Episcopal Church Marriages Down by 66% Since 2003

Story here.

Few marriages, few baptisms, and preaching to increasingly-empty pews. The absolute state of TEC and CofE.

 

I am hoping we pick up the faithful out the diocese of Albany

 

Speaking of Bishop Love...

Episcopal Bishop William Love announces resignation in response to hearing panel ruling

 

I'm glad that Mr. Walton had the good sense to acknowledge that there are multiple causes for this downturn in weddings. There is a certain fringe of the church that would obtusely blame the statistics on the approval of same sex marriage within the Episcopal Church. That is sophistry to an extreme. One needs to think for only a minute or two about the typical TEC parish. It is principally composed of middle aged or older folks who are established in a marriage or, in some cases, who have sworn off marriage and are now in some sort of cohabiting relationship. What young people are in the church are not in any rush to marry.

The same sex marriage question is largely irrelevant to the average Episcopalian. I am confident that there are only a couple hundred priests in TEC who have officiated one. It's mostly the same clique of clergy who are militantly progressive doing those. And I don't think there are many being done because most homosexuals aren't very interested in marriage. I suppose there was a flashy initial wave of participation when it was new and trendy but I suspect that has run its course.

Anecdotal but relevant. My maternal grandparents lived in a rural North Dakota town and were members of ELCA from the time of its formation. As ELCA has closely mirrored the Episcopal Church in every step of this path they became increasingly uncomfortable but they always decided to ignore what was going on in the national church because it didn't happen in their local parish. They didn't know any homosexuals, they didn't have any in their church, so what did it matter? It could be written off as a problem that mostly isolated to the Coasts. The whole parish probably would have been more comfortable transitioning into the NALC but they had grown so accustomed to ignoring whatever happened at the provincial offices in Chicago that it was probably never even given consideration.

One other factor, it's somewhat more challenging to get married in a traditional Church than by some Evangelical protestant group. I can speak to my process. I must give the bishop notice of any wedding I intend to officiate. I must affirm that I have investigated the personal life of each party to an extent that I am convinced it is lawful by the canons of the Church for them to marry. At least one of the participants must be a member in good standing of a Christian church. I can't just put an ad up "Wedding services: $200" and book myself every Saturday through the summer like a DJ. The Romans mandate a lengthy process of counseling before their clergy are permitted to perform a wedding. A lot of people aren't willing to go through the process when they can go down to the court house and have it done for $50 or $60.

 

Our local TEC is a pretty liberal but from what I undestand it is growing.

 

But with an overall shrinking church these numbers make sense.

 

We have a TEC church nearby, and it's got a decent 100+ per Sunday which creates an illusion of non-shrinkage. But then you realize that about 10 nearby TEC churches closed down in the last decade, and you see what's really happening. Either this particular TEC church happened on a pocket of fans that's more stable than the other 10 (mainly associated with progressive leftist politics, lavender, BLM, etc), or they simply picked up the congregation dregs from all the parishes which closed. Either way it's an unstable mixture, and therefore even this church does not have a stable generational future. The BLM affiliates are still strong here, but the lavender folks are moving out and the neighborhood is "gentrifying". This TEC parish will not escape the overall trends.

 

On a different forum I raised the point that Protestants lack (or simply do not understand) a theology of marriage. Marriage as a religious sacrament seems to be one of those leftover Roman Catholic concepts that never got truly "reformed" in a systematic way. Luther considered marriage a civic matter; so did the Puritans. As time has gone by Protestants in general seem to have have drifted away from the idea that marriage is a religious union.

Marriage is not, strictly speaking, a sacrament; is nevertheless a covenant between man and woman that should mirror Christ's relationship to his church (Ephesians 5:25-33). And I mean a covenant in the religious as well as the secular contractual sense. New England Puritans sanctioned civic marriage because their entire society was formed around the church; a magistrate no less than a pastor was assumed to be an upright and Godly man. But we moderns have kept the "contractual" meaning of marriage while discarding the covenantal meaning of it. And we should not, because a Christian marriage is a covenant between a man and a woman under Christ the King.

I've always believed that Christians should be married by a pastor or priest in a church not because it is a religious sacrament, but because it underscores the idea of human marriage as a mirror of Christ's relationship to his church. But modern Protestant churches do not seem to accept (or at least not to advocate) this theology of marriage. Even the RC church seems to be backing slowly away from it. In the US we are probably only a few decades away from declaring marriage a purely secular contractual arrangement, and a time-limited one at that, and I doubt whether we're going to get significant pushback from the churches. To a certain extent ("common law" marriages and homosexual "civil unions") this is already the case.

