Church Growth in the Church of England - the other side of the story

After depressing everyone with the latest CofE membership stats the other day, it was encouraging to read some very good news in this General Synod report. 

Yes you heard that right. The Strategic Development Fund is a 10 year project by the CofE to invest in mission. It focuses on areas where the church is struggling to make an impact - mostly deprived urban areas, children and youth. 

Here are some snapshots from the report, of the impact the funding is having:

 - In a seriously deprived parish in Bristol Diocese, a weekly meal after Sunday worship started in 2019 and feeds dozens from the neighbourhood, for many it's their only hot meal of the week. A midweek service (with food) aimed at addicts and life recovery now has a congregation of 30-40, with several coming to faith. 

 - Rochester diocese’s project to invest in church growth in four priority parishes will include growing two new ministries established at Christ Church Anerley: Kings Car Wash helps ex-offenders to get back into work habits and Kings Boxing works with young gang members as an alternative to knife crime.

 -  A project awarded SDF in Leeds diocese has plans to support those battling addictions and mental health problems in the deprived town of Keighley, including launching a social enterprise with a coffee shop and prayer space.

 - Birmingham Diocese have been placing Children and Families workers in several parishes, and seen 800 new disciples in churches which are hosting them.

 - Canterbury diocese’s ‘Ignite’ project, which was awarded SDF in June 2018 to develop new worshipping congregations in the most deprived areas of the diocese and the Channel Islands, has launched eight new communities with attendance already of nearly 350 and testimonies emerging of lives being deeply touched and changed. 

 - At ‘Top Church’, a new church-planting-church in the deprived town of Dudley in Worcester diocese the worshipping community grew to 110 at the end of the first year (far exceeding the anticipated target of 30 in the first year) with four people exploring ordained ministry.

So far it's estimated that over 10,000 people have become new disciples through these projects, many 

of which are in a very early stage. 

And the report finds that intentionality in mission is fundamental. Churches grow where they have an active, outward-facing focus to create opportunities to develop new relationships; and then find ways to intentionally share the gospel with those new contacts, whether through explorer courses, social engagement, small groups, appropriate forms of worship, or through one-to-one discipleship.

All of which applies just as much to individual churches as it does to a national fund. I just pray that all of these have found a way to continue and to grow through Covid.  

Church of England Attendance Change by Diocese, 2011-16

The latest Church of England attendance figures are out, and full marks to the CofE for producing them in Excel format as well as the usual pdfs. So much easier to play about with.

The good news, however, ends there.

You can always tell if it's been an iffy year, because the press release accompanying the stats is on something other than whats happening in a normal church on a normal Sunday. This year it's the social media profile.

I've been blogging for years on what's happening in the Dioceses, and whether we are, at last turning the corner. Sad to report that the answer is no: at least, not based on the official stats. If anything, it's getting worse

In the last 5 years, only two dioceses have seen adult Sunday attendance grow - London continues to be the engine room of the CofE, but many of the Dioceses that were doing well last time round have seen a sharp drop in numbers. For numbers, read people (see Acts in the New Testament, does it all the time). The rate of decline across the CofE has increased, and to have 12 dioceses recording losses in double figures compares with 5 for 2009-14. 

Maybe the next generation will save us? Maybe not. Again, London is growing, again, nobody else is, and the figures towards the bottom of the table are catastrophic.

Perhaps the hope lies in non-Sunday worship? After all, millions of people now work on a Sunday, and the competition with leisure activities etc. is intense. Adult attendance Mon-Sat has risen from 112,000 to 122,000, so it is both growing, and a higher proportion of overall CofE attendance. However childrens midweek attendance has dropped like a stone - I'm hoping that's to do with a different recording system, but fear that it might not be.

There is wider cultural change too, away from Christendom and the culture that supported an established church. Baptisms, weddings and funerals taken by the CofE have dropped by 15, 21 and 28% respectively in the last 10 years. This in turn reduces the pool of community contacts and means local churches have to work harder to engage with the community, and move beyond dependence on the 'occasional offices' as a way of connecting with people.

One glimmer of hope in the figures is on p10 of the full report. Churches were asked to report on 'joiners' and 'leavers' during the year, and 80,000 people were reported as joining CofE churches. 32% of the adults and 58% of the children had never been church members before. That's encouraging, or does it just mean that we notice more when people join than when they leave?

