Back to Church Sunday 2010

Posted on December 19, 2010 by Clive D. Field

‘Onward Christian Soldiers: Churches Resurgent’ proclaims the headline in Jonathan Wynne-Jones’s article in today’s Sunday Telegraph, referring to the case advanced by Christian Research over the past three months that the relentless decline in churchgoing may be coming to an end, at least for now.

The Church of England was also in upbeat mood when it issued a press release last Wednesday (15 December) about the outcomes of this year’s Back to Church Sunday (BTCS), which was held on 26 September. See:

http://www.cofe.anglican.org/news/pr11610.html

BTCS is an initiative for churchgoers to invite people they know who are no longer attenders to return to church. It was started in the Diocese of Manchester in 2004, spread to the Diocese of Wakefield in 2005, and has grown steadily ever since. Nine Anglican dioceses participated in 2006, 20 in 2007, 38 in 2008, and all 44 in 2009 and 2010.

Other denominations have latterly become involved, including (in 2010) congregations from the Baptist, Methodist, United Reformed and Elim Pentecostal churches; Congregational Federation, Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion and Salvation Army; the Church in Wales, Baptist Union of Wales, Presbyterian Church of Wales and Union of Welsh Independents; Churches Together in Scotland; and the Church of Ireland and Methodist Church in Ireland.

All told, around 3,500 places of worship took part in BTCS 2010, one-third of them for the first time. Collectively, they welcomed back 51,000 people, bringing the total of church returners since 2004 to more than 150,000, ‘enough to fill Wembley Stadium and the Emirates Stadium put together’, as the Anglican media folk put it.

However, what we are not told by them is that, despite a fair amount of publicity (including local radio advertisements), BTCS 2010 was evidently less successful than BTCS 2009, for which the equivalent press release last year announced 82,000 returners, including 53,000 in the Church of England alone.

A good many of these ‘prodigals’ inevitably fall away. Research by the Diocese of Lichfield after BTCS 2007 showed that, six months after the event, between 12% and 15% of returners had become regular worshippers. The Church of England considers this to be a high retention rate; others may feel that it represents quite a leakage.

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Take Your Bible to Work Day

Posted on October 28, 2010 by Clive D. Field

In case you did not notice, last Monday (25 October) was the Bible Society’s ‘Take Your Bible to Work Day’, when Christians were asked to take a Bible to their place of employment as a statement of personal faith.

The day was conceived by the Society following a number of high-profile cases in which Christians found themselves in trouble for encouraging people to think about faith in God or for offering to pray with people in the workplace.

Ann Holt, the Society’s Director of Programmes, was quoted as saying: ‘while we recognise the plural nature of our culture, we are inviting people to take their Bible to work because we believe it is their right to do so in a free society. We believe the Bible’s message provides a framework for living the whole of life, and is not simply a resource for personal piety or a support for those who like religion.’

In connection with the day, the Society commissioned Christian Research and ICM to undertake an online survey among a representative sample of adult Britons. Fieldwork dates and sample size have not yet been reported by the Society.

According to the poll, while most Christians said they would feel fine in having their Bible at work, 43% would feel uncomfortable about actually getting it out to read during breaks and at lunchtimes, and almost a third were worried what work colleagues might think.

In fact, the survey found that only 14% of all workers expressed concern about Christian colleagues reading their Bible at work. Even 75% of atheists questioned said they would not consider it to be a problem. As many as half the workers claimed they would be happy to talk about the Bible with Christian workmates.

This post has been extracted from the limited information contained in the Society’s press release, available at:

http://www.biblesociety.org.uk/news/89/284/Take-Your-Bible-to-Work-Day/

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Thoughts on Trends in Church Attendance

Posted on September 30, 2010 by PeterBrierley

by Peter Brierley.

The recent debate over whether church attendance has reached a plateau, hosted at the Church Mouse blog, The Guardian and here at BRIN, has been of great interest. As a religious statistician and consultant, and editor of the seven editions of Religious Trends, I’m taking the opportunity to offer additional interpretation of the data.

It is not clear that “Catholic mass attendance has flattened out at 920,000”, as the officially published Roman Catholic mass attendance figures from 2000 to 2007 show a drop of over 8%, down from 1,000,820 in 2000 to 915,556 in 2007. However, it has risen to 918,000 in 2008.

