When it comes to having priests at altars, the Anglican Church of Canada is in good shape for the next few decades.

But life in the pews has been radically different, creating a crisis that surfaced recently in a blunt report to Canadian bishops.

"In 2018 General Synod was able to collect a complete and mostly reliable set of data … for the first time since 2001," said a report by Rev. Neil Elliot, a priest in the Province of British Columbia and the Yukon. Research from 2017 "shows that the decline observed in earlier data has continued."

 The stunning bottom line: "Projections from our data indicate that there will be no members, attenders or givers in the Anglican Church of Canada by approximately 2040."

Elliot noted that a 2006 report suggested the final Anglicans would exit Canadian pews in 2061. The church's membership had peaked -- as it did for many mainline Christian churches -- in the early 1960s, with 1,358,459 on parish rolls. That number fell to 641,845 in 2001, while Canada's population rose from 18 million to 31 million.

In the 2017 report, Anglican membership fell to 357,123 -- with an average Sunday attendance of 97,421.

Meanwhile, the number of Anglican clergy in Canada rose -- from 2,380 in 1961 to 3,491 in this new report. But other numbers were sobering. For example, the church confirmed 1,997 new members in 2017, while there were 9,074 burials or funeral rites.

"There is no sign of any stabilization in our numbers; if anything the decline is increasing. Some had hoped that our decline had bottomed out, or that programs had been effective in reversing the trends. This is now demonstrably not the case," noted Elliot.

"International comparisons suggest that the decline in the Anglican Church of Canada is faster than in any other Anglican church," although 2018 numbers from the larger Episcopal Church in the United States showed "an even greater rate of decline in attendance than ours."