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"The perfect storm we can see arriving fast on the horizon is the ageing congregations," he said. "The average age is 61 now, with many congregations above that.

"These congregations will be led by fewer and fewer stipendiary clergy … 2020 apparently is when our congregations start falling through the floor because of natural wastage, that is people dying.

"Another 10 years on, some extrapolations put the Church of England as no longer functionally extant at all."

Andreas Whittam Smith, the first Church Estates Commissioner, who leads the Church's £5.3?billion investment fund, said the demographic "time bomb" for Anglicans should be seen as "a crisis".

He told the assembly: "One of our problems may be that decline is so slow and imperceptible that we don't really see it coming clearly enough.

"I have seen large companies perfectly and impeccably manage themselves into failure. Every step along the road has been well done.

"Every account is neatly signed off."

Then finally they find they have "gone bust", he said. "I sometimes feel the Church is a bit like that."

He added: "I wish that all of us would have a sense of real crisis about this."

ÞMaths lessons are too "capitalist" and should be reformed to promote Christian values, the Rt Rev Paul Butler, Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham, told Synod.

The meeting heard that teachers should not illustrate lessons with examples of "profit and loss", or encourage children to save in order to buy bikes or toys.

Instead, lessons should focus on the maths involved in giving donations to charity, saving for an overseas project, or even "tithing" – giving 10 per cent of one's income to the Church, Synod members said.

In his speech to the assembly, Bishop Butler said: "We need to explore different models from a Christian perspective of how we approach all the curriculum, not just RE."