Christianity at risk of dying out in a generation

Christianity at risk of dying out in a generation, warns Lord Carey

Christianity is just a “generation away from extinction” in Britain unless churches make a dramatic breakthrough in attracting young people back to the faith, the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey has warned.

Clergy are now gripped by a “feeling of defeat”, congregations are worn down by “heaviness” while the public simply greets both with “rolled eyes and a yawn of boredom”, he said.


His comments at a Christian conference came as a stark report laid before the Church of England’s General Synod warned that its position as a “national institution” will be in doubt if numbers in the pews drop much further.


The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, also underlined the scale of the crisis telling members of the Synod they must “evangelise or fossilise”.

continue to source article at telegraph.co.uk

It seems Lord Carey has some legitimate concerns. If you do a search on ATS or use any search engine about Christianity dyeing out you will come across a platitude of articles. There have been several studies done one the subject that mirrors what he is saying. Basically he knows the church needs to change because they are not attracting new followers like they used to and need to be. What makes this article worth paying attention to is he isn’t an atheist saying religion is going the way of the Dodo he is the former archbishop agreeing with the atheists saying it(unless changes are made to stave it off).

Typical Sunday congregations have almost halved since 1970 to just 807,000 in the most recent figures.

Archbishop Sentamu told the Synod: “Compared with evangelism everything else is like rearranging furniture when the house is on fire.

“Tragically too often that is what we are doing – reorganising the structures, arguing over words and phrases, while the people of England are left floundering amid meaningless anxiety and despair.”

I'm not really worried about christianity dying out (good riddance), although I find it unlikely, but I am more worried about people turning to Islam or offshoot, quasi religions like scientology simply because it's new, and the preaching from those highlight everything that's wrong with christianity but conveniently omit their own problems. Basically replacing one problem with another.

reply to post by Grimpachi


Hmm,

Maybe we should start a religion to fill the void. Maybe a religion based on Bacon.
But religion is becoming kind of a loaded or "dirty" word lately.
Maybe we should just call it a cult.

Yes, the cult of Bacon.

Bacon is the light and the way.

It's a great start!

Now all we can hope for is that the rest of the religions follow suit. That wipes out about 99% of war in our future IMO.

Peace

It will not happen anything soon but with luck some day ALL religions will die out. I feel that they must. If the human race is to survive than ALL religions have to go. Though out history far more people have been killed by some thing related to to some religion than there has been killed by non-religion related events combined. As for me I stopped believing in any and all religions the same time I stopped believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.
You can flame me all you want but that is the way I feel about the mater.

reply to post by boncho


I sort of agree with you except I don't think Christians are at risk of converting to Islam in mass but to put the article into context when they say Christianity is going to die out I think they are referring to organized religion and the Catholic Church as a controlling factor. There will be Christians around for the next hundred years but the presence of the church is fading away especially in the UK. The US is the odd one out of the developed nations with religion there has been a decline in religious folk here but at a slower rate than other countries. The only developed nation that has seen an increase of people finding religion specifically Christianity has been Russia.

watchitburn
reply to post by Grimpachi

 

Hmm,

Maybe we should start a religion to fill the void. Maybe a religion based on Bacon.
But religion is becoming kind of a loaded or "dirty" word lately.
Maybe we should just call it a cult.

Yes, the cult of Bacon.

Bacon is the light and the way.

How about this?



Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

Only a shock if you live in a Euro-centric bubble.

Western civilization is in a state of rapid decline verging on collapse. All of its institutions are incompetent to fulfill their missions. The church is collapsing? So are libraries, learned societies, help agencies, even governments. In the US, even volunteer fire departments are disfunctional. If it isn't government or business, it is going extinct.

And even governments are incompetent. Incompetent to win wars, provided social services, reign in banks, or prevent espionage and leaks.

Business is incompetent as well. The western governments are all busy propping up the institutions that remain from capitalism's heyday, like propping up the lifeless skeletons of dinosaurs in a museum exhibit.

Christianity and the church is expansive in China, in Asia as a whole, and in Africa as well. Just as the west turns atheist, more humans claim the Christian faith than at any time in the religion's history. Fully 1/3 of the human race self-identifies as Christian--an all time high. And Christianity for a decade now is the fastest growing religion on the planet.

It IS dying in the west; but that isn't an indictment of faith. It is an indictment of a civilization undergoing senescence.

Savor the Irony of Darwinism taking its course on Christianity.

This could actually be the best thing to ever happen to Christianity. If Christianity dies to the point, the con men no longer control it from the pulpits, and there are no more billions to be made from their congregations, Christianity gets a fresh start. It truly becomes a religion of individual choice, rather than group mentality. It would be like cleaning house, so to speak. Leaving only those who are genuine, and not just following a sect.

On the other hand, this has been coming for a long time. We are at a time in our "social evolution" that not only is the LGBT community coming out full force, but the non-religious, atheists, agnostics, and others have been silenced by the majority long enough. We're going to see all the major religions become a minority in the next few generations, I believe.

