UK Religious Trends to 2020

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Clive D. Field

Some fascinating (but necessarily speculative) insights into ten key current religious, demographic and other changes in the UK and their potential impact upon the Churches are contained in a new publication by Peter Brierley, head of Brierley Consultancy.

Entitled Major UK Religious Trends, 2010 to 2020, the 80-page paper is a companion to the same author’s Global Religious Trends, 2010 to 2020, which we covered on BRIN last year – see http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=61

The report is designed to facilitate strategy formation and leadership development in the Churches, to ensure that their forward thinking and planning are fully grounded in the facts and reasonable assumptions.

Brierley is a statistician with 43 years’ experience of Christian evaluation, research and publishing, including lengthy spells as European Director of MARC Europe and Executive Director of Christian Research.

In his new paper he draws extensively on the empirical data which he collected in these roles, especially in undertaking church censuses and preparing successive editions of Religious Trends, to arrive at informed projections about the state of UK religion in 2020.

Brierley also utilizes the research which he has been conducting for a new book on Church Statistics, 2005-2015, to be released by ADBC Publishers (Brierley Consultancy’s new imprint) later this year.

This last-named publication is billed as giving data across all 340 denominations in the UK and will thus stand in the tradition of Religious Trends, a title that might be said to have moved off in a somewhat different direction in its new online manifestation from Christian Research (see http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=815).

The continuing eclipse of the Judeo-Christian heritage and the decline of institutional Christianity, with some pockets of trend-bucking (such as Pentecostals and larger Anglican places of worship), is the overarching (albeit nuanced) theme which unifies Brierley’s projections to 2020 in Major UK Religious Trends.

This story-line is neatly summarized in figure 6.5 on page 53, which compares the religious structure of Great Britain (rather than the UK) in 2010 and 2020.

By the latter date the Christian and non-Christian communities are estimated to balance at 50% each (with 41% professing no religion and 9% – although 12% is cited elsewhere – being of non-Christian faiths).

Among the 50% of professing Christians in 2020, just 4% will be regular churchgoers (highest in Scotland and lowest in Wales) and 46% irregular churchgoers or non-attenders. Weekday services will account for half of these worshippers.

Church membership is anticipated by Brierley to be 6% (or 7% elsewhere), the majority of it nominal.

These decreases in religious practice and affiliation are further accentuated when set against the background of a modest rise in religious provision, reflected in the forecast growth in the number of UK clergy from 36,630 in 2010 to 38,800 in 2020 and of places of worship from 50,700 to 51,900.

Figure 6.5 is complemented by table 1.12 on pages 18-19 which lists 22 quantitative and qualitative attributes of what the UK Christian scene might look like in 2020.

Brierley’s forecasts about church attendance contrast with the more cautiously optimistic reading of the contemporary situation promulgated by Christian Research since last September. Christian Research is hoping to organize a new UK-wide census of churchgoing and Christian activities this year, utilizing online data capture.

As with much of his previous work, Brierley seems to be on surest ground when writing about Trinitarian Christian denominations. Non-Trinitarian Churches and, more particularly, non-Christian faiths may be thought a little beyond his professional experience and perhaps even comfort zone.

Certainly, some of the statistics relating to non-Christian faiths, and Islam in particular, could be questioned. For example, Brierley’s estimate of Muslims has been scaled back to reflect the fact that (in his view) only half are ‘active members’, whereas the Citizenship Surveys demonstrate that four-fifths of Muslims claim to practice their religion.   

Major UK Religious Trends costs £15.00 inclusive of postage and can be ordered from Dr Peter Brierley, The Old Post Office, 1 Thorpe Avenue, Tonbridge, Kent, TN10 4PW. Cheques should be made payable to Peter Brierley.

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Facing the Axe? Diocese of Bradford in the Headlights

Posted on October 25, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Periodic reports about Islam overtaking the Church of England in terms of the number of worshippers have been a feature of media life for much of the past decade.

The latest variant on the theme is to be found in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday, in an article by Jonathan Petre and Andrew Chapman. A version of this is online at:  

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1323237/Facing-axe-Diocese-twice-Muslim-worshippers-Anglicans.html

The opening paragraph summarizes the story: ‘A historic Church of England diocese where Muslim worshippers outnumber Anglican churchgoers by two to one is set to be scrapped.’

The diocese concerned is Bradford, which – the article suggests – is being lined up by the Dioceses Commission for possible merger with the neighbouring Diocese of Ripon and Leeds (it was actually part of the Diocese of Ripon until separated out in 1919).