The Church of England official figures for adult Average Weekly Attendance (AWA) fall by 2%, from 941,000 in 2002 to 919,000 in 2008, and their children’s figures drop from 229,000 to 225,000, also a drop of 2%. The Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) adult figures fall from 838,000 in 2002 to 812,000 in 2008, a drop of 3%, and from 167,000 to 148,000 for children (a decline of 11% in 6 years). The Usual Sunday Attendance figures – which would be comparable to Roman Catholic and Baptist measurements – go from 768,000 in 2002 to 718,000 in 2008 for adults (a drop of 7%), and from 151,000 to 127,000 in 2008 for children (a drop of 16%).

What appears to be happening is that Sunday attendance is dropping, especially for children and young people, but that midweek attendance is increasing: up from 103,000 in 2002 for adults to 107,000 in 2008, and for young people (up from 62,000 in 2002 to 77,000 in 2008).

By putting midweek and Sunday attendance together, the drop in Sunday attendance is obscured. The “flattening out” therefore is a mix of Sunday decline and midweek increase.

The question is then whether those dropping out of Sunday attendance are simply switching to mid-week, or whether the ‘mid-weekers’ are new attenders. Christian Research ran a survey in 2004 which showed that the mid-weekers were often new people, but a more recent survey in 2009 run by Brierley Consulting showed that more mid-weekers were formerly Sunday attenders. In reality, the growing number of mid-week attenders is likely to be made up of a mixture of switchers and new people. While the new attenders are obviously welcome, their numbers do not as yet compensate for those dropping out.

Looking at the other denominations cited as exhibiting a plateau – the Catholics and Baptists – neither measure mid-week mass or service attendance separately, and so we cannot say what is happening here. The analysis presented thus far relates more to the Church of England, and assumes that Baptist attendance follows Baptist membership trends – which is not necessarily the case.

While of course it is important to note trends in the Church of England and Roman Catholic Church, it is also important to look at what is happening in the other denominations also. The Presbyterians, Methodists and United Reformed Church are all declining very rapidly; the less rapid decline in the Church of England and the Catholic Church does not offset the general pattern. The only denomination, loosely defined, which can truly be said to exhibit growth is Pentecostalism, courtesy the many black churches.

The 1998 English Church Census showed a further drastic drop in numbers attending church, compared with the earlier 1989 census. The 2005 Census showed a continuing decline, but at a reduced rate. The most recent figures for Anglicans and Catholics (important because these are the biggest denominations) show that while decline continues overall, the rate of decline is lessening. It is important to know why and where that is happening. The analysis presented thus far by Christian Research does not allow this to emerge, but it would be interesting to know – if more data is available than was published.

Peter Brierley is former Director of Christian Research. He compiled and edited the seven issues of Religious Trends, from 1997 to 2008, as well as running the English Church Censuses of 1979, 1989, 1998 and 2005, and the Scottish Church Census of 2002, 1994 and 1984. He now directs Brierley Consulting, which publishes the bimonthly bulletin FutureFirst. Contact: peter @ brierleyres . com.

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Church Attendance in England, 2005

Posted on September 16, 2010 by Siobhan McAndrew

The debate over the Christian Research data last week, together with coverage of the papal visit, led me to look at church attendance data from the 2005 English Church Census. The English Church Census got a good deal of coverage when results were announced in 2006, when it was announced that 3,166,200 people, or 6.3% of the population attended church. However, I wanted to look again to see which areas of England had higher rates of church attendance, and specifically which areas looked more Catholic.

I’ve given more detail on the English Church Census here, and the full dataset is available at the UK Data Service. The data are available for counties, but David Voas here at BRIN has created a table whereby attendance and church data has been fit to district/unitary authority borders, so that it’s possible to look at attendance at the local authority level.

While the table does not include additional data on other socio-economic characteristics (for which go to Neighbourhood Statistics), it’s interesting to see which areas of the country have higher church attendance and which much less, as illustrated by the map below (click on the image to enlarge). This can also be compared with the religious affiliation data from the 2001 Census, illustrated by these maps.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First, the area with the lowest percentage of people going to church is North East Lincolnshire, at 2.6%. This looks extremely low, but given that the national average attendance is 6.3%, is scarcely an outlier.

