While bickering Canadian and American Anglicans continue their ugly slide into irrelevance and extinction, there is a revival of a sort going on amongst their brethren in England. Recent surveys show that (in the words of The Telegraph) evangelicals are poised to take over the church.
To the horror of theological liberals, pollsters predict that in a decade evangelicals will make up more than half of all Sunday worshippers, up from about a third now. Their financial contribution to the church is already considerable and is out of proportion to their numbers.
Their enemies, who see nothing but bad things coming out of this manifestation of religious and social conservatism, blame the growth on the baleful influence of money and marketing. The credit actually belongs to George Carey, the previous Archbishop of Canterbury, who was an evangelical who believed in evangelism. He nurtured the wildly successful Alpha Program, a friendly introduction to basic Christianity which has now spread to most denominations, and brought theologian Michael Green back from Canada to lead efforts to re-convert the average Englishman. The result has been a new wave of church attenders who are there for serious spiritual growth and a new generation of young conservative clergy.
In the long run this will be a good thing for the Anglican Church (and England too). The last time evangelicals controlled the C of E they managed to lead the fight to abolish slavery and massively reformed national morality and charity -- the Victorian Age was the result. In 2003 they face, as they did in the eighteenth century, an entrenched and spiritually moribund set of bishops. Until the current grey and gay incumbents are overcome the evangelical impulse will not be felt at its fullest.
A similar situation exists in Canada but prospects are not so bright. Here too the Anglicans are run by a senior clergy far to the left of the folk in the pews and here too the new priests tend to be evangelicals. But the decline in Canadian Anglican numbers is so steep and the homosexual question so vexed that it seems likely the church will parish of mere inanition before the youthful conservatives take over.