffering from not having done it.
- Our corporate identity (motto, visuals and name) are such that they always need explaining and are used badly. I’ve been to churches recently who have described themselves (in every font and style imaginable) as:
  - Scottish Episcopal Church
  - Scottish Episcopal Church (Anglican)
  - Scottish Episcopal Church (Anglican Communion)
  - Scottish Episcopal Church (In full communion with the Church of England)
  - A member church of the Anglican Communion and Evangelical Alliance
  - and with no denominational affiliation at all. (eg my own congregation).
- Numbers matter hugely
- We need to work very hard on our national profile. Bishops have a special role to play here and though they’ve been doing a lot better at being local voices in the press recently we are not really creating much Scotland-wide impact.
- We’ve changed our corporate identity before and at least have to talk about doing so again.
- The Mission and Ministry Board cannot focus on anything because its remit is too large. It needs to be split in two and there needs to be a rethink of which committees go with which boards. For example, maybe Communications and Mission (or even better Outreach or Evangelism) have something to do with one another.
- Mission is a word that is so widely and inappropriately used that it now means nothing except when one is applying for a diocesan grant.
Our identity crisis is revealed by asking people from outside the church what they think we are. “Oh, are you the Church of Richard Holloway?” say the intelligensia. (Yes, still they do).

“Oh, aren’t you just the English Church?” say a whole bunch of others.

Now we need to think about these things. What should our next step be?
census, corporate image, England, English Church, identity, Scottish Episcopa Church

7 responses to “Whither the Kirk?”

Pausing Place

25/08/2010

I missed last night’s programme, but I thought your comments were interesting.

In a sense, perhaps it’s unsurprising if the SEC is inwardly more positive about itself than the CofS. My take is that in the recent past, at least, the SEC started from a lower common denominator, not being the “local” church in the same way as the Kirk, and so it doesn’t have to contend with others saying of it “look how the mighty have fallen” in quite the same way.

As to the health of the Kirk (and the SEC for that matter), I think we need to reflect on our self-perception and to consider carefully the points and places in which a dying church (congregation or denomination) should be allowed to die gracefully, and the ways in which we might see new life emerge from the rubble.

As a young(ish!), relatively new Christian I have seen examples of (both urban and rural) SEC and Kirk congregations where there are few signs of new growth, little to draw in younger (under 50 year olds, to pick a random-ish number) new folk, and much to sustain negative preconceptions of church as boring, irrelevant and so forth.

We as a faith community need to get much better at stepping up to the mark in our creativity and engagement with our society. The sad truth is that most young adults do not know and have not heard about Jesus Christ, and unless we engage with them in ways culturally relevant to them, and which do not presuppose previous knowledge (too often taken for granted) they never will.

It troubles me, but I do think it’s true to say that in the SEC and in the Kirk we have a church sustained by the traditions and cultural reference points taught to a previous generation. Culture has shifted radically, with the result that the same will not be able to be said in 20 years time.

Our challenge is clear. Whether the Kirk and the SEC can step up to the mark to address what it means to live out the Great Commission in the 21st century is less so.

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Cal

25/08/2010

I didn’t really understand who this programme was aimed at, or even what its aim was.

Yes, numbers have fallen, but perhaps the small number of people who remain are there because they actually want to be, not because it’s the done thing on a Sunday morning.

And personally, I rather like the idea of a church “sustained by traditions”. Clearly the church has to be relevant to modern society, but in abandoning the traditions of worship then you lose the centre of why the church exists in the first place.

There was something very Presbyterian about the programme with its “we’re doomed” mentality. I find the SEC generally more positive in outlook.

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John

25/08/2010

The only book the presenter seemed to have used in his research was ‘The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000’ By Callum G Brown – indeed Callum Brown was one of the speakers. The thesis of this well argued sociological study is that “quite suddenly in 1963 something very profound ruptured the character of the nation and its people sending organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significanceâ€. That something he identifies as new media, new gender roles and a moral revolution which has dramatically ended peopleâ€™s conception that they lived Christian lives.â€ It could be said to have happened as â€œsex beganâ€ between the end of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles first LP as the poet Philip Larkin so famously put it.”
To balance this statistical decline the programme flagged up some of the “church without walls ” iniatives in a lame sort of way. All in all a most unsatisfactory programme that only told half the story.

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Kenny

25/08/2010

Good crit Kelvin. My reflection at the end of the programme was, “Lord, we visited this stuff over 30 years ago, and have come out of it stronger and better Church in the SEC.” Hopefully, we stopped longing for ‘the good old days’ a long time ago!

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MartinRitchie

26/08/2010

I thinking “Pausing Place” makes a good point about needing to creatively engage with society. From my own experience of working with a CofS congregation, this creative engagement is a weak spot for many.

As a counterpoint to the programme, interesting to note in the latest “Life and Work” a very positive article about a growing CofS congregation in Stornoway – and I mean really growing! So not all doom and gloom, and I’m sure there are many more examples of bright spots, just as there are in the SEC!

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Graham Vahey

28/08/2010

If the C of S disappeared completely we would be at a loss. During the dark and bleak years of Thatcher’s reign she refused to visit Scotland for 5 years. When she did she expressed shock that we had Royal Regalia and ordered it to be removed immediately for safe-keeping to England. Her ‘Sermon on the Mound’ is now historical for its condescension to the Scots. She was none too pleased to be handed two reports on poverty in Scotland by the powerful Church and Nation Committee. Indeed, it was to this Committee that the population turned to for a moral lead during Thatcherism. When James VI (‘Jamie the Saxt’) became James I in England, the population turned to senior Scottish earls for a moral lead. Unfortunately, the Piskie Church does not give a moral lead in Scotland, apart from the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the recent past. The RC Church does pronounce on moral issues. Could it not be conceivable that all the major Churches could unite in a Committee to pronounce for Scotland on moral issues as the Church & Nation Committee once did?

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Aldous N. Gaiters

01/09/2010

Speaking as a Nonjuror myself I am sure the SEC has a right to a moral voice in Scotland. Taking the US daughter church of the SEC as a model you could see where the fissures would appear. There is room for a modern liberal Christian voice, but even I an old Liberal myself, would have to fear that such a voice might appeal to only a select few.

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