can be found here, with the details here. I love the fact that here we are in 2008 and the CofE still has 'provisional' data for 2006. My own Diocese, Bath and Wells, shows a staggering jump of over 25% in average childrens weekly attendance from 2005-2006. I don't know if that comes from counting schools who have their assemblies in a church as 'weekly attendance', or whether some mighty work of God is happening amongst us.
I'll probably do a bit more number crunching in the next few days, as time permits. It'll be interesting to see if there's any correlation between a Diocese making church growth a priority (e.g. Lichfield, London), and actual growth as shown by the figures.
One cautionary note in all of this - we collect our figures in October, when there's often a harvest service. It's quite hard to identify a 'normal' month for collecting figures that doesn't have anything that distorts them - June is the only one I can think of that doesn't have a major festival (Christmas, Harvest, Remembrance, Easter, Lent, Mothering Sunday) or a major holiday.
I've blogged that - perhaps before you came on board.
ReplyDeleteLondon is up 60% since 1991.
Lichfield I don't know - as you say - they have been doing CG focussed work for some years.
For London there's a full blown report somewhere.
Was on the London Diocese website, but I can't find it.