Secondly, the area with the highest percentage of people going to church appears to be the City of London, at 57%. This raises alarm bells, because the City of London also reported a very high percentage of people with no religious affiliation in the 2001 Census: 24.6%, which was the fifth highest rate among English local authorities. But of course the City of London is not really comparable with other local authorities; it hosts a much smaller number of people (7,185 in 2001), and only one (Anglican) primary school. However, it hosts 40 churches (as counted by the English Church Census), many of them historic, and they undoubtedly draw worshippers from across London. This link provides some further information.

Similarly, the City of London is also the local authority which reports the highest proportion of attenders of New Churches, at an apparent 4.01% of the local population. (New Churches reject denominational labels or principles, with examples being those within the Vineyard or Newfrontiers franchises.) Because of the small overall population his is down to a single church, which drew in 288 attenders on Church Census day.

The histogram helps illustrate just how problematic the City of London figure is – any statistical analysis of this data would surely have to drop the observation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next highest is the Scilly Isles (18.6% attending church on Sunday), a location which might also be considered atypical. The third highest is Kensington and Chelsea at 17.2%. This may partly be due to the nature of the Royal Borough’s population (there is often though to be a relationship between class and church attendance) and also because the Brompton Oratory and Holy Trinity Brompton are likely to draw in attenders from other boroughs. The next is Westminster (15.7%) which hosts Westminster Abbey and Westminster Cathedral; nevertheless the majority of local authorities with relatively high rates of church attendance appear to be in Greater London or the London commuter belt. The remainder of those with over 10% church attendance are Brent, Enfield, Harrow, Ribble Valley, Lewisham, Wirral, Brentwood, West Devon, Wandsworth, Southwark, Sevenoaks, Guildford, South Bucks, Camden, Cambridge and Kingston-upon-Thames.

The ‘bottom ten’ range from 3.6% in South Holland in Lincolnshire, followed by Kirklees, Wychavon (Worcs.), Telford and Wrekin, Doncaster, Fenland, Ashfield (Notts.), Bolsover (Derbyshire), Rotherham (S. Yorks), and North East Lincolnshire, which pulls up the rear at 2.6%. I don’t know enough about these areas to suggest why; some may host high proportions of non-Christians, others populations which are distinct in other ways, or have dispersed rural populations which are ‘underserved’. This awaits further analysis.

So which areas are most Catholic? This map shows Catholic church attendance as a percentage of population.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The highest rates of attendance appear to be in the North West, North East and London. The top three local authorities are the City of London (11.6%), Westminster (7.0%), and Kensington and Chelsea (6.5%), which for the reasons outlined above might reasonably have less to do with the local authority’s population and more to do with their places of worship. The next is then Ribble Valley (5.8%), Wirral, Scilly, Sefton (Merseyside), Knowsley (Merseyside), and Liverpool (5.0%). Some of this is surely due to the legacy of Irish immigration. Ribble Valley also hosts Stonyhurst College, a large Catholic boarding school, which may have boosted its total. Of the top 50, all fall within the North West, North East, Greater London and the South East. The bottom 50 appear to be mostly located in Lincolnshire, Shropshire, Gloucestershire, and Nottinghamshire – which are more rural counties outside the south east.

Of the areas where there are high rates of Pentecostal church attendances, nineteen of the top twenty are in Greater London, and the twentieth is in Luton.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Brent, 7.3% of the population appear to attend Pentecostal churches on Sunday, although it may be that as with the Anglican and Catholic cathedrals in Westminster there are particularly large churches there drawing in attenders from elsewhere. At 5.6% the rate for the City of London again looks unreliable; the next ranked is Southwark at 4.7%. In 39 local authorities there are no Pentecostalist attenders represented at all – and these are predominantly local authorities in the leafy shires. The map illustrates that attendances are mostly in urban centres.

This is clearly a very basic outline of the geography of attendance. To understand what is driving such variation in attendances, we would need to look at the characteristics of the population, as well as of the nature of the churches operating in each area. Nevertheless, the spatial pattern is intriguing and suggests a strong link to immigration history, and rural/urban differences.

There is much to be gleaned from this Census on its own: readers should look at Peter Brierley’s Pulling Out of the Nosedive (2006), and the UK Christian Handbook Religious Trends 6 for further data and analysis. Given the debate last week about whether attendances have been falling or holding up over the decade, Christian Research’s plans to conduct another within the next year or so are of great interest.

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Christian Research and Churchgoing

Posted on September 11, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Two articles in yesterday’s broadsheet press gave somewhat conflicting assessments of the state of religion in contemporary Britain, in the lead-in to the papal visit to Britain, which starts next Thursday.

