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6 responses to “Christian Research and Churchgoing”
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Excellent analysis as always. Mouse adds a few points:
1. Its easy to adjust for population growth. For the CofE the 2001 attendance was 1.7m and 2008 was 1.67. ONS quote mid-year population figures as 59.1m for 2001 and 61.4m for 2008, so the % attending CofE churches is 2.876% in 2001 and 2.72% in 2008. That is decline, but not sure how significant.
2. Average Sunday Attendance is increasingly irrelevant as a statistic, as patterns of worship change in the direction of more mid-week church attendance. Benita explains that in one of the articles (can’t remember which), and that is the reason why average monthly and weekly are used instead.
3. Christmas and Easter attendance numbers are useless indicators, as they are hugely dependent on the weather and the day of the week on which those festivals actually fall.
4. The falls in the number of marriages and baptisms performed in the CofE quoted above are absolute numbers. More relevant statistics would be proportional measures. The number of marriages in the UK has been falling for many years, for example, so we would expect to see drops in the number of Church marriages. More relevant is the proportion of all marriages which take place in the Church of England. Similarly the number of baptisms needs to be put in the context of birth rates. I don’t have these numbers so can’t comment on whether the decline is real or not.
5. Benita has just commented on the point about Polish immigration over at the Guardian
She points out that there was a significant outflow of Polish immigrants in 2008 (according to ONS figures), so that doesn’t account for the increase that year. Nevertheless, the impact of Eastern European immigration should be investigated further, as that surely has impacted on these numbers somewhere. Whether it is to a significant degree or not is pretty much guess work at this point.
6. Regardless of all of this, the real point to be made here is that throughout the 1990s the church shrunk in absolute and relative terms quite dramatically. Now we can see that this decline has levelled off. Perhaps there has still been a small decline, or perhaps a small increase when we factor in Fresh Expressions and other denominations, through the 2000s. But that is not the point. We are no longer in a nose dive. That is hugely important.
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Thank you Church Mouse. Your last point is the main finding I am trying to communicate – the church is no longer declining at a dramatic rate to the point where it might cease to exit. Peter Brierley’s book following the last Christian Research census in 2005 was titled ‘Pulling out of the Nosedive’ and we are continuing to see those trends. We believe the church is pulling out of the nosedive now. It is too early to declare growth, but the situation certainly looks stable.
Usual Sunday attendance is a measure which the Church of England itself sees as no longer relevant. To quote their ‘Church Statistics’ publication: ‘It would be wrong to make direct comparisons between the number counted in church services across October and the figures that churches have traditionally estimated as their “usual Sunday attendance”‘.
As Church Mouse, and the Church of England confirm, Christmas attendance is significantly affected by the day of week in which Christmas Eve and Day fall. Another factor to take into account is that you have quoted the numbers of communicants. Whilst the number of Christmas communicants fell from 1.21m in 2002 to 1.08m in 2008, the number of attenders rose from 2.61m to 2.65m.
The Church of England has conducted some very impressive and significant research with the Henley Centre to look at church weddings, and I believe this is having a real impact on the proportion of church weddings – although, of course, it will be some time before we can confirm this with statistics and trends.
I totally agree with your point about not being able to compare across denominations, which is why we have only looked at trends within denominations.
Sample surveys of the population are a good way of looking at trends. The most consistent of these was the Tearfund twice-yearly study and the most recent data did showed ‘growth around the edges’ of church. It did not show continued decline. We took this into account when making our statement about the end of church decline. Christian Research is planning to continue with such a measure of the population.
I agree that a national census of church attendance will give a more consistent and definitive answer. Christian Research is planning to conduct a census in 2011. This census will be much more comprehensive then any church census conducted by Christian Research in the past. We need to ‘count’ the church in all that it does.
You must be aware, as are we, that churchgoing is changing in this country as the church slowly adapts to changes in society. These changes make monitoring of the situation more complex than before, and present challenges to us researchers. We at Christian Research, and my counterpart at Church of England, are adapting what and how we count. We are also conducting more qualitative research to help understand in more depth what is on hearts on minds of the people we are counting. This will help the church to anticipate and adapt to change.
At Christian Research we could look at the traditional statistics and continue to declare that the church is in decline. But we are looking at the bigger picture, in the context of a changing church and society. We cannot continue to just count ‘membership’ and ‘numbers on pews on a Sunday morning’. The church is changing, and the way people are worshiping is changing. And given the numbers we are looking at, from a variety of sources, it is time to change the narrative from one of decline to one of stability. The church is indeed ‘Pulling out of the Nosedive’.
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Since my original BRIN post I have seen Benita Hewitt’s post from Saturday morning on the Comment is Free (CiF) website. This is entitled ‘Church attendance has bottomed out’ and covers similar ground to her Church Mouse post. See:
The CiF post has triggered some debate. In one of her replies to the comments, Hewitt announces that Christian Research is planning a new national census of church attendance for 2011. This is excellent news (assuming that the funding can be secured).
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[…] The adult average all week attendance in 2009 was 193,000, 10% less than in 2007. For teenagers and the under-13s the decreases were 12% and 34% respectively. At 228,000, total attendances had dropped by 13% in two years. Most adults continued to worship on Sundays, midweek services contributing only an extra 11% on top of Sunday congregations, whereas for children and teenagers midweek services added 67% and 53% to the Sunday totals. These data are relevant to the recent debate about whether the decline in churchgoing has ended. See http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=551 […]
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[…] 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 […]
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[…] Honestly, the two don’t have to be a contradiction in terms! George has flagged up the following interesting article; http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=551 […]
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