Neither the Diocese of Bradford nor the Commission was willing to comment on this mooted reorganization. But what of the other half of the equation, the suggestion that Friday mosque attendances have surpassed Anglican Sunday congregations?

The Bradford diocesan churchgoing statistic quoted is the Mail on Sunday is the usual Sunday attendance figure of 8,700 for 2008, taken from the latest edition of Church Statistics.

Other and more favourable figures for the Diocese of Bradford in that year are overlooked, one suspects deliberately. These are (in ascending order): average Sunday attendance of 10,200, electoral roll membership of 11,300, average weekly attendance of 12,200, Easter Day attendance of 13,800, and Christmas Day/Eve attendance of 26,100.

As for Muslims, a total population figure of about 80,000 for Bradford is cited, apparently put forward by Peter Brierley of Brierley Research. The basis for this estimate is not explained.

The 2001 census of the Bradford Unitary Authority identified 75,200 Muslims, representing 16% of all inhabitants at that date. However, if the Muslim community in Bradford has grown at the same rate as in the rest of the country since the census, the number of Muslims in the city must now be about 110,000, rather than 80,000.

The article goes on to say that ‘Government surveys have established that at least a quarter of Muslims are weekly mosque-goers’. Therefore, ‘on a conservative estimate 20,000 are regular worshippers, more than double the number of their Anglican counterparts.’

It is not clarified what these ‘Government surveys’ are. By far the largest such enquiry which includes religion, the Integrated Household Survey, is confined to religious affiliation and does not measure religious observance.

The question used in the Government’s Citizenship Survey asks whether respondents practice their religion, and 80% of Muslims in 2008-09 said that they did.

An as yet unpublished academic study of Muslims, conducted by Ipsos MORI in 2009 and made available by BRIN’s David Voas, records claimed weekly attendance at services as higher than one-quarter, 30% for the 18-34s and 50% for the over-35s. These claims may, of course, be exaggerated.

It is also far from certain whether the Mail on Sunday’s journalists are comparing like-with-like in spatial terms. The Diocese of Bradford is larger than the city, as regards both population (by 37% in 2001) and area, its 920 square miles taking in (as the article acknowledges) the western quarter of North Yorkshire and parts of East Lancashire, South-East Cumbria and Leeds.

Thus, while the general point made by the article still stands, that Anglicans are in relative retreat in a city which, in 2001, had the fourth highest proportion of Muslims anywhere in the country, it otherwise leaves a very great deal to be desired in respect of presentation and interpretation of the facts. These appear to have been sacrificed in the pursuit of a sensationalist headline.

The story is rerun in today’s Daily Express, in an article by Mark Reynolds, with the additional twist that, following projections in Christian Research’s Religious Trends, it is claimed that ‘even Hindus will soon come close to outnumbering churchgoers’. See:

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/207388/Church-diocese-is-axed-because-of-Muslim-influx

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Counting Catholics

Posted on September 27, 2010 by Siobhan McAndrew

Andrew Brown of the Guardian has just written a very interesting article on the problems of calculating the size of the Catholic community. The church defines this as those who have been baptised living within England and Wales (or in Scotland; these are separate church jurisdictions). A sociology colleague has mentioned however that church administrators do refer to “unbaptised Catholics” – theologically heterodox, but perhaps wise to the need to plan for school places and similar.

The main sources are the Catholic Church itself; the Government (specifically the Scottish and Northern Irish censuses, and data on marriages); and opinion polls and social surveys. The Church data for the most part depends on parishes estimating their community size, predominantly from mass attendance through an annual count, together with estimation of the size of the community which does not attend. This might be gauged from counting rites of passage (baptisms, first communions, confirmations, marriages and funerals), which are also enumerated for parish returns and sent to diocesan offices for compilation and annual report, in diocesan directories and the Catholic Directory for England and Wales.

Tony Spencer, Director of the Pastoral Research Centre, has published an assessment of data quality of various Catholic sources – diocesan directories, the Catholic Directory for England and Wales, and the Vatican-compiled Annuario Pontificio, which is difficult to access. This is discussed in some detail in A. E. C. W. Spencer (ed.), Digest of Statistics of the Catholic Community of England & Wales, 1958-2005: Volume I. A common problem is lack of clarity over how missing returns are treated.

Regarding the Catholic Directory, which is the most commonly-cited source, Spencer suggests that one issue is that data are often not supplied by some dioceses before the publication deadline. This means that the newest data are provisional but often not labelled as such, nor revised between editions. Spencer also suggests that operational definitions may vary between dioceses.

