The Archbishop, who has been in post since 2013, said the decline in church attendance was something that "personally, I count as failure".

The total average attendance for Sunday services across the Church of England in 2013 was 1,009,100. By 2019, that figure had dropped to 854,00 -- a decline of just over 15 per cent.

Many churches have since struggled to hit pre-pandemic congregant numbers. A report by the Diocese of Oxford, based on a limited number of parishes, estimated that attendance in October 2022 was at 81 per cent of the 2019 level.

The Archbishop made his comments at the Religion Media Centre's annual festival at JW3 in Finchley, north-west London, on Monday.

He said: "The further decline in the Church is something that in the end, even if I'm not -- and I'm not saying I'm not -- but even if I were not to be responsible for, I'm certainly accountable for, so that I personally I count as failure.

"Lots of people tell me I shouldn't have said that, but it's what I feel personally. I'm not sure I know what else could have been done.

"Because in the end ... the Church is not in the hands of independent individual Archbishops. The future of the Church, its survival or otherwise, does not depend on Archbishops -- it depends on God and the providence of God.

"And over the last 2,000 years we've been in much worse places than this, infinitely worse places than this. We spent 150 years killing each other over the Real Presence in the sacrament."

Christians now account for less than half of the population of England and Wales for the first time in census history.

The 2021 census, published by the Office for National Statistics in November, showed that 46.2 per cent of the population (27.5 million people) described themselves as Christian, a 13.1 percentage point decrease from 59.3 per cent (33.3 million people) in 2011.

In December, the Church of England published its Statistics for Mission 2021, which details attendance and participation at churches across the country. A Telegraph analysis found that churches failed to bounce back that year from the drop-off in attendance caused by the pandemic, with attendance across all English dioceses at 72 per cent of what it had been in 2019.

In 2021, the average Sunday church attendance across the country was 509,200 -- up from 297,600 in 2020 but significantly down on the 707,100 in 2019.

Churchwardens and members of General Synod -- the Church of England's legislative body -- said "the untold trend is the decline that is being driven by the Church of England itself". Many claimed the trend was being driven by a failure to recruit more vicars and the merging of parishes.

The Archbishop also told the conference that the structure of the Anglican Communion, which he leads and which claims around 85 million members worldwide, needed reform "so it's no longer invariably run by a white guy from England in a communion that is 90 per cent global south".

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