TAKE BACK THE FAITH

Evangelicals poised to take over the Church (Jonathan Petre, 25/08/2003, Daily Telegraph)

Evangelicals, dismissed as a vociferous minority by senior liberals during the Jeffrey John affair, are now poised to take over the Church of England.

A new study suggests that, if current trends continue, evangelicals will make up more than half of all Sunday church worshippers in 10 years' time, up from about a third now.

As they grow quickly, Liberals and Anglo-Catholics continue to decline, says Dr Peter Brierley, a former government statistician who heads Christian Research.

Moreover, all but a tiny proportion of the new breed of evangelicals will be theologically conservative, viewing sex outside marriage, including homosexuality, as outlawed by Scripture.

According to the new analysis, they are consolidating their grip on the Church's income, contributing a significant amount of money to church funds.

Also, half of all ordinands training to be the next generation of clergy are attending evangelical colleges.

The combined effect could be to provide the evangelical wing of the Church with an unprecedented power base as long as their numbers are reflected in the membership of the General Synod and the Church's leadership in future years.

Dr Brierley's projections are expected to alarm liberals, who have portrayed them as fringe fundamentalists whose influence is out of proportion to their numbers. His analysis indicates that, based on several national surveys by Christian Research, about 35 per cent of churchgoers in 1998 were evangelicals and that proportion could rise to half by 2010.

Of this, he estimates, just eight per cent will be "broad" or "liberal" evangelicals, who are relaxed over issues such as homosexuality. The remainder will be mainstream or charismatic hard-liners.

Another survey, detailed in this year's Religious Trends handbook, indicates that the total giving of evangelical churches is already about 40 per cent of the Church's national income.

Gotta love the term mainstream hard-liners. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 25, 2003 12:46 AM