Church of England attendance stats 2011

The C of E attendance stats for 2011 are published today, 3 months later than normal, but looking at the main document that's not surprising - there's quite a lot of detail and extra number crunching involved. A few headlines

 - Average Sunday attendance fell by 1.2%, but average weekly attendance (i.e. including midweek services too) was broadly flat, dropping 0.3%. 18 Dioceses out of 44 registered an increase in the weekly attendance figure, with a further 3 stable year on year. Compared to recent history, that's an improvement.

 - Midweek attendance is therefore actually rising - 13% of regular worshipping adults now attend midweek, rather than on Sunday, among young people and children the figure is 38%. In itself that's an interesting one: what connections are there between the midweek and Sunday congregations? How do we integrate young people and children who've grown up in a separate expression of 'church' to Sunday morning, or do we not, and develop church as a group of networked congregations?

 - Christmas attendance rose strongly - not surprising after the poor weather in 2010, and so did the number of baptisms. Encouragingly, adult baptisms were also up by 5%, though confirmations were down.

Here's some of the press release:

Christmas 2011 drew 14.5% more worshippers to Church of England services than attended in 2010, reaching a total of 2,618,030. Whilst one of the factors for such a high annual increase include the poor weather on Christmas Day in the previous year 2010, initial returns from 2012 suggest a further increase in Christmas attendance on these high 2011 figures revealing a growing trend for church going at Christmas.

The number of christenings increased by 4.3% and was accompanied by a rise of just over 5% in adult baptisms with a combined total of 139,751 baptisms - meaning that the Church of England conducted an average of over 2,600 baptisms each week during 2011. Thanksgivings for the birth of a child also rose; an 11.9% increase taking numbers to 6,582.

Average Weekly Attendance nationally fell by less than half of one per cent (0.3%) to 1,091,484 a stabilising of average weekly attendance figures. Almost half of the Church of England's regional areas saw growth in Church attendance, with 20 out of 44 dioceses showing increases. Nationally there was a 1.2% increase in children and young people attending to 216,928.

Weddings saw a slight decrease of 3.6% in 2011, to 51,880, whilst the number of wedding blessings (Services of Prayer and Thanksgiving following a civil ceremony) was up by 4.5%. The wedding figures confirm the trend of the past decade where the Church of England married an average of 1,000 couples every week.

Church of England Clergy and lay ministers conducted 162,526 funerals in 2011, a fall of 2.8% on the previous year, reflecting figures from the Office for National Statistics which showed a fall of 1.8% in deaths in England and Wales in 2011. On these figures the Church of England conducted an average of over 3,000 funerals every week in 2011 - over 400 every day.

The CofE tends to highlight the positive - don't we all? - but I hope someone is looking at the long term trends. Having one years' statistics - a slight rise here, a slight drop there - doesn't give you the overview of longer trends, though to be fair the main document has a few tables showing the longer term profile of the stats. 

The stats of a single year are manageable, but they can mask other things. For example: you wouldn't guess from the Christmas attendance this year that we're still 15% down on 5 years ago, and with 20% fewer communicants - which suggests a lot of people attending who don't really understand what's going on. (and why would they?). (update: an alternative explanation is that non-communion services are more popular, rather than people attending Midnight Mass but skipping the bread and wine, see the comments)

If time permits in the next couple of days, I'll do some Diocesan tables on attendance, hopefully they'll look better than the last lot, but you never can tell. The figures for my own diocese are, once again, not very encouraging, so if you're the praying sort then please pray for the appointment process of a new bishop who can help us turn this around.

Future of Britain Report: a Tick for the Archbishop and an Opportunity for the Church.

The recently published 'Future of Britain' report backs up Justin Welbys comments about the recession being a depression. Page 1 of the report claims that the results:

“support the suggestion that Britain has entered a depression as far as our outlook and expectations are concerned”

There are all sorts of fascinating things in the report - unfortunately not available online at time of writing, but if you email them for the findings then they seem pretty helpful. Here are a few of them, and some comments...

1. Mindful consumers
One of the effects of the recession has been to make people think again about how and where they spend their money:

We have fallen out with big companies. We no longer trust them, we don’t want to work for them and we’d much rather deal with local, ethical, established community-focussed businesses. (emphasis mine). 

If you swap 'business' for 'organisation', then that sounds like quite an accurate description of a local church, or at least of a local church that's doing a good job. So perhaps there is an opportunity here to reconnect with people. 

2. Flexible working and living
In another section, there are questions about how people see the future, and how jobs, qualifications, residence etc. will shape up. 

