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13 April 2026

The realignment of the Anglican Communion has been realigned. In this two part series, Mouse sets out who is not in charge and what it all means.

For those who have not been following closely (and Mouse envies you if that is the case), Gafcon is a grouping of conservatives formed 2008 in protest at the appointment of an openly gay bishop in The Episcopal Church in the US. The grouping is an odd one, consisting of both those within the Anglican Communion and those outside it who nevertheless call themselves Anglicans. Some are member churches within the Anglican Communion, most notably a number of provinces in Africa. Some are dioceses and individuals within churches in the Anglican Communion, such as Sydney Diocese. Others are groups who have either split from their Anglican Communion churches or formed as conservative rivals to them, such as the Anglican Church in North America who split from TEC and the Anglican Mission in England, a Gafcon missionary arm.

Until recently, Gafcon was led by a council of Primates from the provinces who formed the bloc. But with much fanfare, the world's media were gathered to Gafcon's more recent meeting in Abuja and told to expect the election of a primus inter pares from among the Gafcon Primates Council to act as an alternative figurehead to the Archbishop of Canterbury. This had been announced by the Primates Council in October of last year, alongside the resolution that a Primates Council will lead Gafcon. Then we were told in Abuja that there had been a 'late night movement of the spirit' and the whole plan was off. In fact, the plan changed rather dramatically.

Mouse will dig into the wider context of this in Part II to this post, but in the meantime, Mouse suggests you ignore commentary about the new leadership structure for Gafcon, take no notice of the rebranding of its top table and laugh off claims to be reclaiming the historic origins of the Anglican Communion. What actually happened in Abuja is much simpler. The Primates Council was disbanded and replaced by a group of true believers dominated by the ACNA and its off-shoots.

These true believers mostly come from outside the Anglican Communion and were installed to ensure the purity of the vision. Mouse understands the Primates from the Primates Council who have now been exiled from their Gafcon leadership positions were not present.

In this post, Mouse simply lists out who is now in charge of Gafcon and makes a few observations about the membership.

In place of the Primates Council, Gafcon is now led by the Global Anglican Council. Mouse has listed out the members of the new council below, all of whom we are told have equal voting rights.

Member	Member of the Anglican Communion
Laurent Mbanda, Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Rwanda, Chairman of Gafcon	Y
Miguel Uchoa, Archbishop of the Anglian Church in Brazil, Vice Chairman of Gafcon	N
Samuel Magula, Primate of the Church of Uganda	Y
Henry Ndukuba, Primate of the Church of Nigeria	Y
Siegfried Ngubane, Presiding Bishop of the Reformed Evangelical Anglican Church of South Africa (REACH-SA)	N
Julian Dobbs, Acting Archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA)	N
Enrique Lago, Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Chile	Y
Paul Donison, General Secretary (Rector and Dean of Christ Church Plano in the ACNA)	N
Jay Behan, Presiding Bishop of the Diocese of the Church of Confessing Anglicans Aotearoa / New Zealand	N
Glenn Davies, Bishop of the Diocese of the Southern Cross	N
Yassir Eric, Presiding Bishop of EKKIOS (a diocese in formation for Muslim-background believers)	N
Andrew Lines, Presiding Bishop, Anglican Network in Europe	N
Kanishka Raffel, Archbishop of the Diocese of Sydney	Y
Peter Akinola, Former Primate of the Church of Nigeria and Gafcon Guarantor Chairman	Y
Olayinka Fisher, Gafcon Guarantor and Trustee Member Church of Nigeria	Y
Emmanuel Kampouris, Gafcon Guarantor and Trustee Member of ACNA	N

Mouse observes a few things about this list:

Only seven of the sixteen members of the Council belong to churches within the Anglican Communion, and two of those are from Nigeria. It is perhaps also worth noting that the Anglican Church of Chile became a province in 2018, so is a newbie on the Anglican scene and has just 20,000 members.
Only four Primates from within the Anglican Communion are now members of Gafcon’s governing body. Of the former Primates Council, the Primates from Congo, Myanmar, Alexandria, Kenya and South Sudan have all been dropped. None were present at the Abuja meeting. These provinces have kept some degree of engagement with the Anglican Communion's official instruments, so have been effectively excluded until such time as they publicly sever ties. It has been reported that they have been invited to join should they agree to this condition.
The ACNA has four members of the Council, including its General Secretary and multi-millionaire businessman Emmanuel Kampouris. The eight Council members representing churches outside the Anglican Communion have a combined membership of around 250,000.
Two lay members have been appointed to the council. Both are, coincidentally, multi-millionaires.

What few people realise, however, is that Gafcon is legally speaking a UK Charity. This is only referenced on Gafcon's website on the contacts page, which directs you to Christ Church, Sheffield (an AMiE church) as the secretariat for the organisation and shows the UK Charity number. So if you want to email Gafcon, your email will be picked up by someone in Christ Church, Sheffield.