We provide here the best set of data at our disposal for England and Wales over the past decades up to 2005. The sources used have been Peter Brierley (ed.) Religious Trends 2 and Religious Trends 7 (1999, 2008); R. Currie et al. Churches and Churchgoers (Oxford, 1977); and Spencer’s Digest (2008). We also include a graph from the merged set of British Social Attitudes surveys, from 1983 to 2008. (Predicted figures for 2010 are available in Religious Trends 7, and reported data on attendance, baptisms and so on are available after 2005 from recent editions of the Catholic Directory; the latter will be added here in due course.)

For now here is a set of charts: click on the images for a high-quality version.

1. Baptisms as a percentage of live births.

The Religious Trends data originates from the Catholic Directory and may include ‘late’ baptisms. If so, it’s not really appropriate to divide this by number of live births per year. Spencer’s Pastoral Research Centre data (the red series) is restricted to infant baptisms (under 12 months) which is more acceptable.

2. Entries to Catholicism by type: infant baptisms, late baptisms, adult conversions.

This illustrates that a growing proportion of baptisms are undertaken when the child is older – partly because of falling neonatal mortality rates, and partly because families may opt for their children to be baptised at once, rather than individually soon after birth.

3. Catholics as percentage of England and Wales population.

This chart combines the Currie et al. (or CGH) estimates published in 1977, the estimates published in Religious Trends, and Spencer’s PRC estimates. The total population data are from the censuses (linearly interpolated until 1981, with ONS mid-year population estimates from 1981).

4. Percentage of five-yearly birth cohort identifying as Catholic, British Social Attitudes surveys 1983-2008.

Here we have combined all the 1983-2008 surveys and looked at the percentage reporting they are Catholic by period of birth (1900-1904, 1905-1909, etc., up to 1985-1989). Note however that the rate for each age group will be affected by differential mortality (and fertility) rates as well as tendency to retain religiosity or lapse.

The spreadsheet including the data used to create these charts will be posted here later today. There are data gaps which need filling in (by consulting Catholic Directories from the 1970s, allowing for the estimates being flawed) but this is as far as we have reached at present.

Update (9.30pm)
The spreadsheet is now available here.

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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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Pentecost Postponed? Prospects for Churchgoing

Posted on June 3, 2010 by Clive D. Field

A post on the Christian Today website reports on the talk given recently by Dr Peter Brierley of Brierley Research at the third annual Pentecost Festival in London. In it he painted a gloomy picture of the prospects for church attendance in Britain during the coming decade, based (it would seem), not on any new primary data, but largely on forward projections from the church censuses for which he was responsible when Director of Christian Research.

Brierley anticipates that all the main denominations, except Pentecostals, will decline in the next 10 years, with the Church of England set to experience the sharpest drop in attendance. Whereas in 2000 there were 3.5 million churchgoers, the number today is said to be 2.9 million. Brierley forecasts that, if present trends continue, church attendance in Britain will drop to 2.6 million by 2015 and 2.3 million by 2020.

A study of individual English counties in the last 12 years puts some flesh on these bare bones. While, in 1998, all but five counties had a churchgoing population (on an average Sunday) of at least 6 per cent, today there are only 12 English counties with that figure, and there are seven counties with a churchgoing population of less than 4.5 per cent. Brierley predicts that almost all counties will have a churchgoing population of less than 4.5 per cent by 2020.

He attributes the drop in attendance to various causes, including less evangelism. In 1990, Brierley claims, there were an estimated 120,000 conversions and 60,000 deaths of churchgoing Christians, but in the last year there were only 80,000 conversions and 120,000 deaths.

For Brierley, the most alarming statistics relate to the young. Whereas 60 per cent of British people overall do not attend church at all, the proportion is thought to be around 80 per cent among the under-15s and 75 per cent for 15 to 29-year-olds. 59 per cent of all churches in England have no members between the ages of 15 and 19. Brierley also voices concern about the number of 30 to 44-year-olds leaving the Church, as the presence of the over-65s in church continues to increase.

A major and related challenge for the mainline denominations is identified by Brierley as the ageing of the clergy, since previous research has found that ministers tend to attract congregations of a similar age. ‘The problem is that the ministerial age matches the congregation but not the people they need to reach.’

Black majority and other ethnic churches are the one part of the Christian scene not in decline, according to Brierley. By 2015, he anticipates that around one-quarter of churchgoers in England will be from non-white communities. Brierley explains their success because their members are inviting friends and neighbours of similar ethnic origin, and because they are friendly churches whose pastors offer good sermons.