-          62% think a job for life is a thing of the past

-          53% see themselves changing jobs every couple of years

-          54% envisage changing where they live in order to get work

-          47% see being self-employed as being more attractive than working for a big company

-          44% think that most jobs in the future will be created by entrepreneurs

This should give churches pause for thought. We are already seeing these trends, but it looks like they are accelerating. How does a 'permanent' church thrive in a place where jobs and residence are temporary? 

A few thoughts:
 - we will have to become much better at welcoming new people into communities, and into churches, and reduce the 'probation' period before folk get the chance to use their gifts and skills in the life of the church
 - with a greater value on autonomy and entrepreneurship, can the church become more enabling, giving people more leadership responsibility and support?
 - is there a place for 'temporary church', pop up congregations which aren't designed to last forever? Do we need a few more tents and a few less temples?

3. Good Company
And finally: part of the survey looked at what sort of businesses we would like to work for, or deal with as customers. The first affects how we look at ministry, the second how we look at outreach:

The Ideal Job: is one that is secure, fun, relaxed, financially rewarding and flexible. Given that we're dealing with a lot of volunteers, so the 'financially rewarding' isn't such a big part, is this how are churches are to work or volunteer for?

The Ideal Company to buy from is one that is ethical, flexible, well known, secure, established and local. I personally think that or church is probably more flexible than it appears, and think we score fairly high across the board. A good local church fits very well the profile of the kind of company/business/organisation that people like to engage with as customers. 

Again, there is an opportunity here. Maybe what is missing is that church engagement with most people is based on our issues rather than theirs. The Bible is packed with teaching about wellbeing, finance, ethics, community, environment etc., all the issues that people say they care about. But how often are we heard talking about these things? Nobody else will do this for us - the media reporting of this report is evidence enough: 2 newspapers used it to sneer at the church, whilst failing to mention that the church is 6 times more trusted than the media. 


the findings are based on interviews with over 2000 adults. 

Google vs The Church of England?

According to some media reports earlier this week, a new study had revealed that Google was more trusted than the Church of England. The reality, of course, is much more interesting than what you read in the media. 

The question is part of a bigger study Future of Britain, put together by the OMD consultancy (no, not that OMD). There's lots of other material in the report which I'll blog on in the next few days, but here's the full set of answers to that Google question. 

To what extent do you feel each of the following types of business have your interests at heart? (top 3)

The NHS 37%

Police 26%

Big charities 21%

Supermarkets 19%

Google 17%

Religious institutions 17%

building societies 15%

local authorities 10%

private healthcare companies 9%

Facebook 9%

legal profession 8%

Banks 7%

The media 6%

utility companies 6%

Insurance companies 5%

political parties 3%

There are quite a few interesting findings here:

 - The NHS being top isn't a surprise, it is our national religion after all.

 - Despite the bad press over pricing, undercutting other retailers, horse meat etc., supermarkets have done surprisingly well. 

 - Google comes across as the oddity - religious institutions are pretty much level with building societies, supermarkets and charities. 

 - What a surprise that the media reports didn't mention that hardly anyone thinks the media has their best interests at heart. 

The report isn't available online, but if you email them and ask nicely....

Update: There appears to be a bit of doublethink going on too: 100% of the respondents to the survey disagreed with the statement "large multinational retailers are reliable and I trust them". If that's how people feel about Wal-mart, Tesco etc., then it's quite hard to see how, logically, you would also think these organisations had your best interests at heart.

One Man Church

ouch, little bit too close to the bone this one. I'm not a very good delegater! (delegator?). And that guitar looks exactly like mine, maybe someone's trying to tell me something.

More of Dai Woolridges excellent stuff here.

Strategic Celebration

I'm currently reading through some papers on church growth strategies, for a conference hosted by the Centre for Church Growth later this month. There's lots of helpful and quotable stuff, but I was struck particularly by this:

One vicar said, “I have been here for twenty years, in which time the church has grown hugely and this in a diocese that has shrunk numerically more than almost any other. Yet until our new Diocesan Bishop called on me the other week nobody from the diocese had ever shown the slightest interest in how or why we had grown or whether there might be any lessons or inspiration for others.”

So one key strategy element should be to identify, honour and learn from churches that have been growing numerically, spiritually or in effective service of their community. Bishops and others should seek to learn the lessons and pass them on, and diocesan communications should tell the story and highlight the lessons for the rest of the diocese. Stories should be told in diocesan conferences and synods. All this changes the culture through highlighting what is now seen to be important, improves morale through celebrating what is going well, and spreads good practice through inspiring others. (emphasis mine)

As at the church level, so at the individual level. As leaders we're so used to fire-fighting and problem solving that we forget that a key leadership role is identifying and celebrating success, faithfulness, and fruitfulness. It was great to be in on a meeting this afternoon, talking about some excellent work with younger people in groups of 7-8, and agreeing that it was more important to do that in-depth work well than to grow the numbers but sacrifice the quality. 

