I feel an explanation is in order……. and this is the time and place to do so
For many of those who read this blog, the reason that you do so will be rooted in a report I gave to the ACC in 2019 – the somewhat infamous “Elliot report”. The headline in the report, at least according to the subsequent Anglican Journal, was “gone by 2040″* I am not the first to have made similar claims – in 2006 the McKerracher report predicted the last Anglican would leave in 2061. What my report identified was that the data trend may have accelerated. and 2040 was the current projection.
Of course, such a bold report attracted attention. It was intended to. I have heard a variety of responses, mostly second-hand. This being the polite Anglican church in nice Canada, there have not been any death threats, nor letters accusing me of being an agent of the anti-Christ. On the positive side I have heard of the relief experienced in parishes who said “thank goodness” because they no
longer felt alone and culpable in facing the teep decline. I have heard of congregations which used the
report as a springboard to consider their future. I have heard a variety of dismissive comments – “What nonsense” and my favourite “Well I’ll still be there – and so will my kids”
What I want to do in this blog is explain what exactly I was saying, particularly the difference between projections prophecies and expectations. And that means talking about trains.
A train has just left Saskatoon and is heading for Edmonton. That means it has a distance of just over 500km to travel. The train is travelling at a very reasonable speed of 100km per hour over the prairies, and there are no stations to stop at. So the projected arrival time would be in 5 hours. That’s a simple projection. It’s just maths. 5 hours times 100 km per hour equals 500 km travelled.
Let’s note here 5 hours is not an opinion. It is an observation from data, a projection
of that data into the future. The train is travelling at this speed and it has this distance to cover. The train engineer will know the track well and may know about slowing down as you go over certain sections, or come into Edmonton. That would be an expectation. Someone with prophetic gifts may ‘know’ there will be a tree on the track in two hundred km which will change everything – depending on whether the prophet is believed on not.
And that projection was the kind of data in the “Elliot report”. Not just one set of data – five sets of data. All of them were “straight line” data – a constant rate of decline. They showed the same speed of decline. That would be like using the speed from the train speedometer, the data from a GPS system, and the measurements from a compass, plus two other speed detection systems. And all of them give the same result. And then you keep taking those speed measurements for an hour, and it stays constant. Well you are pretty sure that you are now going to be getting into Edmonton in four hour’s time. It’s a projection from all the known data. Math.
But math doesn’t know about real life. Maths doesn’t know about rain or snow or trees on the line. It doesn’t know that you have to slow down when you get towards Edmonton, or that there’s a crossing
with a problem. It doesn’t know about alien spacecraft picking trains up and moving them down the line. The math said we would have no members in 2040. It said it five times. So I reported the math “Here I stand……”.
And then the spacecraft came. Covid-19 picked up the train and moved it down the line. And suddenly all our instruments stopped working. We know we are closer to Edmonton, but we are not sure exactly fast we are travelling. That is the situation right now. The projections we had before Covid came were based on straight line data – the train travelling at a constant speed. But Covid changed that. The data I will be reporting in the next six months will help us know how far we have moved down
the line. But I doubt I will be making any more projections until we are in a stable state again – if ever.
And once the train heads into Edmonton things will change. The time left is very small. The train can’t go at the same speed: the track curves; there are crossings; there are people. In statistical terms we move from big data to granular data as our data set shrinks. What happens to churches as they shrink beyond the limits of viability? Do they close or re-imagine themselves? What happens to dioceses when their finances cease to support their ministries? We have examples of these events across the country. What we don’t have is substantial data about how those processes happen.
Partly that is because what we have is granular data – small numbers, not connected together in a systematic way.
Ultimately the intention of the 2019 report was to report the latest data – something we had not seen for almost 20 years. It was intended to wake the church up to the immanency of the challenge. What the
report could not do was to say what will happen, irrefutably. This is not a laboratory where such science might be done. Nor would I wish to speak prophetically – at least not in the popular sense of prophecy as predicting the future. As a church stats nurd, I do wonder about the power of numbers as a way in which God might speak to us.
We could and should have long conversations about what the likely outcomes are over the next twenty years. I really hope those conversations are ongoing – somewhere. It will not surprise you that I have opinions, even expectations, about the likely outcomes. But in this blog I will be keeping my opinions to myself and trying to report the relevant data.
* https://anglicanjournal.com/gone-by-2040/
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