This also explains the reference to 'Trustee' for Olayinka Fisher and Emmanuel Kampouris's listing on the Global Anglican Council - they are trustees of the UK charity. The full list of trustees is quite fascinating.

When we look of the list of people who are legally responsible for the organisation, we find just four members of the Global Anglican Council. The trustees are, instead, stuffed full of ACNA members. Quite how Sarah Finch qualifies under the 'leadership commitments' of the new look Gafcon leadership when she sits on the General Synod of the Church of England is beyond Mouse, but perhaps she too will find herself removed from her position shortly.

Quite what the Charity Commission will make of this is another question. Overseas trustees for UK charities are permissible, but having just two UK trustees and a leadership structure which appears to be entirely subservient to the new Global Anglican Council, raises significant governance questions.

The full list of trustees, per the Charity Commission listing, is:

John Guernsey, Chair	Retired Bishop, ACNA
Carolyn Parlato	Retired US lawyer, member ACNA
Joel Reinhardt	Canadian Lawyer, member ACNA
Paul Donison	Gafcon General Secretary, ACNA
Laurent Mbanda	Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Rwanda, Chairman of Gafcon
Charles Marnham	Retired Church of England priest
Emmanuel Kampouris	US businessman, Gafcon Guarantor and Trustee, Member ACNA
Laurence Scandrett	Australian consultant, Gafcon Australia, Director, member Sydney Diocese
Christopher Green	AMiE priest
Olayinka Fisher	Nigerian businessman, Gafcon Guarantor and Trustee, Member Church of Nigeria
Sarah Finch	PCC member, St Helen’s Bishopsgate, General Synod member

When you combine these two leadership lists, you can see just how strongly the ACNA is represented in its leadership, including with post the General Secretary, and how little involvement there is from within the actual Anglican Communion.

30 March 2026

In a troubled church, in a troubled communion, in a troubled world, Archbishop Sarah takes up her new ministry as Archbishop of Canterbury. Her appointment is a historic milestone and has been met with the widest possible range of reactions.

Mouse's offers up his prayers for Sarah and will be praying in particular for five things:

1. That Archbishop Sarah boldly proclaims the truth of Christ crucified without fear and without co-option. That the Christ she shares is the one about whom the scriptures testify, not one who has been re-edited and re-drawn to support political agendas.

2. That Archbishop Sarah finds new ways to articulate the gospel of Christ to generations who have not heard or understood it before. As more and more people in the UK grow up in households where there is no tradition of church-going, Bible reading or prayer, I pray Archbishop Sarah will lead us in finding new ways to communicate to new generations.

3. That disagreements in the Church be held openly and honestly and that Archbishop Sarah will not become a personal focal point for entrenched positions and long-running disputes, but that she will be a facilitator of conversations which allow both grace and truth to rise to the surface.

4. That Archbishop Sarah is strengthened to lead the Church in England to become a beacon of hope where people of all faiths and none are struck by the commitment of the Christian community in living a life which reflects Jesus's teaching to love our neighbours, serve the vulnerable and the needy, strive for peace and reconciliation as we exhibit the fruits of the Spirit.

5. That Archbishop Sarah is able to support the growth of the next generation of leaders in the Church of England, able to continue this work after her term as Archbishop has ended.

May God richly bless her, strengthen her with His Spirit and inspire her leadership of the Church. May God help us to see our role in supporting her and working with her in the service of Christ.

24 November 2025

Far be it for Mouse to suggest he is ahead of the curve, but 15 months after Mouse observed the need to understand how the Church of England does its doctrine and published a comprehensive guide to the subject, the good old CofE has had a go itself.

The Bishops realised that doctrinal discussions within the torturous LLF process hit the rocks in part because people were talking past each other with different understandings of the nature of doctrine. What does it mean to 'change' doctrine? Is that even possible? What actually is doctrine? And can the church hold more than one doctrine at the same time?

Their response was a theological study, commissioned by the Faith and Order Commission, called The Nature of Doctrine and the Living God.

Mouse has a few observations.

1. The report does not deal with the role of the Faith and Order Commission itself

The role of the Faith and Order Commission (FAOC) is as an advisory body to the Bishops, General Synod and the wider Church. It is made up of 16 members, around half of whom are bishops, and is appointed by the Archbishops. As a result of this, the group has no formal role in the Church of England. Its role is simply to consider topics as requested and publish reports. Previous incarnations of this group have included the Faith and Order Advisory Group and the Doctrine Commission. These groups are all a 20th century innovation, starting with the Doctrine Commission in 1922.

In not addressing the purpose and role of the group, its deliberations or positioning how it will be used by the church, it reads merely as an abstract discussion of a topic with no particular purpose or direction.