Writing in The Guardian, Julian Glover portrayed ‘a nation of fuzzy doubters’, with believers and churchgoers in a minority but a cultural identity with Christianity still strong. There were extensive quotes from BRIN’s David Voas of the University of Manchester, who has documented (through the 2008 British Social Attitudes – BSA – Survey and other research) that there is a large middle-ground of ‘fuzzy people who don’t really care’ about religion. ‘It is not the case that Britain is getting more religious’, Voas was quoted. Glover’s article can be found at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/10/religion-typical-briton-fuzzy-believer

The other piece was by Martin Beckford in the Daily Telegraph under the headline of ‘Churchgoing stabilises after years of decline, research shows’. ‘Figures obtained from several of England’s main Christian denominations suggest that the numbers of worshippers in the pews each Sunday are either stable or increasing,’ wrote Beckford. ‘The data run counter to the widely-held views that the country is becoming more secular.’ This article can be accessed at:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/7992616/Churchgoing-stabilises-after-years-of-decline-research-shows.html

The source of Beckford’s report was an exclusive guest post by Benita Hewitt (Director of Christian Research) on the influential Church Mouse blogsite. It was headlined ‘Church attendance in the UK no longer in decline’ and was described as ‘rather earth shattering’ news by the Mouse in the introduction to Hewitt’s post.

Hewitt herself was clear that, in the light of the Anglican, Catholic and Baptist statistics analysed to date, ‘the previous forecasts made showing continued decline have been superseded’ and that the Church is ‘no longer a dying institution but a living movement’. Her post appears at:

http://churchmousepublishing.blogspot.com/2010/09/christian-research-church-attendance-in.html

In the case of the Church of England, Hewitt demonstrated fairly steady attendance over several years on the basis of average monthly and average weekly congregations. But these are only two of a basket of measures now used by the Church of England to enumerate religious practice.

Hewitt failed to mention that the most long-standing indicator of Anglican churchgoing, usual Sunday attendance, fell by 8% between 2002 and 2008. Similarly, while she observed that her statistics exclude Christmas and Easter churchgoing, she does not note that both Easter congregations and Easter communicants fell by 4% between 2002 and 2008. Christmas communicants also dropped by 11% during the same period, although Christmas attendances rose slightly.

Moreover, Church of England baptisms were down by 8% between 2002 and 2008, confirmations by 19%, marriages and blessings by 6%, funerals by 16% and electoral roll membership by 3%. The overall picture is, therefore, more mixed than the one Hewitt paints.

For English and Welsh Roman Catholics, Hewitt observed that the decline in mass attendance was halted in 2005 and the figure has been steady since then. She does not offer any explanation for this.

Most commentators would attribute this trend, not to the religious practice of indigenous Catholics (which is probably still declining), but to the positive impact of immigration, from Eastern Europe and elsewhere, of devout Catholics.

With the economic recession, the net inflow of Eastern European Catholics (for example, from Poland) now seems to be turning into a net outflow, so this immigrant brake on the decline in mass-going may be purely temporary.

An even cheerier assessment is given by Hewitt of the state of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, whose church attendance rose between 2007 and 2008. It is certainly the case that, on a number of measures, the Baptists can be shown to have bucked the secularizing trend, including being more successful than most mainstream Christian denominations in reaching ethnic minorities.

Here again, however, Hewitt only tells part of the story. Overall, the Baptist data for 2002-08 are mixed. For more information, see the earlier BRIN news post at:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=69.

The Methodist Church is a fourth denomination to collect church attendance statistics, but they publish them only triennially, with the next data not due until summer 2011. The most recent figures showed an average decline of 14% in all age whole week attendance between 2005 and 2007, with even greater decreases for children (32%) and young people (30%).

The problem with using denominational data for calculating church attendance is that, because differing methodologies and periodicities are employed, the information is not truly comparable. Also, of course, many denominations do not count their churchgoers.

Only a national census of church attendance would provide a definitive answer, and none has been held in England since 2005. Nevertheless, it is significant that Peter Brierley, the architect of that census and a former Director of Christian Research, is forecasting continuing decline. See our earlier news post at:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=319.

Another potential difficulty with Hewitt’s analysis is that she is dealing in absolute numbers, and not relative to the population, which is known to be increasing significantly through birth and immigration. So, church attendance figures which appear flat may actually still conceal relative contraction.

