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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Career aspirations of women priests in the Church of England

Posted on January 23, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Women priests in the Church of England are willing to take up a senior ministerial post in the future, including in the episcopal ministry, if the opportunity arises. However, they appear much less likely to respond to an open advertisement than to a personal approach.

These are the main findings in an article which appeared in the Church Times for 15 January, written by Rev Dr Jane Hedges (Canon Steward of Westminster Abbey) and entitled ‘A little encouragement is all it will take’.

The article is based upon a self-completion postal questionnaire sent by Dr Hedges, at the end of 2008, to 1,600 women priests on the Church Commissioners’ payroll, of whom just over two-thirds replied.

To read the article, go to:

http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=87487

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New Church of England statistics

Posted on January 23, 2010 by Clive D. Field

The Church of England published two new sets of statistics on 22 January.

The first were its provisional statistics for mission in 2008, covering baptisms (infant, child and adult), thanksgivings (infant and child), confirmations, marriages and blessings, funerals, Easter and Christmas communicants and all age attendance, typical monthly church attendance (adult and children/young people) and electoral roll membership. Trend data are provided back to 2002. Weekly church attendance and electoral roll statistics are disaggregated by diocese. All these data may be found at:

http://www.cofe.anglican.org/info/statistics/2008provisionalattendance.pdf

An accompanying press release leads on the attendance figures, which show that 1,700,000 people attend Church of England services each month and 1,100,000 each week, either on Sunday or on a weekday. Total attendances in an average week were down 1 per cent on 2007, although there was a 3 per cent increase in the under-16s. Churchgoing grew in 14 of the 44 dioceses. Commenting on the results, Rev Lynda Barley (the Church’s Head of Research and Statistics) contextualized the data within declining participation in all organizations, noting especially the fall in membership of political parties. The press release is available at:

http://www.cofe.anglican.org/news/pr1310.html

The second set of statistics is contained in a report entitled Celebrating Diversity in the Church of England, which is on the agenda for next month’s meeting of the Church’s General Synod. This is based on a gender, age and ethnic diversity audit of a cross-section (one in eight parishes) of the Church’s adult congregations undertaken in September-December 2007, in response to the 2003 report, Called to Act Justly. It follows a comparable survey of clergy diversity in 2005. The proportion of ethnic minority worshippers was 5 per cent, with 65 per cent women and 69 per cent aged 55 and over. The full report is published at:

http://www.cofe.anglican.org/about/gensynod/agendas/feb2010/gsmisc/gsmisc938.doc

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Sermons: the View from the Pew

Posted on January 19, 2010 by Clive D. Field

CODEC, a research centre at St John’s College, Durham University, and the College of Preachers have just released the results of a pilot study of attitudes towards preaching and sermons. This forms part of the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the founding of the College of Preachers in 1960.

A total of 193 churchgoers from 16 places of worship of various denominations (including Roman Catholic) were surveyed. Although 97 per cent of worshippers frequently or sometimes looked forward to sermons, and 60 per cent said sermons gave them a sense of God’s love, only 17 per cent thought that preaching changed the way they live. Many Anglicans and Catholics had a strong preference for sermons of around ten minutes, but Free Church worshippers often wanted longer sermons.

A report on the survey is available, price £5, from CODEC at St John’s College, 3 South Bailey, Durham, DH1 3RJ. It is entitled The View from the Pew and is authored by Ben Blackwell, Kate Bruce and Peter Phillips.

Headline findings also feature in a number of print and online media articles, including on the BBC website at:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8467504.stm

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Religion and human rights

Posted on January 19, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Liberty, the human rights organization, has today released the findings from a poll of United Kingdom Christians on the subject of freedom of religion and religious discrimination.

The poll was commissioned against the background of the case of Nadia Eweida who was banned by her employer, British Airways, from wearing a Christian cross outside her uniform. The case has now reached the Court of Appeal.

A total of 535 Christians aged 18 and over, drawn from the Cpanel, were surveyed by ComRes by online questionnaire between 3 December 2009 and 10 January 2010.

96 per cent of the sample agreed that everybody should have freedom of thought, conscience and religion as long as they do no harm to other people.

85 per cent agreed that, irrespective of their religion, the law should protect the right of believers to wear symbols of their faith.

87 per cent expressed the view that British Airways had acted unfairly towards Nadia Eweida and 86 per cent said that the company was wrong to insist the cross was covered up.

80 per cent thought the case set a dangerous precedent for religious discrimination.

Full computer tabulations of the results of the poll may be found at:

http://www.comres.co.uk/resources/7/Political%20Polls/Liberty%20Cpanel%20tables%20Jan2010.pdf

An article about the case by Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty, appears in today’s issue of The Times (‘Freedom must apply to all faiths and none’). This, with an associated videocast, is also published online at:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6992931.ece

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Faith and the environment

Posted on January 17, 2010 by Clive D. Field

The Bible Society has released the results of a small-scale poll of the attitudes of religious people towards the environment. Seven in ten believe that caring for the environment is part of their religious duty.

