God leaves it to its inevitable fate:
A CASH crisis in the Church of England is forcing bishops to consider radical moves including cutting clergy numbers by up to a third and making worshippers meet in each other’s homes, The Times has learnt….
More than half of the Church’s 16,000 parish churches have fewer than 50 members. Average weekly attendance in 2003 was 1,187,000 compared with a figure in 1968 of 1.6 million.
I find it ironic that people are always lobbying Christian churches to loosen up and accept changing societal mores in order to become more relevant and popular. Any empirical study will show that this is precisely the way to kill a church; the Southern Baptists and other whacky fundamentalist denominations are still growing fast even as the broad-minded and progressive churches die around the world.
The world needs God, not public acceptance and self-affirmation. And yet, the very concepts of popularity, numbers and influence are almost meaningless anyhow, as the church grew from a hard core of twelve disciples to cover the entire globe. As long as there is one believer on the planet, the Word will be heard.