One way of detecting these relative movements is from sample surveys of the national population. Although they are known to exaggerate the actual extent of churchgoing, since (for various reasons) people tend to over-claim their religious beliefs and practices, they can still provide a guide to the direction of travel.

The medium-term trend from the British Election and BSA Surveys is decidedly downwards. However, in support of Hewitt’s thesis, it is interesting that, among those professing a religion, those claiming to attend religious services at least monthly were stable comparing 2005 and 2008.

The lessons of church history are also worth bearing in mind. Religious change can be an extremely slow and long-term process. This is not necessarily inconsistent with short-term (year-on-year) volatility in particular measures of religiosity. This is best illustrated historically in church membership statistics, originally tabulated by Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert and Lee Horsley, and now republished by BRIN at:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/figures/#ChurchesandChurchgoers.

In sum, there are lots of caveats to be considered when reading Hewitt’s blog. It is far from certain that a modern-day revival is just around the corner. The dragon of secularization is still not slain.

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Where are the Men?

Posted on June 4, 2010 by Clive D. Field

“Where are the men?” has long been the cry of those observing the congregations attending Christian services. Writers such as Edward Weston and James Fordyce could be found complaining about the relative absence of male worshippers in the eighteenth century, and prominent Nonconformists such as John Clifford added their concerns in the Victorian era.

When the first large-scale census of churchgoing which controlled for gender was conducted, in inner and outer London in 1902-03, 61% of worshippers were found to be women. At the 2005 English church census the proportion was 57%.

Sorted magazine (the “lads’ mag” for Christians, launched in November 2007) and Christian Vision for Men have recently come together to examine the phenomenon of male attitudes to churchgoing.

They commissioned Christian Research to oversee a new empirical investigation, which was undertaken by Research Now among a representative sample of 1,003 UK men, interviewed online between 9 and 14 April 2010.

Headline findings from the survey were released by Christian Research at last month’s International Christian Resources Exhibition in Esher. There is also an article in the current issue (No. 20, May 2010) of Christian Research’s membership magazine, Quadrant, while another short feature (later repackaged by the Baptist Times and Methodist Recorder) is available online at:

http://www.sorted-magazine.com/news/item.htm?pid=4182

Although most men have visited a church within the past two years, principally for a rite of passage, it is apparently not a place in which they feel entirely at ease, in comparison with other environments which were enquired about. The latter even included ladies underwear shops, where many men said they would feel more relaxed than in a place of worship.

Only 20% of men said they would feel very comfortable in church, with 41% uncomfortable. There were significant variations by age, with 58% of the 18-24 year-olds feeling uncomfortable in church but 22% of the over-65s. Even among professing Christians, 41% of 18-24 year-olds feel uncomfortable in church.

Hymn-singing partly explains male discomfort about attending a church service. 48% have an aversion to singing hymns, with still bigger numbers of the young and those with no religious affiliation.

However, there is also discomfort about singing in public more generally, such as in public houses (60%) and at parties (52%). Only in the privacy of the shower (83%) and alone in the car (86%) do men feel totally relaxed about exercising their vocal chords.

Levels of discomfort fall to 20% when it comes to men having a conversation with the vicar, with 28% very comfortable and 51% quite comfortable. There are notable differences by age, once more, both for the sample as a whole and for the sub-sample of Christians (33% of whom aged between 18 and 24 would be uncomfortable about chatting to the vicar).

Setting church on one side, religious profession is also heavily conditioned by age. The number of Christians is only 42% for men aged 18-24, against 84% for the over-65s. Another 15% of the youngest cohort claim to follow other religions (2% among the over-65s), while 44% have no religion at all (14% for the over-65s).  

In summary, according to the author of the Quadrant article, “the survey highlights the urgent need to find better ways of engaging young men – both to encourage them to become Christians and to help those who are Christians feel more comfortable to practise their faith”.

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English Church Census, 2005 – Dataset Released

Posted on April 18, 2010 by Clive D. Field

On 30 March the Economic and Social Data Service released for secondary analysis the dataset from the 2005 English church census, conducted on 8 May of that year under the auspices of Dr Peter Brierley of Christian Research and sponsored by a consortium of funders, including the Economic and Social Research Council.

