Sunday attendance at church has halved since the millennium.
Christianity's grip on the national psyche has been loosening steadily for more than a century.
The release of the 10-yearly census data sent shockwaves through the clergy and beyond,
revealing a startling acceleration in this decline over the past two decades,
and raising profound questions about the evolving nature of society,
and the role of the church within it, if any.

The census had revealed that, for the first time, less than half of the population
describe themselves as Christian, though minority ethnic communities were keeping faith alive.

The Church of England, once an immovable pillar of British life, is now a crumbling relic of its former self.
For centuries, it stood as the moral backbone of the nation, a guiding light for both the powerful and the humble.
Today, its pews are mostly empty, its congregations disillusioned, and its influence largely an illusion.

In a world increasingly captivated by secular ideologies, the Church of England has floundered.
Its leaders, once unafraid to speak truth to power, have lost the eternal truths of the Gospel of Christ
in a miasma of mistaken doctrines oriented to an imagined spiritual reality
and the legends of ancient religious superstition.

Where people look for openness and truth, the church offers obedience and mystery.
Where people look for sharing, the church offers compliance;
Where people look for inclusion, the church offers an exclusive message;
Where people look for hope in this world, the church offers heaven in the next;
yet
where Jesus spoke of sharing our possessions, the church grows rich on its own;
where Jesus spoke of turning the other cheek, the church supports those protecting their power;
where Jesus spoke of human love, the church supports the anchorite.
How is it that the church has gone so far astray?

It would seem that God is at work beyond the walls of the religious institutions;
that divinity inspires the goodness that flows untrammelled from seemingly secular sources,
that the structures and strictures of the church may well be an impediment
to the workings of godliness in our time.

Sensng divine denial, the people have turned their back on the institutional church,
condemning its constitution and its message through their absence.