The Church Mouse Blog

18 August 2025

The Bible Society has published stunning data appearing to show a dramatic increase in church-going in England and Wales. But this Mouse has declared himself a Quiet Revival sceptic. He has now had the chance to review the data and thinks there are good grounds for this scepticism.

In the unlikely event that you have missed it, the ‘Quiet Revival’ is the title of a report from the Bible Society that has made the extraordinary claim that the Church in England and Wales has, despite everything we have previously believed, experienced dramatic growth in recent years. Two YouGov polls were conducted, one in 2018 and another in 2024, asking large samples of their actual experience of attending church. It showed a significant growth in attendance, led primarily by young people.

This news has received a rapturous welcome from those who have been predicting revival in the UK for as long as Mouse can remember, and has gained mainstream media attention from sources as diverse as The Sunday Express, The Times, BBC Radio 4's More or Less and The New Agents podcast. Many have honed in on the reported increase in 18-24 year olds attending church, arguing that the increasing uncertainty in the world today is causing young people to ask bigger questions about their future and their place in the world.

While Mouse would love to believe that people are flocking back to church, his instant reaction was that it simply didn't fit with the data we have from every other reliable source. Most importantly, the actual counting of bums in seats at all the major denominations. In fact, over 70% of the growth the Bible Society report claims to have spotted comes from two denominations which are self-reporting that they are shrinking.

At the time of Mouse's last blog, the underlying survey data tables which the Bible Society used as the basis for their report were not publicly available. Now that they are, Mouse has had a chance to have a look. Mouse also note an important article by the eminent David Voas, Professor of Social Science at UCL and a highly reputable authority on such matters. Professor Voas, like Mouse, has declared himself a Quiet Revival Sceptic.

So what is wrong with the Bible Society's data?

On one level, there is nothing wrong with it. Two surveys were conducted by the respected polling organisation YouGov and the results have been summarised accurately, albeit with a focus on the numbers which tell the most positive story. The wider picture the data reveals is one where the total number of people who call themselves Christian is more or less the same, but with a notably higher level of claimed church attendance from within that group.

Mouse's previous comment pointed out the rather obvious point that this data doesn't match what the churches themselves have reported or data from other well-known authoritative surveys. David Voas makes the same observation, but also points out that the YouGov data also differs from survey data produced by the highly respected polling organisation ... errr ... YouGov. As Professor Voas summarises:

The findings are also inconsistent with other data from YouGov, the polling firm that collected the data for the Bible Society. A decade ago, the British Election Study (BES) commissioned YouGov to create an online panel. This panel, which includes more people than the Bible Society surveys, was asked about religious affiliation and church attendance in 2015, 2022 and 2024.

According to YouGov’s data for the BES internet panel, the share of Christian churchgoers in England and Wales declined from 8.0% to 6.6% between 2015 and 2024, whereas YouGov’s surveys for the Bible Society apparently show an increase from 8% to 12% between 2018 and 2024.

That's right, YouGov had already created a panel measuring church attendance and has now created another survey to contradict their own earlier data. The BES panel uses a more rigorous methodology too, keeping contact with the same panel members over time to ensure comparability in the different data sets. It is a long-term study project, which has been running since 1964 with a panel of 30,000 people currently in the survey. The BES data matches other sources, including the British Social Attitudes Survey, widely seen as the most authoritative source of data on these issues.

So why does the Bible Society study show something different?

Mouse would point to three key points:

1. Different questions were asked

Reporting suggested that the same questions were asked in the two surveys, which is technically true in the sense that the questions driving these results were worded in the same way. But in one of the surveys a number of other questions were asked before getting to the crucial ones on church attendance.

In the 2024 survey, before asking how often the individuals attended church in the last month, an additional series of questions was asked. Participants were asked whether they think ‘It’s important to me to try to make a difference in the world’ and whether they agree with statement like ‘My life feels meaningful right now’. In total eight additional questions were asked of this nature.

There is a very well known psychological phenomenon called priming, whereby you can incluence thoughts and behaviours through the use of an earlier stimulus or prompt. One example is that you can get a different answer to the same question depending on whether that person has been primed to think in a particular way beforehand. In one famous study, people were asked to guess the date the Mongul ruler Genghis Khan died (1227). Half the group were asked to write down the last three digits of their phone number before making their guess and half were not. The group who were primed to think of an unrelated three digit number were more likely to guess a date before the turn of the first millennium - in other words they were primed to guess a three digit number.