The only risk of large segments dying out are those murdered in the middle east under the sanction of our international bankers, royal families and western leadership, who are wolves in sheeps clothing.

But Christianity is the one religion that is closest to the ideals and leads us home, so its not likely to die out.

jude11
That wipes out about 99% of war in our future IMO.

Hahaha! That's the dumbest thing I've heart on ATS all day! Thanks for the laugh! We're not fighting wars due to religion, we're fighting it for greed, power and money. We'll continue to fight for this for centuries to come!

"Fighting for religion" Hahaha, going to pass that one along!

reply to post by Grimpachi


Certainly the tyrannical satanic globalists have been doing all they could for centuries to wipe out AUTHENTIC Christians and AUTHENTIC Christianity.

Now they are using Islam . . . ruthlessly . . . then they will wipe out Islam . . .

ALLLLLLLLLLLL

MUST join the one world religion to literally worship satan.

THAT IS

THE SCRIPT.

How thoroughly it will be achieved remains to be seen.

Thankfully, we know from the Bible that many authentic Christians will be supernaturally protected and many will be martyred.

However, the evil doers and all they stood for and all evidence of their existence

WILL BE WIPED FROM THE PLANET. So much for their legacy.

fixer1967
It will not happen anything soon but with luck some day ALL religions will die out. I feel that they must. If the human race is to survive than ALL religions have to go. Though out history far more people have been killed by some thing related to to some religion than there has been killed by non-religion related events combined. As for me I stopped believing in any and all religions the same time I stopped believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.
You can flame me all you want but that is the way I feel about the mater.

Atheistic Communists have killed more in the past 100 years.

jude11
It's a great start!

Now all we can hope for is that the rest of the religions follow suit. That wipes out about 99% of war in our future IMO.

Peace

Yeah right. We are not fighting religious wars dude. We are fighting over who's political laws we must fallow.

To day it dosent matter what any one of us believe, as long as you fallow the law.

God dosent punish us when we break he's laws. Only man hands out punishment when people break their laws.

Wake up and smell reality.

Not surprising.

In order to reduce us to a pack of ill-educated, ill-bred, isolated and uncivilized idiots who need to be ruled by force, TPTB had to undermine three things - our families, our neighborhoods, and our faith communities.

That means breaking apart the traditional family which we see with the push toward single-parenthood and marriage equality and the general idea that all family "models" are equal. And with the steady erosion of the nuclear family, you also see an erosion of the extended family. How often are we bombarded in the media with stories telling us about how we ought to dislike our extended relations? It used to be that familes, and extended families, relied on one another for help and support in times of trouble. Blood being thicker than water and all that.

Who among you can name your neighbors, genuinely say that you like them or trust them or could rely on them if you had some temporary trouble? Remember the good old days when you and all your neighbors' kids ran the neighborhood like a free range pack from dawn til dusk?

And it used to be that just about everyone went to some kind of church every Sunday. Or at least enough of us did that it carried over for those who didn't. And our church community was another one from which we drew strength in a pool of people we knew, trusted and could count on to help lift us up if we ever ran into trouble.

All three of these things made us better able to be a self-reliant and free people who neither wanted nor needed the strong, paternal hand of the government on our lives.

Watch any of them pass away and mourn for our future.

(church in this post is a generic term for a house of any kind of worship)

Klassified
This could actually be the best thing to ever happen to Christianity. If Christianity dies to the point, the con men no longer control it from the pulpits, and there are no more billions to be made from their congregations, Christianity gets a fresh start. It truly becomes a religion of individual choice, rather than group mentality. It would be like cleaning house, so to speak. Leaving only those who are genuine, and not just following a sect.

On the other hand, this has been coming for a long time. We are at a time in our "social evolution" that not only is the LGBT community coming out full force, but the non-religious, atheists, agnostics, and others have been silenced by the majority long enough. We're going to see all the major religions become a minority in the next few generations, I believe.

Agreed. Your comment brings to mind that movie called The Book of Eli. Not a fan of Denzel Washington mind you, but IMO one of his better roles.I can't see religion disappearing for a great long while. Christianity is simply losing its appeal. It'll be back when it's needed.

-Cheers

I can't see it happening myself, Christianity will be around for a while. There hasn't been a disaster in England recently, I'll ask the old man to send one that way so they can start renewing their beliefs.

Auricom

jude11
That wipes out about 99% of war in our future IMO.

Hahaha! That's the dumbest thing I've heart on ATS all day! Thanks for the laugh! We're not fighting wars due to religion, we're fighting it for greed, power and money. We'll continue to fight for this for centuries to come!

"Fighting for religion" Hahaha, going to pass that one along!

Pass it along as far as you want. But also remember to pass along the actual inception of greed, power and money. Unless of course you don't know and in your case...that's my guess.

Peace

reply to post by Grimpachi


Thank God!

LOL