A younger generation of Protestants ‘are flocking away from the church’ yet ‘becoming more spiritual’
. There is, he says, “a genuine sense across the West that churches are in decline and they need to do new things to reach out”. He believes “God works in seasons, things being cut back and pruned, and then he rebuilds. I think we’re in a massive paradigm shift which is bigger than anything that has gone maybe since the Reformation.”
At Holy Trinity Rathmines, “we have pioneered something new. We’ve gone after the young generations. We’ve listened to them and we’ve changed how we do things, not to change the message but to change how we actually do things to reach out to them. We’ve really grown.” They are the first generation who are “more interested in spirituality as opposed to organised religion, and it’s fascinating. We’re kind of going back to a time of Patrick, who dealt with a pagan philosophy and people open to something more than themselves. But organised religion wasn’t something they were up to. I think we’re kind of in that time again, of tapping into the spirituality which is so important in the life of our island.
He spoke of “dis-ease and disgruntlement and, even from time to time, defeat” among people in the church, “an organisation that has all the signs of slipping away from them and from everything that they have held dear in their everyday church lives.” This, he said was “not begrudgery. This is not even sentimentality. This is bereavement. This is distress. This is real alienation. This is most worrying.
The 2021 Northern Ireland census showed Church of Ireland membership there had dropped 2.2 per cent to 11.5 per cent of the population, from its 248,821 members in 2011. The diocese is the largest geographically in Ireland, taking in most of the Wild Atlantic Way from Sligo to Cork. “People are drawn to the west.” During Covid, people “decided they don’t want to be in the rat race of living in a city, with all the expense and all that, so people are going west”, Sloane says.
Canon Gillian Wharton, rector at St Philip and St James’ Church in Booterstown, Co Dublin, says: “There’s a different way in which people now participate in worship and a different dynamic that’s going on. So, even if you are looking back to 2013, I would say now that we would have as many people involved in our parish and attending worship as we have 10 years ago, and in some cases more, but not as often.
Church-Of-Ireland Common-Ground Rathmines
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