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.