A friend recently sent me a post by David Goodhew about the latest figures on attendance at Church of England ceremonies. It’s as interesting as it is depressing.
His primary focus is on how Covid has emptied out pews. However, as he makes clear what the pandemic did was at most accelerate and deepen a long-standing and apparently remorseless trend. In 2000, usual Sunday church attendance across C of E congregations was 950,000. By 2022, it was 549,000. That’s less than 1% of the population of England worshiping weekly with our national church.
That actually understates the extent of the problem. What had previously looked like bright spots, such as the growth of the Diocese of London, have largely disappeared. And the contraction is most pronounced amongst young worshipers. In just 3 years the number of children in Anglican churches has dropped 23%.
As Goodhew writes:
“Where the C of E goes next can be seen by looking at other denominations in England. The United Reformed Church … is leading the trend of mainline decline. In 1972 it had 192,000 members. By 2022 it had 37,000 members. In 50 years, it has shrunk by over 80 percent. The bulk of its existing churches are small and elderly. This is what ecclesial collapse looks like. British Methodism is on the same path.
“The trajectory of the church will take a little longer, but in many places it is the same trajectory. As congregations age, they struggle to fill key posts — wardens, treasurer. They stop being composed mostly of people in their 70s and become composed mostly of people in their 80s — and then they stop. There comes a point when decline tips over into being unviable and that point is at hand for many congregations. This won’t happen everywhere immediately, but it is happening and at speed.”
Perhaps strangely, I don’t really put this down to secularisation per se. Britain’s spiritual beliefs are changing and we are collectively becoming less likely to believe in God. However, it is a fairly gradual transition compared with the vertiginous decline in active participation in church life. A similar story can be told about Christian identity. Many more people seem willing to participate in occasional Anglican rituals like christenings, funerals, or Christmas services. It seems that English people stop regularly going to church before we stop believing a creator or seeing ourselves as Christian, not because of it.
As an alternative, I’d suggest that what’s happening to the C of E and other denominations is an example of the ‘Bowling Alone’ phenomenon identified by Robert Putnam back in the 90s. He theorised that the rise of individualised entertainment that could be consumed at home without meeting anyone else, at the time he meant TV but I guess social media would now be a bigger deal, progressively ate up more of the time that previous generations had spent on civic engagement. This can be seen not only in the decline of churches but participation in everything from bowling leagues to political parties to scout groups.
Bucking these wider social trends would almost certainly be tricky for the C of E. Difficult but not impossible. Our eighteenth and nineteenth century forebears managed to pull the church out of a previous cycle of decline. We are perhaps also better placed than some voluntary groups to compete with the lure of TV and Tik Tok as entertainment was not, or at least shouldn’t have been, at the heart of what we were offering in the first place. There may also be an unfortunate ‘gap in the market’ created by the general decline of civic institutions for churches to abate the loneliness that results.
That said, I don’t think reversing these trends is a given, let alone an inevitability. After all, it’s not like we’ve done it yet.
More speculatively, I worry that the church might have a particular problem. My anecdotal impression is that the majority of congregations interested in pro-actively inviting new people to join – perhaps we could call this ‘evangelism’ – are generally committed to a set of theological shibboleths on everything from hell to same-sex relationships that most people rightly recognise as incompatible with a vision of a loving God. Conversely, those parishes that practice a more inviting kind of Christianity seem disinclined to, well, invite people to participate in it.
I think the logic of the latter position tends to be that we do not want to impose our ideas on others. And in any case isn’t what we can do for the community beyond our church walls more important than padding out our attendance numbers?
This is understandable but misguided. Sharing ideas and trying to make a persuasive case for them is not the same as imposing them on someone. A refusal to try and win others round to our point of view may seem like a sign of open mindedness. In reality, it reflects an expectation of mutual close mindedness. As the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah observes in his book Cosmopolitanism the result of saying “from where I stand, I am right. From where you stand, you are right” is that there is nothing further to say. “From our different perspectives, we would be living effectively in different worlds. And without a shared world, what is there to discuss?” Rather than promoting dialogue “it’s just a reason to fall silent”.
It’s also not the case that trying to encourage people to join our congregations is in tension with helping people who never attend church. Indeed, it’s essential. A church cannot help anyone if it doesn’t exist. And as we saw, it’s not like the C of E is in danger of vaingloriously accumulating ever more bums in pews. Many of its congregations could disappear. And if they do, they won’t be hosting food banks, fundraising for water pumps in the Global South, recruiting prison visitors, hosting lunches for lonely retirees, running youth groups, nor sending someone to check on those unwell or bereaved. That all goes.
In a funny way, the more tolerant and progressive a faith you profess, the more you’ll need to be recruiting new members. We don’t tend to place barriers like the threat of shunning or eternal damnation in the way of people who want to leave. So, people will leave. Similarly, we don’t tend to stigmatise people if they decide their journey in life doesn’t involve marriage and lots of children. So, we cannot rely on ‘demographic’ growth to replace the people who leave. Hence, sharing our faith isn’t simply a requirement for our congregations to grow, but for them to do anything other than gradually fade away.
Also, let’s be clear about this: something valuable happens in church. That’s why we go. We have substantial research evidence that being part of a religious community is good for your physical and mental health and facilitates trust in our neighbours and giving to charity. Why? Because it helps us to meet people, to make friends, to find creative ways to express ourselves, to make the space to reflect on big questions, and of course to connect with our creator and hear his words. We don’t have to justify our churches solely by the good works it does. Those activities are meritorious in their own regard, but so is being part of a church community. It is an experience we should cherish and we should be unapologetic about wanting to share it widely – before it’s too late.
Image credit: By Ethan Doyle White – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79257810
Matter Of Facts 