What is in Kelvin's Head?

  • Counting our many blessings – Scottish Episcopal Statistics

    This Sunday is the day when the Scottish Episcopal Church counts how many people are in church. It isn’t a count of the number of people who want to be Episcopalians, it isn’t a count of those who say they are Episcopalians – in fact it isn’t even a count of Episcopalians at all. It is simply a count of the number of people who happen to be there on that particular Sunday.

    I like this Sunday because when the people are counted, I find myself counting them as so many wonderful blessings.

    I think that statistics are important and that they can tell us things. They can’t tell us everything but they can tell us a huge amount.

    Now, whenever we talk about the stats in the Scottish Episcopal Church we end up talking about how we gather them and there’s always people ready to say that the numbers that we gather are the wrong numbers.

    Some people want to make a case for gathering them as an average over a number of weeks. Others say that counting the number of people at Sunday services doesn’t come close to saying how many people the church deals with.

    To an extent that is true but it then leads on to absurd suggestions that instead of counting the number of people at worship we should count the number of people who come through the building. You get people wanting to count the Tai Chi group, the AA group that hires the hall or the dog club. I think some people are so desperate to pretend that their numbers are not in fact going downwards that they’d be happy to count the dogs.

    The truth is, we need to be fairly consistent in what we count. It isn’t the actual number that we arrive at that matters that much, however interesting it might be in any given year. The real question is how we are doing over time.

    I’ve been in many a meeting in the church where we assign money or other resources to something that we claim to be mission and then talk in the rest of the meeting as though we have no expectation at all that the numbers will go in anything other than a downward direction.

    I wish we did more with our statistics and I’m quite keen that we keep gathering them.

    The extraordinary thing that we discovered last year was that there are over 100 000 people in Scotland who think they are Anglicans, Episcopalians, C of E or some other Anglican variant of answering the question in the Census. The question that really should have been at the top of the agenda of a lot of our meetings is why we don’t seem to see more than about 15 000 of them on a Sunday.

    Here’s what I think:

    • The numerical trend has been going downwards for a long time.
    • The really steep fall is in those who claim to be part of the church but who are not communicants.
    • We shouldn’t be surprised that non-communicants have disappeared when we’ve been pushing communion as the main service for 40 years or so.
    • We don’t generally behave as though we believe our mission plans, policies and strategies are likely to succeed.
    • All the evidence points to the fact that our mission plans, policies and strategies (and we’ve had tons of them) have not succeeded.
    • The national profile of the church needs to be fixed.
    • We need to discover a new, respectful ecumenism that will help us to turn our backs on the kind of ecumenism that harms our ability to speak of having something distinctive.
    • Getting people to turn up on more Sundays in the month would give an immediate and dramatic boost to our numbers. We need to speak of why it is important to worship weekly again.
    • Churches with poor websites are going to go going out of business and for good reasons. They shouldn’t expect bail-outs from others.
    • The Scottish Episcopal Church has only ever really grown when it has been in the business of  opening new congregations.
    • You don’t plant new congregations unless you are confident that you’ve got something good that’s worth sharing.
    • The Scottish Episcopal Church may not be doing as badly as some other churches. We may be increasing in market share but need a bit of research to see whether that is the case.

    Anyway, all that being said, this Sunday counts because this is the Sunday when we do count.

    If you want to be counted yourself then you need to turn up.

    Like with most things.

    , ,

23 responses to “What if this is the end of the Eucharist?”

  1. Thomas Scott Avatar
    Thomas Scott

    Just noticing here that DGD (of happy memory) seems to have left out of his catalogue of joyous, sad, perilous, and solemn occasions any instance of celebrating during a plague or pestilence. I’m not worried about the mass. The eucharist need not be celebrated as though it were a car battery, as if not offering it now would somehow allow the power to run down. It is not at risk, we are, which I think is your point. The questions asked are worth asking, of course.

    Reply
  2. Mo Nicholson Avatar
    Mo Nicholson

    Mo Nicholson. This is an intriguing discussion and what I would like to add to it is the observation that I have had to learn the hard way that participation in the Eucharist being made impossible in no way diminishes an individual’s ability to worship God or be in fellowship with other believers. I am barred from receiving Holy Communion in the Catholic church because allergies make this impossible for me. The pain induced by this has little to do with feeling separation from God, in fact nothing at all as I do not feel that. It comes from feeling excluded from the community, different sections if which regard it as desirable or tolerable that a member of the community should be excluded in this way. This experience has made me understand as never before that if we place prime value on liturgical celebrations, ir indeed anything else, above charity, compassion, welcome and inclusivity, in other words love, then we have become the sounding gong which St Paul warned against. If we truly believe that God is love, as I do, then it is obvious that it is love for one another which makes us true children of God our Father, and in light of this we could begin to look at these present challenging circumstances as simply an opportunity to love more, to reach out to one another in whatever way possible in the knowledge that this is what actually matters and always did. Only perhaps we were tempted to almost make a fetish of our rituals, sacraments and so on. And perhaps this can show us a better way more adapted to the world we are supposed to serve.

    Reply
  3. Lynsay Downs Avatar
    Lynsay Downs

    You and your conversation with Dave Roberts prompted me to write this. Does it resonate for you?

    https://astonishing.community/2020/05/06/conversations-in-coronatide/

    Reply
    1. Kelvin Avatar
      Kelvin

      Thanks Lynsay – yes, it does resonate with me very much.

      I’ve shared it on facebook. I think it is really helpful.

      Reply
  4. Fr Keith Avatar
    Fr Keith

    Thanks again for such a thoughtful piece. With the Eucharist central to much of, at least Anglican/Episcopalian, worship in recent generations, we perhaps forget that the Church in these islands was, between the Reformation and the liturgical revivals of the 19th and 20th centuries, sustained by Mattins and Evensong as the regular diet of worship on Sundays. I’m not advocating a return to such times, but there is, as you suggest, work to be done on non-Eucharistic worship (though not defining it as a negative). Thanks again.

    Reply
  5. Fenland Boy Avatar
    Fenland Boy

    For the record, I’m not in favour of lay presidency at the Eucharist. I believe, for better or worse, in an ordered church.

    Why are you concerned about lay Presidency?

    Reply
  6. Chuck Avatar
    Chuck

    May I say respectfully, lighten up. Many Anglicans/Episcopalians lived on the edges of civilization in the nascent U.S. and various elements of the British Empire. Priests to celebrate the Holy Eucharist and to baptize were seldom seen, at most twice a year in many areas. (Bishops, only every several years.) The Church carried on in this manner decade after decade. If circumstances require, the Church will carry on again despite our profound sense of loss.

    I should add, to those who grew up under threat or reality of war, persecution, oppression, famine, other disease, etc, the present difficulty is not unfamiliar in many respects.

    Reply
  7. Miriam MacCarthy Avatar
    Miriam MacCarthy

    Thank you! It is wonderful to read these serious, personal thoughts about the Eucharist. My feeling is that it has become celebrated to the point of boredom. Church, and what we do in it, is in danger of becoming simply a habit. It could just as well be crackerjack for a fast-asleep congregation. My heresy is that the direction Jesus gave is to “do this in remembrance of me”, and that means everything we eat at any time, whether alone or with others, in thanksgiving. If that is seriously done, it has vastly more meaning. It really gets ones attention and requires preparation. Would not become popular or usual, I predict!

    Reply

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