So Mouse is left to speculate whether being asked if you feel connected to your community and have a meaningful life immediately before being asked if you attended church recently has a similar priming effect. In some respects, it would be a surprise if it did not.

2. The surveys were conducted at slightly different times of year

The 2018 survey fieldwork was done between 11 October and 13 November, while the 2024 survey was just a couple of weeks later from 4 November to 2 December.

Ordinarily a two week difference would not be considered significant, but looking at the dates makes Mouse speculate whether it had an impact in this case. It certainly isn't speculation that in December you are running into a lot more Christmas trees and hearing a lot more of Wizzard wishing it could be Christmas every day than you are in October. Halloween took place during the 2018 fieldwork, but had already passed by before the 2024 fieldwork period and the Christmas build up was in full swing. It is possible this timing difference had an effect.

3. Different samples were used

The 2018 survey had just over 19,000 participants while the 2024 survey had just over 13,000 participants. Presumably, since they asked more questions in the second survey they saved some money by cutting back on the sample size.

That begs the question how the demographics of the two different sized samples were balanced to ensure comparability. No doubt YouGov will have made every effort to strike a demographic balance in these two samples, but that is no easy task. There is no gold standard for ensuring a group of people are equally likely to go to church or not, so there is a possibility the samples had an effect. The sample picked people and weighted the sample to achieve an equal mix of age, gender and ethnic diversity. That would help, but if there were other differences in the demographics, such as a mix of social classes or a bias between urban and rural, these would have a significant impact on the likelihood of church attendance but would be very invisible in the YouGov methodology.

In Professor Voas's article he explains the problems with the sampling methodology YouGov used for the Bible Society study. While the ideal methodology is to randomly select individuals to take part, YouGov's method is to recruit a self-selecting group to take surveys with the offer of financial compensation. From this group, basic demographic characteristics are equalised to try to make sample groups more representative of the general population, but the selection method means that they are unlikely to be genuinely representative in all aspects. Professor Voas explains:

Gold standard social surveys are based on random (probability) samples of the population: everyone has a chance to be included. The British Social Attitudes survey is one such example – and found that churchgoing fell by nearly a quarter from 2018-23.
By contrast, people opt in to YouGov’s survey panel and are rewarded after completing a certain number of surveys. The risk of low-quality or even bogus responses is considerable.

Passing the sniff test

There are some anomalies in the Bible Society data which indicate a problem with the samples which should make us stop and think. Take the number of people reporting that they go to church 'Daily / Almost Daily'. In 2018 the result for 18-24 year olds was 0%, as we would expect, but it jumped to 2% in 2024. The equivalent figure claiming attendance 'a few times per week' also jumped from 1% to 7%. At face value, an incredible increase. That single data point has contributed enormously to the narrative that it is the young who are behind a jump in attendance, almost itself explaining the total jump in monthly attendance reported. But if we are honest it is simply not credible to believe by extrapolation from the 28 people who ticked the 'daily / almost daily' box (that is 2% of the 1,400 sample in that group) and the 98 people who ticked the 'a few times a week' box that there are now almost half a million 18-24 year-olds attending church almost every single day. If we are to believe these numbers, the average demographic in church for daily prayers through the week would have more 18-24 year-olds than any other age group. Is it a coincidence that these answers were the top two in the list of answers? It seems to Mouse a more credible explanation that the people being paid to fill in the survey just ticked a box high up the list without reading it properly or caring much what they were ticking.

On Radio 4's More or Less programme, 'The Undercover Economist' Tim Harford posited several possibilities to explain the anomalous data. The 2018 survey could have been an ‘outlier’ poll with attendance coming out too low. The 2024 poll could have been an ‘outlier’ poll in the other direction. It is possible that a sudden upswing genuinely has happened late in 2024 after the denominational counts had taken place, and other data is yet to catch up with the sudden and dramatic turnaround. The conclusion was that more data is required.