EDIT: Tightened up some language.

 

I find that the whole problem with how we view and define marriage started with the acceptance of birth control. Once we separate marriage from the purpose of begetting children and make child bearing optional in marriage we change what it means to be married. Then marriage becomes slowly but surely about adults and sexual fulfillment. When it becomes that how can you deny gay marriage or even polygomy. Churches need to go back to the basics and teach what the purpose of marriage is.

 

Does that mean I should only marry a woman of child bearing age or more exactly one of child bearing ability?

And so it damn well should. My wife is in her 70's and we don't sit there moping about our marriage not being able to produce children, but we do practise being adults and sexual fulfillment.

I don't know how you interpret it but the 1662 BoCP. to me suggests reasons for marriage other than children.

Fir ſt, it was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the prai ſe of his holy Name. Secondly, it was ordained for a remedy again ſt ſin, and to avoid fornication; that ſuch per ſons as have not the gift of continency might marry, and keep them ſelves undefiled members of Chri ſt’s body. Thirdly, it was ordained for the mutual ſociety, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in pro ſperity and adver ſity.

Or maybe Paul had people like me and non child wanting people when he said "But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn." (1 Cor 7:9). Not much thought about Children there.

 

No what it means is that it is accepted that marriage leads to children. It is the natural order of things. It was never about sexual fulfillment until about 40 years ago. I am not sure Paul is contradicting me there as he knew in his day and age if you got married and had sex children could and would often result from that. Older people who got married while not always fertile were not going against that norm and expectation but they had kinda aged out of the being able to have children thing.

 

I live within the territory of the diocese of SE Virginia. It is a hot mess. They cannot keep a bishop. This area has some of the oldest and most historic Episcopal churches in the US and many of them are functioning as museums these days. In the last year or so, the most progressive church in my city was amalgamated with the most traditional one. That lasted for all of about a month and a half before the LGBTQ+ and hippie worship element started holding their own service on a Saturday at the new location, leaving the traditionalists with the Sunday timeslot.

The original Episcopal church in downtown Newport News was closed altogether. The neighborhood had deteriorated so much that it was prudent to consider bringing a pistol to church. And it was like a game of roulette guessing how many windows and tires one's car might have after leaving it in the parking lot long enough to attend a service. Maybe soon they'll close the one where the militant feminist priest teaches that God is a woman.

 

@Shane R do yall ever pick up some disgruntled TEC people?

 

We've had 4 or 5 place membership in the last 4 years. For the most part, anyone who's still hanging on with TEC is willing to grin and bare it, or they just stop going to church.

 

I know several good people who go to our local TEC. They are either liberal or have their head in the sands about what is going on or maybe they just grin and bear it. I don't think that place is a bastion of orthodoxy but their last priest even they saw as a nut

 

If it's any consolation -- and I know it isn't -- the Episcopalians aren't the only ones going through this pain. The United Methodists are in the middle of schism; the Presbyterians split years ago; the Southern Baptist Convention is melting down. The RC church is fracturing along trad/modernist fault-lines. And all over the same stuff: homosexuality, female presbyters, and preaching "social justice" rather than the Gospel from the pulpits. They are the signature issues in this era of Christianity in the western world. (The Eastern Orthodox are in schism too, but over ethnic politics rather than social justice.)

And I'm not even getting into the continuing rot of the "prosperity Gospel", hyper-Charismatics, and New Age garbage...

I've said before that COVID-19 is acting as a winnowing fork on churches (accelerating a process that was already well underway). Many churches will never re-open. Congregations are going to shift and consolidate. I think that this whole process is going to have the effect of forcing doctrinal fence-sitters to pick a side. The "moderate middle" is disappearing in churches as it is in politics.

This can be read in a good way: Jesus Christ himself said that we should be hot or cold, not lukewarm (Revelation 3:15-16) Strong doctrine and sound theology will keep churches afloat in this sea of chaos.

 

I've long believed that the root of the problem with most churches (Protestant or RC) these days is that the clergy is significantly to the left of their congregations on social issues. Why? Seminaries, like secular colleges, have drifted far to the left in the 2000's (and were never exactly bastions of orthodox thought to begin with).

They hire Marxists and even atheists to teach courses; they lean heavily into the "liberation theology" nonsense (esp. in RC seminaries); and they are even more money-driven than their secular counterparts (if that's even possible). There is a rash of low-tier diploma mills that still somehow get accredited, and turn out graduates who are not just badly educated in theology but actually maleducated. I've met seminary-trained PhD's who have theoretically studied both Biblical Greek and Hebrew yet cannot read a word of either language; who recall nothing of foundational works by Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, or Luther; and who often seem to have a very vague grasp of their own denominational theology. People who should have been flunked out in their first semester, in other words, but just keep getting kicked forward as long as the tuition check clears.

