Bucking the Trend: A Study of the Local Theologies Contributing to Numerically Growing Anglican Congregations in the Dioceses of Huron and Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Demographic studies of the Anglican Church in Canada have shown that since peaking in the 1970s, average Sunday attendance among most Anglican congregations has been in decline. Evidence of this trend has been seen within the Dioceses of Huron and Toronto. In Huron there has been a decrease in Sunday worship attendance by 37% between the years 2007-2017. In this same period of time, the Diocese of Huron deconsecrated fifty-seven church buildings. The Diocese of Toronto has experienced a decrease in Sunday attendance by 33% between the years 2001-2017 with sixty-four deconsecrations taking place. Despite membership decline in Huron and Toronto, there are some congregations that are bucking the trend. Within the same reported periods, roughly eight percent of congregations in Huron experienced growth in their average Sunday attendance. In Toronto, the number was even greater with twenty-five percent of congregations reporting growth. What sets these growing congregations apart from the many others in decline? This research project is a phenomenological study of twelve numerically growing Anglican congregations in the Dioceses of Huron and Toronto. Using the Roman Catholic missiologist Robert Schreiter’s definition of local theologies, the project has collected expressions of locally held faith beliefs as articulated by lay leaders in each congregation. Through surveys, questionnaires and twelve appreciative inquiry group interviews, the study has sought to explore how the presence of certain key local theologies may be motivating congregations to seek out and foster new relationships, thus resulting in trends of membership growth. Throughout this dialogue, the researcher has solicited contributions from close to one thousand participants including both members and visitors. These contributions have documented trends in demographics, values and expectations found within each congregation. The study concludes that there is in fact a correlation between the presence of locally held theological beliefs and how these beliefs are motivating the practices of evangelism, outreach and membership growth within the twelve subject congregations. The subsequent analysis and recommendations within the study may provide insights as to how better understanding local theologies may be the starting point for reversing trends of membership decline in the Anglican Church of Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".