But Mouse wonders what the response to these two surveys would have been if they had shown an unexpectedly large decline in church attendance. Presumably, Church commentators would have analysed the methodology, compared the results with other authoritative sources and concluded that it was a rogue poll. What a shame similar rigour has not been applied in this case.

As for Mouse, sadly he feels that the most likely explanation for the unexpected report of rising church attendance is that there is a bit of bias in the surveys for the reasons outlined above, and a few self-selecting survey responders didn't bother to answer very honestly.

Mouse clings on to some hope that this instinct is wrong and there genuinely has been a sudden and unexpected cultural shift, but none of the explanations he has yet heard have convinced him, and the evidence to the contrary is strong.

If you'd like to read the data yourself, the YouGov data tables are available here and here. You can also read the Bible Society's ~~response to criticisms of their survey~~ FAQ's here.

29 May 2025

Mouse recently confessed to someone that he was sceptical that a quiet revival was underway in the UK, and the response he got was a frustrated, "Don’t you believe in Jesus?"

So here I am making my confession. I’m The Church Mouse and I’m a ‘quiet revival sceptic’. But I still have hope.

In case you have missed it, the ‘quiet revival’ is the title of a report from the Bible Society that has made the stunning claim that the Church in England and Wales has, despite everything we have previously believed, experienced dramatic growth in recent years.

The most extraordinary claim is that, in the past six years (i.e., since just before the pandemic), the Church in England and Wales, across all denominations, has grown by more than half, from a total of 3.7 million regular worshippers to 5.8 million. The report says that it is largely the young who are driving this, in contradiction to our previous assumption that every generation is less religious than their parents.

The evidence for these claims comes from a large survey undertaken by a highly respected polling organisation, YouGov, that whether they had attended a church in the past month, among other questions. The same question set and methodology six years previously reveals a 56% increase in attendance.

And none of us noticed.

Reaction has largely been one of joy, mixed with anecdotes supporting the conclusions and speculation as to the reasons.

‘I had noticed more people attending recently, so it has the ring of truth about it!’

‘Young men are increasingly in search of purpose.’

‘Gen Z are much more spiritually open than previous generations.’

This is the sort of thing that church social media is full of.

Numerous articles have been written to explain this growth. We have been treated to explanations of how Gen Z is simply a different sort of human being from Gen Y or us oldies of previous vintages. Apparently, they are more open to spirituality and not burdened by old assumptions around faith. We are told that they don’t have the same sense of hope that previous generations had, so they are searching for new sources of meaning and purpose, and it is the young who are fuelling the growth.

So let Mouse unpack what this survey is actually saying and then form a view, to the extent that we can from the available evidence.

Firstly, the survey is not a measure of the number of people who have attended church regularly. It is a measure of the number who said that they have attended church regularly. Those are not the same things, and we must test whether there is a gap between actual attendance and claimed attendance before going any further.

Pollsters have long experienced the phenomenon of inaccurate responses in political polling. Perhaps most famously, the 1992 general election was widely predicted to be a Labour win. When the Conservatives secured a 21-seat majority, the pollsters looked at their numbers to work out what went wrong. They had accurately reported how people told them they would vote, and their samples were representative. But they coined the term ‘Shy Tories’ to explain the phenomenon. Some felt a sense of social embarrassment in telling someone they intended to vote Tory, so they either said ‘don’t know’ or declined to respond. They have since learned to make adjustments for this type of thing.

When it comes to polling on church attendance, no such methodological rigour exists. The polling firms can only report what they are told by members of the public and aim for samples that are large and as demographically representative as possible. So the minimum this survey can tell us is that more people are claiming to go to church than was the case six years ago.

This Mouse would be absolutely overjoyed if this turns out to be the reality, but let me set out a few (evidence-based) reasons why he finds it hard to believe.

Some of the churches where the Bible Society reported significant growth actually count the number of people who walk through their doors, and the numbers don’t match.

The most robust data set by a UK denomination is from the Church of England. Each church counts the number of worshippers during the same period each year, and the numbers are compiled to create a robust, consistent data set. The data shows that over the past six years, the Church has shrunk by between 10-20%, depending on how you count it.

