All Age Attendance 2001-2010, by Diocese

This is a bit of a test post, since I've had to use 4 different file types* to come up with the above table, starting with last weeks Church of England attendance stats for 2010 (pdf). I'm planning a post for Wednesday with the data for adult and childrens attendance separately, and perhaps a bit of commentary.

If there's any other amateur number crunchers out there, it would be helpful to combine these figures with Bob Jacksons for the 1990s to give the cumulative 1990-2010 figure. My sense is that a drip drip of yearly declines of 1-2% is never enough to distract General Synod from talking about sex for long enough to engage with mission (alert: tongue in cheek comment) (no, not tongue in cheek in that sense, please concentrate).

At least one Diocese has seen adult attendance shrink by 20% in both decades, a cumulative 36% drop. It would be bonkers if they were still trying to make things work in the same way as back in 1990, wouldn't it? ...........?

For info, this is based on the 'average weekly attendance' figure, which is the headline one the CofE likes to use. I'm sure that's nothing to do with the fact that it's higher than the other ones, and so keeps the headline figure above the 1m mark. There doesn't appear at first glance to be a massive difference in the outcomes by the different measures, but life's too short for me to do a thorough comparison by diocese!

(*Geek corner: pdf to Excel - almost by hand - for number crunching, Excel to powerpoint slide, powerpoint slide to Word, saved as picture from Word. There must be an easier way)