In the spirit of that first paragraph, I had a look at our diocesan membership stats in Bath and Wells. A worrying fact - of the 38 churches larger than ours in the Diocese, only 1 grew in any meaningful way last year, 3 were stable, and the rest lost members, some quite dramatically (Did I hear you say 'clergy vacancy?' you'd be right). Trying to find a church that's our size that hasn't plateaued or fallen away is quite a challenge. I was hoping to find some churches I could make contact with and say 'tell us how you're doing it'. But it looks like the questions may have to be a bit different!

How Not To Invite People to Church

Excellent set of videos on how not to invite people to church (or anything else for that matter)




links direct to the Skit Guys website, so you don't get the adverts
Weatherman
Dead Cat
Goulash

Bishops: How to Misread a Job Description

I am mystified, as to how this list of personal qualities wanted in a new bishop:

1. A deep and confident personal faith
Our new bishop should be a person, clearly captivated by God, whose love of God and life of prayer will equip him to encourage, and engage in a meaningful way with the diversity of church traditions that make up the diocese. He will be theologically literate, confident in scripture and a good/strong teacher of the faith/apologist for the church.

2. A clear commitment to mission and growth
He will have demonstrable gifts in visionary and inspired leadership and be fully committed to working with the Five Marks of Mission. He will promote growth and stewardship in its various forms and build on existing initiatives as well as offering fresh insights. 

3. Experience of working across diverse social, economic, ecumenical and interfaith contexts
He will be able to embrace the many diverse elements that make up the diocese and have an awareness and understanding of the particular issues that pertain to the North. He will have at least some recent urban experience as well as an interest in suburban and rural contexts. 

4. An ability to lead and to manage change creatively
He will take the lead in managing necessary change at parish, deanery and diocesan level, recognising the need to work collaboratively and to delegate as part of that process. He will be bold and courageous in tackling difficult issues: ensuring financial sustainability, helping to steer through the necessary culture change in relation to the balance of lay and ordained ministries.


5. A confident and competent communicator
He will be comfortable and at ease engaging with a wide cross-section of people and be particularly able to connect with young people in churches, schools and HE/FE. He will be able to communicate in a compelling way with the un-churched as well as with members of churches and other faiths. He will have experience of working with the media and be a clear thinker with a warm and engaging delivery.

6. A gifted pastor to clergy and laity
He will be a person of wisdom and integrity with an ability to listen and to get alongside both clergy and laity. He will encourage, motivate and empower others, building up their confidence and self esteem and affirming them in their ministries. He will be open to the ministry of women at all levels of  the church’s life whilst respecting and seeking to hold together those of differing views.

produces the headline 'Church of England diocese asks for gay-friendly bishop'. 'Establishing positive relationships with the LGBT community' is half of one of the 27 bullet points under these 6 headings. Forget being 'captivated by God', a high quality teacher, a leader in mission, a deliverer of change, an empowerer and motivater of other leaders, and all that other stuff.

Because hey, who cares if the Church of England is disappearing up its own Synod, as long as we're being friendly? I'm not decrying bullet point 13b, it's just the utter lack of perspective that frustrates me.

As a footnote, it seems to have taken the Telegraph 6 weeks to break this story after the publication of the original document. Maybe someone with an agenda has had a quiet word? If so, here's an agenda: mission, mission, mission, mission, mission, mission. A.O.B: mission. Who'd have guessed from the article that Manchester had this on their agenda at all?

Justin Welbys Mission Statement

"My key mission is to lead the Church in worshipping Jesus Christ and encouraging people to believe in him and follow him. That's my mission." (source)

Those of us who've become accustomed to a lack of clarity in the leadership of the Church of England had better start getting used to something different. I'm surprised to find myself so surprised at Justin Welby's clarity in statements like this one. But that surprise is quite telling - why have I got used to wordy fluff in the place of clear vision? And it's a challenge too - do I or my fellow church leaders have the same clarity? What is my key mission? 

I've recently been on a 2 day consultation on 'priesthood', and what it is and what it isn't. I've come back with a lot of thoughts, stories, a few insights and helpful quotes, but nothing like the above. And I'm reminded again just how important it is to get alone with God, as Jesus did, to get back to the key mission. So often life is so busy that I lose track of priorities, and end up just responding to deadlines and demands. That's not good enough, and it's no help to the church I lead.