Some commentators have responded that the Church of England is the exception, not the rule. Mired in conflict over sexuality and having high-profile sexual abuse cases in recent years, we should simply ignore the Church of England. The growth is elsewhere, we are told.

The Head of Research for the Bible Society, Dr Rhiannon McAleer, has made this argument.

“Some churches, like the Church of England and Methodists are very good at counting attendance within their churches and these data sets clearly show decline. This is picked up in the media and extrapolated to the wider picture, when it is not necessarily a fair indication of what’s going on in many denominations and churches who don’t collect attendance statistics.”

But that is not what the Bible Society report says. We can see in the data exactly what they are reporting for the Church of England. They are reporting significant growth.

According to their data, 41% of the English and Welsh Church attendance in 2018 was in Anglican settings. Based on a total regular attendance of 3.7m people, we can calculate the Anglican attendance at around 1.5m. By 2024, Anglicans had reduced as a proportion to 34% but of a much larger reported attendance of 5.8m people, so we should be seeing an increase in attendance of around 500,000 to around 2m. In other words, the report claims that the Church of England has grown by a third since 2018.

The Church of England has a range of measures of attendance, but even its most favourable measure of the ‘worshipping community’ is 8% smaller in 2024 than it was in 2018. By stricter measures, such as the average Sunday attendance, the CofE is more like 20% down, despite small increases in numbers since the pandemic lows.

Mouse notes that the Bible Society report includes Wales, however, the Anglican Church in Wales reported attendance of just 26,000 in 2018, so it is safe to assume the vast bulk of these numbers are from the Church of England.

The same methodology can be applied to the data for the Catholic Church, the next largest denomination. The report said that it has grown from 23% of attendees in 2018 to 31% in 2024, meaning it would have grown from around 850,000 regular attendees in 2018 to 1.8 million in 2024, spectacular growth of almost a million regular worshippers.

The Catholic Church in England and Wales reported regular mass attendance down around 20% from pre-pandemic levels, to 555,000 in 2023 from 702,000 in 2019.

Between them, these two denominations have reportedly grown their regular attendance by almost 1.5m people, out of the total reported growth of 2.1m, or over 70% of the total growth. But Church attendance data simply does not back that up.

If we are to take seriously the claims from the Bible Society / YouGov report, someone must come up with a plausible explanation for how it shows growth in attendance of 1.5 million people in denominations whose own statistics show decline.

It is certainly possible that there has been growth in other denominations, but when we have good reason to believe that over 70% of the growth claimed by this report is non-existent, it is hard to believe that the overall picture is anything like the headlines.

Mouse is a little frustrated that the actual questionnaire and data tables from YouGov are not available. That is not to suggest anything is being deliberately hidden, but for anyone looking to understand the data better, this would be invaluable. There may be a better way to understand the numbers, but Mouse cannot work out what that is. There may be more nuggets to be mined from the data tables if they are available, but for now, Mouse has to draw stumps at this point.

So where does this leave us?

Mouse’s take is that it is far from clear that more people are attending church than was the case in 2018, based on actual data from the two largest denominations in Britain. More solidly, we have pretty firm grounds for believing that nothing like the 56% increase is happening in reality, even if there is some growth in some places.

It is perhaps most interesting that people are claiming they attend church more frequently, even if they aren’t actually doing so in practice. For some time there was a bit of a social stigma in certain circles about religiosity. The New Atheist movement had created a hostile environment by arguing that religious faith was the preserve of the ignorant and needy. Many felt the need to move their faith into the private sphere in the face of this. That has largely died away. Perhaps the ‘Shy Christians’ are prepared to say what they really think more now.

But Mouse would conclude by zooming out a little on the macro trends. Church attendance and religious affiliation in Britain has been on the slide since before the Second World War. This has been well evidenced in church attendance data and robust surveys, such as the British Social Attitudes Survey and the Census. Perhaps it will turn around. Perhaps it has already started to do so, but Mouse urges that we not underestimate the depth and profundity of the social forces that have been driving that decline for the past century. Patterns of behaviour learned and passed on from one generation to the next have changed. New habits, behaviours, attitudes and beliefs have replaced core assumptions of previous generations. Turning this round will not be driven by a TikTok meme or a passing fad.

