By David W. Virtue, DD
January 6, 2025
To no one’s surprise there was virtually no good religious news stories this past year.
Most of it was bad, even repellent.
Highlighting the year’s top Anglican news was the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby over the cover-up and concealment of an evangelical layman’s sadistic behavior with more than 100 young men across two continents. Welby took responsibility and exited himself from Lambeth Palace.
A former archbishop, George Carey also got caught in the safeguarding net and tossed in his Permission to Officiate (PTO) and exited the pulpit. Another archbishop, John Sentamu of York had already resigned over similar charges and the push is now on for Stephen Cottrell, the present Archbishop of York to step down over failed safeguarding issues.
As the Mother Church fades into the sunset, the good news is that the Global South continues to rise, and its leadership strengthens by the day, inevitably pushing the Church of England to the margins. The CofE is facing death by a thousand cuts, more spiritually devastating than a layman’s cane.
The worldwide persecution of Christians continues apace with no sign of it letting up any time soon. Islam remains the single most persecuting religion in the world, happy to kill Christians while screaming Islamophobia at anyone who dare accuse them of murder.
Nigeria is the biggest killing ground of Christians today, say TCT reports, with thousands of Christians dying for their faith at the hands of Fulani tribesmen and Boko Haram. Still and all the Anglican Church continues to grow with an estimated 20 million Nigerian Anglicans, making it the largest province in the Anglican communion.
The sun is setting on Western Anglicanism, with the Anglican Church of Canada, by its own admission, roiling in its death throes. The Episcopal Church is watching as dioceses are forced to merge just to stay afloat as congregations shrink, with aging Episcopalians and their checkbooks close as they head to columbarium’s.
There are fewer fulltime opportunities for rectors, with seminaries offering free education to draw in hopeful candidates for ministry. Part time rectors, second career priests look to be the church’s future with shriveling congregations.
TEC got a new presiding bishop, in the person of Archbishop Sean Rowe, a young management wonk who promises to clean house and trim the budget to meet the church’s growing need to conserve rather than spend.
He also appeared ready to wade into the waters of Title IV, the disciplinary canons of the church and promptly fired some of the worst offenders in a house cleaning effort to correct the neglect the church had become famous for.
Anglican Watch, a feisty but unofficial watchdog of the Episcopal Church complained mightily that the intake officers sandbagged complaints against bishops, refused to provide a pastoral response to complainants, ignored requirements to provide notice of the right of complainants whose complaints were dismissed at intake to appeal, acted with indifference to the needs of complainants and refused to act when bishops’ diocesan ignored the provisions of Title IV. The hope is that Rowe will correct all this.
The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) also got a new archbishop in the person of Bishop Steve Wood, a capable man who had proven himself as a bishop, church growth specialist and Covid survivor. Archbishop Foley Beach, his predecessor, will be a hard act to follow. He brilliantly wended his way through the political machinations of the communion and came out mostly unscathed.
ACNA will need to navigate its identity in the coming months. Will it be the three streams of former Archbishop Bob Duncan, Anglo-Catholicism or the reform theology of Thomas Cranmer? Women’s ordination will continue to hang like a Damoclean sword over the church as both sides threaten to split the fledgling denomination over the issue.
In early speeches, Wood pressed the case for evangelism and discipleship, hoping to push the church to new levels, post Covid. But with 50 million dechurched Americans having fled the church over the last 25 years, pulling them back in is going to be difficult. Apathy, sexual abuse, homosexual approval, failed secularism, cultural Marxism have emptied the churches with little sign that people are prepared to trust the institutional church ever again.
Even the Roman Catholic Church took big hits; with revelations of sodomite cliques in the Vatican, homosexual cardinals and priests abusing others with their homosexual behavior? with the church buoyed only by immigration from South America.
While 4,500 churches closed, 3,000 churches opened new doors in America, with the hope that small, vibrant, evangelical start-up churches will be America’s future. First generation breakaway denominations are also showing promise including Anglicans, Presbyterians and Methodists, to name just a few.
Mega church leaders fell out of pulpits into strange beds at an alarming rate, leaving tens of thousands of bewildered and betrayed believers empty handed. Dr. J.I. Packer’s observation that American Christianity was 3000 miles wide and half an inch deep, rang eerily true.
Homosexuality split the third largest church in America – The United Methodist Church - with over 7600 churches leaving the denomination for the newly formed Global Methodist Church. 2024 has undoubtedly been the most consequential year yet for the Global Methodist Church, said observers.
Even the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant group, shrank in 2023. A quarter million people left, continuing its downward slide. The SBC’s 2024 Annual Church Profile, showed that membership dropped to 12.9 million members, the lowest since the late 1970s. Having peaked at 16.3 million in 2006, membership has been in decline ever since, with nearly 3.5 million members in total lost.
Nones, people without religion, but vaguely spiritual are now the single biggest group in America, numbering 28 percent of the population with Catholics running at 23 percent and evangelical Protestants running at 24 percent.
A small band of atheists and ex-atheists emerged onto the scene declaring their love for cultural Christianity, not quite so convinced that peace on earth is possible without reference to a deity. The triumph of transcendence over immanence caught the attention of people like Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson to name but two cultural icons that ruffled secular feathers in their respective countries.
“Christian America” saw hope for a better nation and future, and voted in Donald Trump with the hope that he will turn the cultural Marxist tide with reduced abortion and better times for all. Hope is in the air, but the jury is still out.
END
I believe it was 1982 when the Church of England pulled out of a union with some of the Free Churches. The Calvinists and Lutherans have somehow managed to merge in France and the Netherlands. The Episcopal Church is clearly kissing up to the Methodists now that the moral conservatives have left. Is there any thought that the C of E might be contemplating a United Church structure?
This article by David Virtue excellently summarizes church-related events and data associated with this past 2024; it may also be the most appropriate venue to project a bit into the future.
I am no prophet, nor even a forecaster of note. However, the scriptures reveal the future in the sense of revealing what is eternal… that is, what is always true. The following (which I have shared elsewhere) is my compilation of eleven ‘predictions’ which communicate just these kinds of eternal verities. They may serve to counterbalance the more negative realities of the Church's struggles in this fallen world. - BEA
11 New Year’s Predictions that Will Endure: Bible Version
Collected by Bruce E. Atkinson PhD
1. The…