The Church of England regularly offers doctrinal sounding statements from the House of Bishops. Synod votes on matters with clear doctrinal implications. Liturgies are revised with consequential doctrinal implications. Yet the role of each of these is not discussed and the FAOC does not position its own work in the context with which the Church is expected to read it in relation to these other official seeming acts.

2. The report does not mention any previous attempts by the Church of England to answer the same questions

When Mouse first sat down to read the new report, he had assumed that it would start with a review of previous authoritative statements by the Church of England on the matter. His own article on the subject looked at the foundational documents of the Church of England (39 Articles), the Canons, then the major publications from the Church of England on the subject, starting with the first Doctrine Commission report of 1938, Doctrine in the Church of England. The 1938 report was commissioned with the remit:

To consider the nature and grounds of Christian doctrine with a view to demonstrating the extent of existing agreement within the Church of England and with a view to investigating how far it is possible to remove or diminish existing differences.

Sound familiar?

The 2025 report, does not mention the 1938 report. It does not mention the Doctrine Commission's 1968 report on the nature of the 39 articles and their role in defining the essential doctrine of the Church, entitled Subscription and Assent to the 39 Articles. There is no mention of the 1981 publication by the Doctrine Commission Believing in the Church. It does not consider the role of General Synod and the House of Bishops in the Church's theological considerations. Most astonishingly, there is not a single mention of either the 39 Articles or the Canons or an attempt to analyse how they establish the parameters of doctrine in the Church of England.

Perhaps the most significant contribution to the discussion on the nature of doctrine within the Church of England is found in the Doctrine Commission's 1981 document Believing in the Church in a chapter partly authored by an up-and-coming young theologian called Tom Wright entitled ‘Where is our doctrine to be found?’.

For Mouse, the failure to recognise or build on these past sources represents a gaping chasm in the report, which reads as if it is the first time anyone in the Church of England has ever had the idea of attempting to define the nature of its doctrine. This is particularly problematic as the specific remit of the report is, 'to provide clarity around how doctrine can develop or change within the Church of England.' [Mouse's emphasis]

Image created using Microsoft Designer AI

3. The report derives its authority from a random selection of theologians

In place of building on previous work in the Church, the report instead starts from first principles with a theological review. Included as authoritative sources for this work were:

Thomas Aquinas
John Calvin
Richard Hooker
John Henry Newman
Brooke Foss Westcott
Michael Ramsey
Kevin Vanhoozer
Anthony Thiselton
Alister McGrath
Sarah Coakley
Ellen Charry
Mike Higton

The works of these theologians is reviewed and the conclusion is reached that they are, essentially, of one accord. Sadly, this conclusion has been somewhat undermined by one of the theologians themselves. Writing at Via Media Mike Higton has rejected the report stating plainly, 'I for one, however, do not recognise my own work on doctrine in this formulation.' He writes that he had no idea his work was being included until someone pointed him to the report post-publication. He concludes, 'There are several divergences between the account I offer in the book and the ‘consensus’ that I am supposed to support.'

Yikes.

Perhaps a more fundamental question, however, is who decided that this group of theologians are the authoritative source for such a study? Mouse's hunch is that the idea was to gather the views from group from diverse theological perspectives and show that since they all essentially agree on this question it isn't really up for grabs. But in order to do this, they have to shoehorn complex views (such as Higton's) into a narrow conclusion and we are left to wonder if these really are some kind of representative sample of theologians and who else could have been included who might have offered a different perspective, not least the work of Tom Wright in the Doctrine Commission's own 1981 report on the very same subject.

4. The report does not answer the questions it was asked

The Nature of Doctrine and the Living God was not commissioned as an abstract theological reflection on doctrine, but specifically to address a series of questions arising from the LLF process. These include how doctrine develops or changes within the Church of England. The report offers no examples of doctrine that has or hasn't developed, or attempts the church has made to handle theological difference in the past. The question is simply not dealt with.

The commission from the bishops also included the questions:

Is it possible to hold multiple doctrines simultaneously, in order to respond in the most gracious and pastoral way possible, even when this is messy or incoherent? Is it possible for there to be a range of interpretations of one doctrine?

But the report doesn't even attempt to answer these questions. This could have been tackled by reference to the previous Doctrine Commission reports Mouse has mentioned and a historical review of the subject. The outcome is a report which offers a perspective, but does not conclude on the key matters and we are left to wonder our position if we simply disagree.

So where next?

Sadly Mouse is not optimistic that this report will help the Church move forward. The 1938 report of the Doctrine Commission took 16 year to produce. Once published it sunk without a trace and has barely seen the light of day since. In part, that is because the Doctrine Commission, like its present day successor, holds no formal position. Its reports are merely advice to the Bishops and the wider church which it can freely ignore at will. It did not help the church come together and find unity on the controversies of the day. Mouse fears the same fate for this one. The good ship LLF has been dashed on the rocks and there is no hope that this report will offer us a life boat.

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.

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.