Facing into these uncomfortable truths is not a lack of faith or hope, but simply a recognition of the reality in which we live. In fact, it is only by facing this truth that we can have hope that we will turn it around. This Mouse still has hope, but it remains a hope in things we have not seen.

10 February 2025

Mouse was intrigued by newspaper reports of a new survey claiming to have found that Gen Z are the most spiritual generation and the least committed to atheism. The claims looked compelling but need a deeper look.

Just in case you've been able to miss the deluge of excited Christians sharing the news, Mouse is referring to an opinion poll survey of 10,000 people in the UK which has found that the generations appear to be becoming more spiritual. The survey was first reported in The Times, which headlined that Gen Z were half as likely to consider themselves atheist as their parents.

The survey has been pounced on by some Christians, eager to demonstrate that the current generation of young people are open to conversations about faith and suggesting that this might be the prelude to a revival in the UK.

Well. Perhaps.

The first alarm bell for Mouse was that the survey, with an impressively large sample size, is not actually available for us to review. We don't know the exact questions asked and we are not able to see the data tables behind the headlines. We don't know how the data was collected or the demographic breakdown of the sample. Mouse is always suspicious of a survey when he can't see the exact wording of the question asked or the actual data.

The second alarm bell is that the survey was conducted for the purposes of publicising a book - The Devil's Gospels, by Christopher Gasson. So what we're evaluating here is a survey where we can't see the questions or answers, which was constructed to generate publicity.

Nevertheless, let's take a look at the information that is available from this survey with an open mind. Gasson has written up his key conclusions from the survey in a stand alone report. In the introduction, Gasson writes:

I expected the data to confirm what has been assumed for a long time: Britain is steadily becoming a more atheist country. The results are the reverse of what I was expecting.

Mouse would suggest that Gasson's expectations were somewhat out of line with most of the recent evidence, if that was the case. There has been no evidence of increased atheism for a long time. That said, the evidence has strongly indicated a growth in 'nones' - those affiliating with no religion.

However, Gasson's data does appear to have a counterintuitive conclusion. It appears to show that younger generations consider themselves more spiritual and more religious than older generations. This leads to the paradoxical conclusion that despite the nation becoming less committed to religion steadily over time, younger generations are becoming more committed to religion than older generations.

Now, Mouse will suspend his suspicions that some of this may be caused by the exact nature of the questions asked and take the finding at face value. How can this be true?

In 2022 a survey asked the UK population about belief in God, heaven and hell and came to another paradoxical conclusion - that younger generations were both less religious than older generations, but also more likely to believe in heaven and hell.

It was a puzzle that the Policy Institute looked into in a fascinating article by David Young, who asked:

Is this due to a rise in people with unorthodox combinations of beliefs, shunning organised religion but believing in eternal damnation? That may be an intuitive solution – but it’s not the answer.

Young's solution to the puzzle was a simple analysis of demographics and the impact of immigration. In essence, the younger the generation the increasing proportion of the population is made up of first or second generation immigrants, who come from relatively more religious backgrounds than the UK population into which they have settled. As Young explains:

later generations do include a higher proportion of people from immigrant backgrounds (a person was classified as having an immigrant background if either they described themselves as an immigrant or described both their parents as an immigrant), though this has actually levelled off in Gen Z, which is probably only because the Gen Z cohort is still too young, with birth years between 1997 and 2012, for many Gen Z adults to have immigrated to the UK from abroad, compared to preceding generations.

In particular, Young showed how the increased British Muslim population amongst younger generations moved the needle on belief in Heaven and Hell. While the headline showed that Gen Z were more likely to believe in Hell than any other generation, this is not true when Muslim respondents were excluded.

So what has Christopher Gasson discovered in his survey?

The increased religiosity and 'spirituality' of Gen Z are most likely not a fundamental change in values of younger people, but more likely simply reflect that a greater proportion of this generation come from more religious immigrant families.

Many Christians assumed that the increase in 'spirituality' could be a stepping stone towards commitment to faith. But it is more likely that it is, in fact, a stepping stone in the other direction. Children of immigrant parents who come from a religious background are less likely to follow the faith when they are growing up (and trying to fit in with their mates) in a society which is largely faithless.