There is probably a lot more to say in the detail, but I hope these stats are actually used for mission - I blogged on a previous occasion how the only people who paid any attention to membership figures were the finance department. A vicar who's seen their attendance drop by 15% in a year is more likely to get a call questioning whether they've under-reported to save on parish share (contributions to the Diocese) than whether they are ok and if they need any support.

Many Dioceses now have a mission strategy, including even Bath and Wells (I know, it's hard to believe at times), and it looks like we need it more than ever. But it shouldn't be a preservation strategy, even though God has probably used the ghastly stats above to kick the recalcitrant CofE out of its sniffiness about evangelism. We now need to get over our complacency about prayer.

Update: final thoughts - the 4,000 smallest churches have an average weekly attendance of 12, i.e. small enough to fit into a decent size front room. On average, CofE churches have a worshipping community of 75, with 54 of those present on any normal Sunday.  This means that on a normal Sunday 1/3 of the congregation is absent. How does a church work and thrive and grow in relationships with this dynamic?

Also, each vicar costs roughly twice the average salary (due to housing, training, pension costs), so 40 people giving the 'Anglican tithe' of 5% to their church could support one. Bump that up to 50 for other central costs (our Diocese has over 50 support staff, sorting out things like training, finance, safeguarding, schools). Then you've got to find money to run the church - resources, building costs, etc. If some of those church members are fairly new, it's not long before you get to the point that the average local church only works if it's overseen by a part-time vicar. Either that or it loses the building (the other major cost centre). We have roughly 7,000 vicars to 16,000 churches, so it has to be that way anyway. Despite no longer being able to sustain the '1 parish 1 vicar' model, CofE structures and expectations are still largely based on it. We're like a fat man after a successful diet still trying to wear the same clothes. Buildings, parish boundaries, the expectation (indeed the law of the land) of weekly communion, committee structures, recognition of lay ministry (Lay Readers are the main accredited role alongside clergy, following 2 years theological training, Deacons get lip service and little more) etc.remain largely untouched from 20, 50, 100 years ago. And every few years, your parish gets blessed with an enforced vacancy, just to stifle any growth you might have managed to muster.

Either the system will collapse under its own wait (scroll up - maybe we're witnessing that already), or we need a decisive shift away from ancient buildings, paid clergy, or an over-clericalised theology and practice of church that stifles lay leadership. Or there'll be a miracle. I'd argue we need both.

update: a few more links at Thinking Anglicans.

PS if you're sharing this on Facebook, please could you tag me in, would be good to see the debate on FB as well as on the blogs.

update 2: At over 7000 views this is now the third-most read post on this blog (out of nearly 2600 posts). That is already more than the average Adult attendance in 2 Dioceses (Sodor and Man and, ironically, Hereford), and also exceeds the number of men confirmed in the CofE last year (6581). As a sign of the times, Facebook is the source for nearly 2/3 of the visits here, comfortably outstripping Twitter and other blogs. 9.50pm make that 9500 views, why so many visitors?

Update 3 Jeremy Marshall has some very perceptive analysis on his blog, worth a read if you are more interested in how we respond to all this.

Church of England Attendance - Downs and Ups

Earlier this week the CofE released its latest set of attendance figures. The general downward trend was picked up by the press, and the official press release marked a welcome departure from the standard positive spin, dealing directly with the fact that membership has fallen 12% in 10 years as part of a longer-term pattern of decline. However it rightly points out that within the overall picture, there are signs of growth, and plenty of good things going on.

Here are the figures by Diocese for the last 5 years

The North-East leads the way: given that I left Durham Diocese in 2006, perhaps Bath and Wells will show the same pattern to 2020 if I hand in my notice now. 9 dioceses are growing, out of 43, and the overall pattern is still a drop of 1% a year. That's a slight improvement on the longer trends, but often what happens is that Dioceses will report better numbers over a short time frame, (Durham saw a big jump 2013-14). 16 Dioceses reported higher adult weekly attendance for the year 2013-14. But longer term these tend not to be sustained. You can see this volatility in the Diocesan charts on p44 onwards in the main report.  Also a concern is the big slowdown in growth in London.

