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One response to “Thoughts on Trends in Church Attendance”
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Peter
Thanks for this. I was hoping to come back to the topic, and will do again, but haven’t been able to since the debate.
I guess the issue is which year to pick as the base year. Your stats pick an earlier year as the base than Benita does when she talks about the flattening out. I also note that the numbers you quote are slightly different from Benita’s – not materially, but slightly.
So if we take Catholic attendance the numbers in full are:
1995 1,135,044
1996 1,111,077
1997 1,086,250
1998 1,056,027
1999 1,041,728
2000 1,005,522
2001 993,632
2002 968,006
2003 949,869
2004 928,870
2005 917,484
2006 927,154
2007 915,556
2008 918,844So it looks like things have flattened out since 2004/5.
For the Church of England the numbers in full are:
Average Monthly Average Weekly
2001 1,708,000 1,205,000
2002 1,682,000 1,170,000
2003 1,704,000 1,187000
2004 1,707,000 1,186000
2005 1,706,000 1,174000
2006 1,694,000 1,163000
2007 1,690,000 1,160000
2008 1,667,000 1,145000So from that perspective it looks like things have flattened out since 2001 in terms of Average Monthly Attendance. Average Weekly Attendance shows a small decline, but has been pretty flat over the same period.
However, the broader point is that this is a change in the long term trend from the 1990s where we were seeing dramatic declines year on year. The charts Benita put on my blog illustrate the point – the era of big decline is over. Whether we are now in a period of small decline or stability is the discussion we are having, but there is no doubt that the trend has changed.
The challenge now, therefore, is to keep changing it and move into a period of growth.
As for the other denominations, it looks like your numbers above are a little old (latest is five years old at 2005), so we’ll have to wait for Christian Research to pull those together for a fuller analysis. I understand they are working on that right now.
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