It is possible that this demographic phenomenon explains the whole of the effect that Gasson has found. Or perhaps there is an element that young people are more open-minded than older people. After all, Gen Z are aged between 11 and 26 - the ages when teenagers and young adults are discovering themselves and finding their own way in the world. This may explain why the report claims that younger generations are much more likely to have taken a greater interest in religion and spirituality in recent years.

Mouse is not without hope that there will be a change in the direction of travel with regard to faith in the UK. But he is not yet convinced that he is seeing it happen. The best evidence appears to simply show that the reason for changing beliefs in the generations is due to demographic changes. As David Young concluded, "The pattern we see in Gen Z emerges not because of changes in the combinations of beliefs held by Britons, but changes in the composition of who Britons are."

13 January 2025

It seems we are Schrodinger’s Church - both growing and shrinking at the same time - according to the latest statistical release from the Church of England. Attendance in 2023 was higher than 2022, but still significantly below pre-pandemic levels so we have yet to show we have bucked the overall long-term trend of decline.

The headlines from Statistics for Mission 2023 are that the post-COVID bounce-back continued with an increase in attendance of between 2.5% and 5%, depending on which measure you use. But the bad news is that those numbers still put us well below the pre-pandemic attendance level.

The key numbers are average all-age attendance during October, which increasing by 4.6% between 2022 and 2023, but that level is still 20% lower than 2019. That pattern is broadly consistent across most measures.

Easter and Christmas attendances increased by more in 2023 (8.6% and 20% respectively) but Mouse observes that these tend to fluctuate more depending on the weather and the day of the week that these festivals fall, and overall they are still well down on pre-pandemic levels by 20% and 16% respectively.

Mouse would like to offer a few observations.

It is commendable that the Church of England publishes such fulsome statistics and the methodology used is probably the most reliable of all the options. It has been consistent for many years to allow comparisons to be drawn and trends identified. The church asks each parish to physically count the number of people who come through the doors for each service during October and then adds them all up. This has the advantage that it is, in theory at least, not a subjective measure. It does not rely on estimations or surveys which could be subject to bias depending on who does or does not fill them out. To that extent, we treat the numbers as reliable.

However, that does not mean that we should not do further interpretative work on the outcomes.

It has been obvious for some time that one of the issues with this methodology is that counting the number of people in attendance does not give a clear indication of the size of the membership of a church. The count would be the same for a Church with 50 members who were all in attendance each week as a church with 100 members but where attendance is 50%. Electoral rolls are even less reliable as they are only fully refreshed every four years and even then depend on the extent to which church administrators are motivated to enrol parishioners.

This feature of the data means that it is difficult to interpret changes. Do falls represent the same number of church members attending less frequently or fewer members attending at the same rate as previously. Or both. Conversely, do we interpret the recent rise in attendance as the conversion of new members attending church for the very first time, or simply those who had stayed at home for a while coming back, or just those already attending coming to church more frequently.

For this reason, the Church of England stats wizards came up with a new measure - the ‘worshipping community’. This attempts to measure those who attend worship once per month or more, whether physically or online, so is intended to give a more rounded picture of membership. This number shows a 2.5% increase from 2022 to 2023, but only a 10% reduction from the 2019 level.

This is perhaps a little more encouraging, but given the more survey-based nature of this number, it is subject to more bias. Mouse likes the concept, but it lacks the rigour to be able to rely on it too heavily. And even if we take it at face value, it still points to a shrinking church, just one which is shrinking more slowly than the headline figures.

It is also important to note that these numbers are already pretty dated by the time they are published. The latest release relates to October 2023 attendance. To that extent they are what statisticians would call a lagging indicator, helpful mostly to understand the past rather than predict the future. However, within these numbers some of the statistics could be considered leading indicators - ones which point to a future direction.

Marriages and baptisms are not true leading indicators, but have shown that they move more quickly than the headline attendance numbers, so may be a proxy for leading indicators.

Sadly the data here is not encouraging. As Mouse has previously noted, marriage rates within the Church of England have been plunging and, if you exclude some blips around the pandemic and avoid over-interpreting the post-Covid bounce-back, remain dreadfully low. Similarly, baptism rates are plunging, with the latest data showing the CofE undertaking 24% fewer baptisms than as recent as 2019.

