Anglican Church 'fiddling away while Rome is burning'

http://www.hfxnews.ca/index.cfm?sid=40244&sc=89

[The Daily News] 26 June 2007--Among all the items discussed by the Anglican Church of Canada at its national meeting this past weekend, from same-sex unions, to residential schools, and aid to Africa, missing from the agenda was one of the institution's most pressing problems - the fact increasing numbers of Canadians don't go to church.

While the church's 300 delegates talked for days about whether their priests should bless the unions of gay and lesbian members, there was no formal discussion about the serious decline in membership at Canada's oldest Protestant church.

"I think we are a church in denial," says Jonathan Gibson, an Anglican priest from Calgary who attended the Winnipeg meeting as an observer, but not a voting delegate.

"I think we're kind of fiddling away while Rome is burning. If I had anything to do with the setting of our agenda, I would have tried to address the larger issue of our relevancy.

"In 2005 the Anglican Church of Canada's House of Bishops was handed an internal study that said the church was losing 13,000 members a year, and that membership lists had shrunk by 53 per cent from 1961 to 2001.