With
the way it’s been going recently, with their continued descent into wokeness,
moral relativism and leftish identarian politics, I honestly wonder whether the
Church of England will survive its current identity crisis; whether there’ll be
a big split, or whether it will disintegrate as it continues to dilute or
abandon many of its sacred doctrines.
I’m reminded of Alice’s Red Queen, where it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place, and if you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that. Many factions of the Church of England are running twice as fast to remain chameleons that blend into transient values and misguided cultural whims, while gradually losing their voice, and with that, much of the power of the gospel it was founded to proclaim.
Ordinarily, assuming this trend continues, I would have predicted that during the next century the Church of England will fracture: some factions will attempt to remain a force for, while others will accelerate further into misjudged conformity and compromise, leaving it divided and diminished beyond repair. But I have an element of doubt, because the Church of England is enormous, and deeply intertwined with British society, law, and governance - so a split would be complex and messy.
The Church of England is the established church in the UK; the monarch is its Supreme Governor, and bishops sit in the House of Lords. Splitting would involve complex legal and possibly parliamentary processes. Churches, cathedrals, schools, and endowments are legally held by the institution. Dividing assets would be chaotic, costly, and litigious. And we all know that bishops, priests, and dioceses are tied to the formal structures of the church, and millions of people identify as members - so convincing them to follow a new, separate body could be slow and uneven, especially at there would be inevitable disagreements over what the split would even look like.
Maybe these trends won’t last, and the church will wake up and see sense. Or maybe it won’t see sense by itself, but the trends themselves will die, as many hopeless things do, and the church will no longer be able to court popularity and relevance through these diluted vogues. Or maybe it can’t split, but will become more and more divided, leaving it to be a continued but ever more fractious mix of institutional dysfunction, cultural irrelevance, and spiritual compromise, with a regrettable loss of clear identity. As someone who always felt that I could vibrate to a slightly conservative Anglicanism, I’d hate to think that the church would become an even more hollowed-out institution, struggling to speak with authority, losing members, and drifting further from its founding mission.
It’s my faith in Christ as Lord that keeps me believing that the Church of England is worth saving. For all its current confusion, the Church of England still carries immense beauty and weight. Its liturgy remains one of the most profound expressions of Christian worship ever written; its cathedrals and parish churches still anchor countless communities in prayer and continuity; and its historic rootedness gives it a unique moral and cultural authority. If only it could recover the courage to speak timeless truth with grace and conviction, it might yet become again a steady moral compass in a disoriented nation. If it cannot recover its soul, the Church of England may eventually endure only in name, but not in spirit.