The thing that determines whether a church will grow or shrink is the r number - the rate at which church members replicate themselves. Or more simply whether more people are joining the church through birth and conversion, or whether more a leaving it by death or by leaving the faith.

The Church of England has had a negative r rate for quite some time. This is in large part due to demographic change. According to the ONS, there were 598,000 deaths in England and Wales in 2023 and 598,400 births. However, there was population grown of 610,000 due to net immigration of 622,000. The balancing figure is migration from England and Wales to Scotland. Population growth was strongest in cities and urban areas, also reflected in the CofE data.

Recent immigrant communities are far less likely to join the Church of England than those born in England. At the time of the last census, the largest immigrant communities in the UK were from India, Poland, Pakistan, Romania, Ireland, Nigeria, Italy, Germany and Bangladesh. None have a significant Anglican church, from which migrants might expect to naturally move into the Church of England on arrival, with the exception of Ireland, which has around 125,000 members in the Republic - small enough not to invalidate the broad line of argument here.

Without any conversions or people losing the faith, the church will naturally shrink unless church members have babies at the same rate as the death rate and every single baby born to parents who attend the church will subsequently grow up in the faith. Neither of these propositions are realistic.

Evidence from recent studies in church growth within the Church of England show that this fundamental in the r rate has not been overcome, even by the most successful evangelical church planting initiatives. While the evidence base on church planting in the Anglican context is very limited, what does exist seems to show that the vast majority of attendees in new church initiatives are those who either come from another church or who have some degree of churchgoing in their past. In other words, these initiatives are reaching people from within a population which is itself shrinking. The best this can do, therefore, is slow the decline.

According to a 2021 report from the Strategic Development Unit, the data on Resource Churches who had been given funding to support church growth in the Church of England showed that 38% of attendees moved from other churches and 24% had recently moved to the area. A further 14% were ‘de-churched’ (i.e. used to go to church but gave it up) and just 9% had never been to church. The remaining 15% were either part of the plant team, the ‘inherited’ church community or attend in addition to another church.

Even this data is potentially subject to challenge as it was collected by survey from the churches themselves, who may have an inherent optimism bias about the success of their evangelism efforts. Mouse also notes that all the Resource churches identified were in cities, where population growth was strongest and were the result of huge efforts by the planting churches and massive financial investment.

We have yet to find a model which can reach significant numbers of people who have never been to church or come from non-Christian communities, which is essential to increase the r rate of the Church.

So what have we learned from the most recent statistical release? Mouse would encourage a combination of optimism and realism. It is positive that the church appears to have been growing. We must be realistic that the Church of England may not be the church of choice for everyone and we are not part of a growing community. We must continue with church growth efforts that are working, even if they are merely slowing the decline. We must re-double efforts to revitalise those church communities which have been neglected by the most recent Renewal and Reform plans.

The Save The Parish initiative has given voice to some of those who feel neglected by Renewal and Reform programme. The argument goes that the bulk of the Church of England’s parishes have been neglected and starved of resources while millions is ploughed into shiny new initiatives, which are yielding meagre results.

Mouse has to admit that the maths is difficult to comprehend. With 16,000 churches at its disposal, growing the church by just one weekly attender at each church would be an increase of 2% - a remarkable and dramatic turn-around in the long term decline of the Church. That isn’t to say that shiny new things should be stopped - there are many great examples of revitalised churches growing strongly. But Mouse contends that these efforts have not overcome the demographics, so a new plan to support the whole of the church is needed.

The last dose of realism Mouse would add is that the trend of decline is a very long one. It has hardly budged regardless of who has been Archbishop, what national evangelism strategies we have employed, which issues are causing the most argument in the Church at the moment. This points to something more fundamental in our society and demographics which will take enormous efforts to overcome. It has happened in the past, but changes to trends this deep do not happen very often.

6 January 2025

Thank you for subscribing to updates via email. Mouse has migrated to a new system to distribute updates, so if you subscribed on the old 'FollowIt' system you might notice that things look slightly different now. You still have the option to opt out at any time (booo!) and Mouse crosses his heart and promises not to use your email address for anything whatsoever other than sending you updates via email.

Thanks again!

Mouse

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