By Steve Weatherbe

ANGLICANS got a trio of bombshells dumped on their doorsteps recently. Their explosive message: become more like evangelical churches in style, in order to survive.

Critics on one side are resisting change entirely; on the other, they suggest something must also be done about theological content.

Two bombshells came in the Diocesan Post: both were articles from the B.C. diocese development director, the Rev. Dr. Gary Nicolosi. They were titled ‘Can We Handle the Truth?’ and ‘Why the Church Must Change or Die.’

The third shock came as an announcement that operations were being suspended at Camp Columbia on Thetis Island, as a way of dealing with diocese’s $1 million deficit.

Nicolosi’s letters were blunt. When he came to Victoria to head the development office, he was expecting the diocese would have 40,000 members, based on Vancouver Island’s population of 700,000. Instead, when the data came in from the 54 parishes in 2007, “we were astonished to discover only 9,200 Anglicans on the parish rolls, with an average attendance of 4,955.”

The diocese responded by calling on parishes to make efforts to grow by two percent per year, to redress the decline caused by deaths and out-migration. Instead, recalls Nicolosi, the decline continued – to 3,856 in 2008.

A gradualist approach would not work, the diocesan development team concluded: 46 parishes had deficits, 23 were losing members; six reported surpluses, 14 reported growth and only four reported both growth and surpluses.

A key problem was that the traditional Anglican pastoral model no longer attracted enough members to support viable parishes. The clergy were trained to deliver sacraments, sermons and care to roughly 150 people each.

As a result, parishes rarely grew beyond that number. Parishioners were accustomed to “an inward focus,” and uninterested in “evangelical outreach.”

“Our members are getting older, weaker, sicker – and dying off,” Nicolosi summarizes. “Today’s church is running on institutional fumes and atrophying affinities,” he goes on to warn, and it cannot long survive unless the decline is reversed.

To accomplish the reversal, Nicolosi calls for merger of congregations, to create a “critical mass” of members and money – to do “exciting, innovative ministry to draw young families.”

Also, a new breed of clergy must be hired or trained to be “entrepreneurs rather than maintenance keepers” – willing to expand from “our pastoral model to a more missional model, that actively seeks to reach non-churchgoers at their point of need and understanding.”

As well, the diocese must encourage growth, by first offering direction to parishes that shrink, and then amalgamating them; by requiring that 50 percent of rental incomes be spent on evangelization; by rewarding clergy with higher salaries and more holidays; by training those that don’t grow their parishes – and, if necessary, move them to non-leadership positions, or out of the ministry entirely.

Reaction was swift and sometimes harsh, wrote Nicolosi in his second article.

“Why do you insist on making our job more difficult? Can’t you just leave us alone?” he reported as one priest’s reaction.

A Nanaimo Anglican, Sue Gueulette, quarreled with Nicolosi’s numbers, blaming low attendance in December of 2008 on bad weather – and deploring the notion that “clergy compensation should be tied to performance, as if we are a corporation expecting our CEO to produce dividends.”

But others say the Anglican church can’t reverse its decline, until it ends its fractious internal debates about whether to recognize same-sex marriage and ordain homosexuals.

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The different model Nicolosi was calling for was being demonstrated by the Mennonite Brethren in B.C., who last month held a fundraiser and appreciation night for 23 couples who have planted new churches in the province over the last three years – two of them on Vancouver Island.

“Most of them are in the cities,” says Gord Fleming, the group’s director of church planting, “because that’s where there is a shortage of churches. And all of them say they are called to a specific city, and even a specific area in a city.”

Fleming, the former vice president of a restaurant chain, accelerated the church planting process when he decided to throw out the budget and commit to raise whatever was warranted by the number of couples who demonstrated a calling.

Then he went around to business people cap in hand, a process that raised the church planting budget from $400,000 to $1.1 million in two years. “Business people understand you have to grow, and you have to take risks,” says Fleming.

Already, 3,000 new church members have been attracted and a half dozen congregations are self-sustaining.

But it isn’t all technique or entrepreneurial attitude, says Fleming. “You have to bring people into a friendship with Jesus, you have to get them to know the power of the gospel.”

Ron Corcoran, pastor of Christ the King Church – whose 160 members took that name after exiting from St. Matthias Anglican Church en masse earlier this year – says Nicolosi’s criticisms and recommendations are “right on the mark. Gary is a real visionary.”

St.Matthias has been growing since the mid-1990s when it refocused, under Corcoran’s leadership, on “outreach, social justice and evangelism.”

Corcoran wonders if the diocese’s priests are open to making the kind of change Nicolosi calls for. “I don’t know if the good will is there,” he says.

What’s more, he wonders “what the good news is that the clergy is going to bring? Will it be the good news that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life?”

Corcoran’s congregation voted to leave the Diocese of B.C. because, he says, “it is not adhering to scriptures.”

Corcoran has written a book to chronicle his congregation’s journey: The Bishop or the King: How the Anglican Church of Canada has failed to defend its King.

November 2009