The census was undertaken by means of self-completion postal questionnaires, responses being obtained from 18,633 of the 37,051 Christian places of worship which were contacted. A fuller description of the methodology is available online, together with details of how to access the dataset (catalogued as SN 6409), at:

http://www.esds.ac.uk/findingData/snDescription.asp?sn=6409

Summary data were published by Christian Research in printed form in 2006, in Pulling out of the Nosedive and in UK Christian Handbook, Religious Trends, No. 6, 2006/2007, both by Peter Brierley. These books contain comparisons with the results of the earlier English church censuses of 1979, 1989 and 1998.

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Quadrant and FutureFirst

Posted on April 10, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Two extremely useful bi-monthly newsletters for anybody interested in religious and social statistics are Quadrant (ISSN 1351-9220) and FutureFirst (ISSN 2040-0268). They are published by Christian Research and Brierley Consultancy respectively and distributed to members of each organization as part of their subscription package. Personal annual subscriptions to Christian Research currently cost £30 and to Brierley Consultancy £18. Every issue of both these newsletters runs to six pages and comprises a mixture of substantive articles and snippets of information, including quite a bit of international data.

The latest issue (No. 8, April 2010) of FutureFirst contains two such global articles, on ‘Muslims and evangelicals’ and on ‘American religion’. Of the Britain-related content, perhaps most interesting is the relatively short piece and accompanying map estimating county church attendance in England in 2010, projected from the 2005 English church census which was conducted by Christian Research. Overall current Sunday churchgoing in England is calculated at 5.7% of the population, but 31 of the 47 counties are below this figure. The lowest percentage is recorded by South Yorkshire and the highest by Greater London, closely followed by Merseyside. Factoring in mid-week attendance brings the national total for 2010 up to an estimated 6.3%.

Distributed with this particular issue of FutureFirst is a six-page supplement on Roman Catholic Church statistics in England and Wales, prepared by Peter Brierley and available for £1.00 from him at The Old Post Office, 1 Thorpe Avenue, Tonbridge, Kent, TN10 4PW. The data in it are substantially abstracted from Tony Spencer’s invaluable Digest of Statistics of the Catholic Community in England & Wales, 1958-2005, Volume 1, which can still be purchased from the Pastoral Research Centre, Stone House, Hele, Taunton, Somerset, TA4 1AJ. Brierley reproduces statistics for the years 1997-2005, adds some later figures from the Catholic Directory and produces estimates for 2010. The topics covered comprise Catholic population, numbers joining the Church, marriages, deaths and mass attendance. There is a general pattern of steady decline. Discrepancies between the Church’s counts of mass-goers and the four English church censuses since 1979 are noted.

The most recent issue of Quadrant is No. 19 (March 2010). This includes features on: the latest church attendance statistics from the Baptist Union and the Church of England; the British Social Attitudes Survey, 2008; the diversity audit of the Church of England; the Citizenship Survey, 2008-09; and the online poll of attendees at Spring Harvest. You can also read more about all these topics in news posts on the British Religion in Numbers website.

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News from Christian Research

Posted on January 28, 2010 by Clive D. Field

On 18 January the Bible Society announced changes to its leadership team, one of which was the appointment of Stuart Rivers as Executive Director of Enterprises. He previously worked for Ericsson and, for the past four years, as an officer in the Salvation Army.

The Bible Society’s newly-created Enterprises Division subsumes its trading arm, Bible Society Resources Ltd., together with Christian Research and Christian Resources Exhibitions. It also manages the Society’s interest in the Theos public theology think tank, of which the Society is a major sponsor.

Christian Research, best known for its publication of the UK Christian Resources Handbook and Religious Trends, has its roots in the Bible Society during Dr Peter Brierley’s time as the Society’s programme director.  

It was then established as a separate entity, led by Peter, first as MARC Europe (1982-93) and then as Christian Research. On Peter’s retirement in 2007 it was merged into the Bible Society. In retirement, Peter runs Brierley Consultancy.

Now under the direction of Benita Hewitt, Christian Research provides a range of services to its members and undertakes quantitative and qualitative research, both for the Bible Society and other Christian clients.

Two of Christian Research’s current initiatives are ChurchCheck, a mystery visitor service provided in association with Retail Maxim; and Faith Journeys, the first detailed quantitative investigation of faith development among UK Christians since John Finney’s Finding Faith Today (1992).

Further information about Faith Journeys, including interim statistical findings, may be found at http://www.faith-journeys.com. A substantial feature article about the project by Jenny Williams also appeared in the Baptist Times for 3 December 2009.

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