So it's no surprise to me that as these clergy are sent out into the field, they take their pathologies with them and spread them to their congregations. 'Twas always thus. It's no accident that one of the most common themes in the New Testament epistles is that of the dangers of false teachers.

[EDIT] You should read some of the ridiculous garbage spewed out of seminaries in the form of dissertations and theses. A very small percentage of it is good foundational work, but a lot of it -- maybe most of it -- is either grindingly-boring minutiae in fields so specialized that only three or four people understand it, or current-year critical-theory trash that will be out-of-date before it is bound and shelved. If you want to know the state of Christian seminaries, just look at their academic output. It's not pretty.

 

You've really put your finger on the issue. Those who are involved in brainy activities (intellectuals, seminarians, even artists & journalists, etc), are significantly to the left of everybody else. Yet because they do the thinking for society (by the virtue of their professions), their biases end up being determinative for the society as a whole. So what if 100 construction workers believe that X is right and Y is wrong? If one intellectual/brainy person (seminarian, journalist, artist, author), believes that Y is right, his view will prevail over the 100 construction workers; after all, it's his job to think, and theirs to work in construction. He may be 1 and they may be 100, but he studies these issues; he's studied the X and the Y, and concluded that it was Y which was right.

But the takeover of the Western intellectuals by leftism is a new phenomenon, and didn't exist among the Founding Fathers for instance. If anything, all the intellectuals of that era adopted positions located in the economic right (on today's spectrum). And it definitely didn't exist in the Reformation era, where you had these massive brainy intellectuals going back to ancient hebrew, greek, classical latin, massive scholarship and absolute rejection of anything that whiffed of progressive.

The key question is, how and why were Western intellectuals taken over by leftist ideas in the last 100 years? Because if we don't solve that, it will continue to happen that the 1 thinker will decide the thoughts of 100 construction workers. Or as another phrase puts it, "What is whispered in the seminary, will be preached from the pulpit. What is preached from the pulpit, will be shouted in the streets."

 

People nowadays tend forget that Universities were created to teach and train clergy for the church. That was their entire raison d'etre. (There was a time when Notre Dame was a Catholic school, as the old joke goes.)

In Europe, when Universities shifted to secularism during the Enlightenment, religious teaching withdrew to specific departments or into their own institutions altogether. There is a whole big thick book to be written on why the Christians remained supine during this process -- perhaps the fatigue of the Reformation era battles and wars had wrung them out.

In the US, the transition of Universities toward the secular German model didn't start in earnest until the 1830's. But by the 1850's the conversion was pretty much a fait accompli, and so seminaries sprang up to fill the gap. But these seminaries were amateur affairs for the most part, and to call most of them "heterodox" is to be kind. It would be decades before American seminaries could raise themselves to being merely mediocre. (And even today, there are relatively few that I would call world-class.) The clergy they turned out are part of the reason why American religion went so far off the rails in the latter half of the 19th century.

The American Revolution was as much a cultural revolution as it was a political one. Founded as it was on ideals of the Enlightenment rather than the Reformation (think of Thomas Jefferson razoring out the parts of his Bible that he disagreed with), and with the rise of humanist German philosophy (Kant and Hegel, among others), American religion among the intellectuals took a decidedly heterodox turn.

It's no accident that some of the most pernicious religious cults of our time started in the 1800's: Mormonism, Jehovah's Witness, Christian Science. Americans fell in love with the new and the different; we were "progressive" and "modern" in the sense of wanting to leave behind the ideas and conflicts of the Old World. The explosion of denominations in America (and to a lesser extent in England) speaks to this urge intellectuals had to break away, to forge their own path toward God. And the population loved following these newfangled prophets and preachers!

What other country could have produced a specimen like Joseph Smith, a known liar and failure in business, who somehow still managed to found a cult followed by millions of people to this very day? Europe had their share of religious cranks and charlatans, no doubt, but only in America could they thrive and expand in such an astonishing way.

American religious life is notorious for being theologically barren, but this is far more the case in the post-Revolutionary era than before. It's a consequence of the triumph of Enlightenment ideals over those of the Reformation. Americans themselves are religious by nature, but this is informed by our national character, which is weirdly conformist while at the same time being hyper-individualist. That's why false prophets and charlatans always find fertile soil here.