Alongside the aggregate decrease in Christianity, other religions in Britain are set to grow, particularly Islam, with Brierley predicting the number of Muslims in Britain at 3 million by 2020. This seems a very conservative estimate, since there are probably some 2.5 million now, with Eric Kaufmann projecting almost 7 million by 2029 (in his new book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?).

With thanks to the original Christian Today post at:
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/researcher.anticipates.further.church.decline.in.2010s/25949.htm

Since Brierley gave his talk to the Pentecost Festival he has published a short article entitled ‘Decline Continues’ in FutureFirst, No. 9, June 2010, p. 2. This provides maps (for 1998, 2010 and 2020) showing the percentage of the population in each English county attending church on an average Sunday.

The article also contains new aggregate forecasts for English churchgoing, revised to take account of the latest Roman Catholic mass attendance figures. The 2010 average weekly Sunday attendance for England as a whole is given as 5.5% of the population, with projections of 4.8% in 2015 and 4.1% in 2020.

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Future Role of Bishops in the Church of England

Posted on May 14, 2010 by Clive D. Field

The Church of England Evangelical Council, founded by John Stott in 1960 to provide a collective evangelical voice in the Church of England, has recently published a report on The Future Role of Bishops in the Church of England, which it commissioned from Brierley Consultancy.

The report is based upon a 23% response to a Likert-style questionnaire which was emailed early in 2010 to over 1,000 members of the Council. Respondents were disproportionately male (86%), clergy (69%) and aged 50 and over (74%), which may or may not reflect a skew in the actual membership of the Council as a whole.

The questions were arranged around five topics, comprising a couple of dozen statements in all: the role of the diocesan bishop; the appointment of bishops; the work of suffragan bishops; the bishop and his national role; and the bishop and national issues. There were also two ranking questions. The full results will be found at:

http://www.ceec.info/library/positional/CEECReport%20on%20Bishops%200510.pdf

Asked to rank five dominant issues facing a bishop today, 84% of respondents placed mission in first position, followed by declining church attendance (19%). Still further behind were financing ministry (5%), church unity (4%) and homosexuality (4%). Even when second, third, fourth and fifth preferences were factored in, mission remained the clear front-runner.

The primacy of mission was reinforced by the answers to another ranking question on the priorities of a bishop. To teach and defend the historic faith (55%) and to lead the Church in mission and ministry (51%) were the two issues of first rank, easily surpassing to be the voice of the Church in the public square (9%), to offer pastoral care for the whole Church (6%), and to manage Church resources most effectively (3%).    

The Likert-style questions asked about specific issues in isolation. 88% of Anglican evangelicals surveyed considered that a bishop should resign if he supported clergy in active homosexual relationships, and 75% were clear that the consecration of women bishops would divide the Church.

In respect of Church and state, 80% wanted bishops to continue to sit in the House of Lords, but only 27% supported their appointment by the Prime Minister and Queen (the remaining 73% disagreeing). Three-fifths favoured bishops being elected by their diocesan clergy and their appointment for a fixed term of 10 years.

One-third of respondents felt that bishops were out of touch with ordinary Church life, and one-fifth wanted them to be judged on their performance and to be paid accordingly. 62% did not consider it appropriate that they live in palaces or especially large houses.

These latter findings were among the aspects of the survey to be featured in the summary published on the front page of the Church of England Newspaper for 7 May 2010. This also quoted the Bishop of Willesden (a member of the Council) apparently casting some doubt on the representativeness of the survey.

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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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Global Religious Trends to 2020

Posted on February 12, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Anybody using British religious statistics in a comparative context may find a new discussion paper by Peter Brierley (head of Brierley Consultancy) of interest.

It is entitled Global Religious Trends, 2010 to 2020 and has been prepared for this year’s Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, being held in Cape Town. The 57 page paper is available (price £12, inclusive of postage) from Dr Peter Brierley, 1 Thorpe Avenue, Tonbridge, Kent, TN10 4PW.

The paper examines ten key secular and religious trends which will impact upon global Christianity during the coming decade and seeks to quantify them. The secular trends include those of ageing, immigration, family and technology. Key elements of the religious scene include the static number of Christians overall (relative to population), combined with a growing proportion of Evangelical Christians and Muslims.

There is a particularly interesting account of the ‘tribes’ of evangelicalism, largely informed by a new analysis of data from Christian Research’s English Church censuses (the latest from 2005).

Otherwise, there are few specifically British statistics. Global data are used wherever practicable, disaggregated by continent. Major sources include the World Religion Database and the World Values Surveys (the latter particularly for churchgoing).

Naturally, the usual caveats apply to the quality of some of the forecast data, not least those which are projected as far forward as 2050.

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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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