The Society’s press release will be found at: http://www.biblesociety.org.uk/news/49/84/The-Bible-matters-when-it-comes-to-the-environment/

The poll was conducted via Faithbook, an interfaith social networking site on Facebook, which was set up by Global Tolerance in 2008 to improve interfaith relations and tackle extremism on the web.

Faithbook used Survey Monkey to collect the data.

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Citizenship Survey, 2007-08 – Religion

Posted on January 9, 2010 by Clive D. Field

The Department for Communities and Local Government published the topic report on race, religion and equalities from the 2007-08 Citizenship Survey on 18 December 2009. The report runs to 256 pages and is freely available online at http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/statistics/pdf/1417955.pdf

The Citizenship Survey has been conducted every other year since 2001, by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) on behalf of Government. The population surveyed comprises adults aged 16 and over in England and Wales. In 2007-08 14,095 people were interviewed, including an ethnic minority booster sample of 4,759.

The race, religion and equalities report includes six chapters, with numerous appended tables of data disaggregated by demographics, on religion. They cover: profile of religion; religious prejudice; perceptions of the extent to which Government protects the rights of religious groups; religious discrimination; the effect of religion on day-to-day life; and racial and religious harassment.

Four other topic reports on the 2007-08 Citizenship Survey have been issued previously, and may be found on the Department’s website. They deal with: identity and values; community cohesion; empowered communities; and volunteering and charitable giving. Each includes some statistical analyses by religious variables, additional to those appearing in the race, religion and equalities report.

The dataset for the 2007-08 Citizenship Survey is available for secondary analysis from the Economic and Social Data Service as Study Number 5739.

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Profile of British Methodists

Posted on January 8, 2010 by Clive D. Field

The Methodist Church of Great Britain has an unbroken record of collecting and publishing membership statistics since 1766. However, they tell us little about the sort of people who affiliate to Methodism.

In an effort to fill this gap, Clive Field (Universities of Birmingham and Manchester) has studied data on those who professed to be Methodists in the British Social Attitudes (BSA) Surveys between 1983 and 2008, controlling for survey decade and frequency of churchgoing.  

He has now published the results of his analysis in ‘The people called Methodists: statistical insights from the social sciences’, Epworth Review, Vol. 36, No. 4, November 2009, pp. 16-29.

The number of individuals professing allegiance to Methodism is shown to have declined over time, especially when the data are expressed in terms of birth cohorts.

Thus, among those born between 1890 and 1909 9.0 per cent claimed to be Methodists, but the proportion fell relentlessly, to reach 0.9 per cent for the 1970-89 birth cohort.

Even so, more people identified with Methodism in the BSA than show up in the Church’s official statistics on the community roll. These ‘missing adherents’ demonstrate the value of recent empirical research into the potential for church-returning.

Those who professed to be Methodists were analysed by gender, age, marital status, ethnicity, education, social class and housing tenure.

Unsurprisingly, the profile of Methodism is revealed as being skewed, particularly among active churchgoers. Relative to the overall adult population, they are disproportionately female, old, married or widowed, white, better educated, from higher social classes and home owners.

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Institute for Jewish Policy Research

Posted on January 8, 2010 by Clive D. Field

The Institute for Jewish Policy Research, originally founded in New York in 1941 but located in London since 1965, has appointed Jonathan Boyd as its executive director. Mr Boyd joined the Institute a year ago as a research fellow and has recently been its acting director.

Mr Boyd will oversee the launch this week of the first national online survey of the attitudes of British Jews towards Israel, which is being conducted for the Institute by Ipsos-MORI. The survey can be found at http://www.ipsos-mori.com/israelsurvey

Future projects from the Institute will include a community-wide survey of Jewish identity in the UK and an analysis of the Jewish results of the 2011 national census, which will include a question on religious profession, as in 2001.

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Welcome!

Posted on January 4, 2010 by admin

 

Welcome to the blog section of BRIN – newly integrated into the main site.

This section of the site reports on new releases of religious data. It will also flag up interesting new publications, policy reports or news stories using religious data.

In December the following were released.

Church of England Finance and Ministry Statistics

… which among other things reports that the total income of parishes rose well above inflation in 2007, while 574 new clergy were ordained in 2008. The Church of England reported that clergy numbers were generally ‘buoyant’. See more on the Church of England website here.

An interesting survey was conducted on awareness of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, with results publicised last month. The survey was funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, which was founded by the York chocolatier and philanthropist Joseph Rowntree. It’s unusual in being a comparatively large survey  into attitudes towards one of the smaller denominations. An article and more detailed presentation are available here in the weekly Quaker magazine The Friend: ‘Seeing ourselves as others see us’.

A third interesting release was the Pew Forum’s measures of government religious restrictions, and of social hostilities with religious aspects, for 198 countries. The Government Restrictions Index was based on 20 separate measures and the Social Hostilities Index on 13. To find out how the UK scored, and how the measures were created, have a look at the Pew Forum website.

More to come!

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