Here's the picture in the 2 decades prior to 2020. 

 perhaps the rate of decline is slowing, but not by much. There are pockets of growth, and there's a welcome focus on the factors which make for a healthy, growing church. It will take time for this to get round, and even longer for it to be adopted. We don't have very long but at least we are now talking about this and addressing it, rather than hoping it will all go away if we do Evensong really well.

Meanwhile the ageing of the church continues to be a big issue. The CofE is failing in a key area where it needs to engage. We are seeing fewer children than ever - the table below is for Sunday attendance, if you include midweek services (which you'd expect to be better, given that adult attendance is moving towards weekdays), the drop is a staggering 29% (in the last 2 years services exclusively for schools have been excluded, which is the main reason for the drop. It takes over 100,000 off the headline figure). On the positive side, this gives the lie to anyone who claims that CofE schools indoctrinate children into the Christian faith. But that's clutching at straws.

Thinking Anglicans links to a few other pieces of commentary and analysis.Crunching the numbers (and every number is a person, but crunching people sounds like the bad giants in the BFG) in our own Diocese, there were 15-20 churches which had shown some sustained and significant growth at some stage in the last 10 years. What came as more of a surprise was that it was mainly the finance department who used the figures. We collect 'statistics for misson' but don't really look at them through mission eyes. The CofE is becoming more socially engaged - food banks, debt advice etc., but we still plough so much time, energy and effort into maintaining the buildings and the system that many small churches are too snowed under to engage well. A few other snippets from the stats: - the church continues to age, with children dropping from 16 to 14% of Sunday attenders. 29% of us are over 70.  - the 'average church' has 69 regulars, 171 people through the doors at Christmas, and carries out 10 funerals, 9 baptisms and 3 marriages a year. But hardly any churches are average - the smallest 5% have 8 members or fewer.   - about 15% of the stats are estimated, because not all the info has been collected from the 16000 churches involved - 84,000 people joined an Anglican church in 2014. 1/3 of these were worshipping for the first time, a further 1/3 had moved from another area. 15% had moved from another church (roughly the same as those who gave this reason for leaving), and 16% had returned to church after not being members for some time.  - there's been some attempt to break down the age profile of the worshipping community. In my own Diocese, over 40% of our members are aged 70+. Blackburn has the highest proportion of children (nearly 30%), London the most under-70s. With death and illness being the main factor in shrinking attendance, it's clear which Dioceses are going to face challenges in the near future. Sorry Lincoln, but it's not going to get any better.  - There's a breakdown of Christmas services - 2 1/4m people came to 'congregation and community' services, a further 2 1/2m to 'civic and school' services. - in general more rural/elderly Dioceses had higher proportions of the local population involved in church: places like Hereford, Gloucester, Bath and Wells and Carlisle. These are also the places where a higher proportion of people have church funerals, baptisms etc. London has the lowest proportion of population having a church wedding, baptism or funeral. - there's some data on relative sizes: the largest 5%  average 41 children and 178 adults involved, the smallest 5% average 8 adults and no children. Not a surprise, but neither is it an encouragement. The Church of England is at last changing, we are starting to learn from each other what makes for a thriving church, and we are starting to listen more to our communities, rather than assume folk will come to church when they work out what's good for them. That's not working for pubs - they are closing at a faster rate than churches - the way we meet and mix as a society is changing. We have to listen to that and adapt to it. 

London: Lessons for the Church of England

A couple of days ago Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, delivered a lecture on the remarkable turnaround in the Diocese of London. For the last 20 years, London has been just about the only place in the CofE which has been growing, whilst all but 1 of the other 42 Dioceses have been shrinking, some at an alarming rate.

In terms of England, London is an exceptional place, but there are other Dioceses (Southwark, Chelmsford) which also cover parts of the capital, and there are particular things that London Diocese has done that others could learn from. Some will be more controversial than others.

Here's a few of them, with some quotes from the lecture.

The mission of the church is to all sectors of society, not just the most vulnerable: We can regret this now, but at the time it seemed to be inevitable and even meritorious that the Church should retreat from what could be regarded as imperial over-reach to associate itself with the voiceless in the back streets. Sympathy with vulnerable local communities also led the church into sustained opposition to major new developments, notably Canary Wharf where no attempt was made to establish a Christian presence in what was effectively a new town with a working population which now exceeds that of Leicester.

Scrap the boards: there was an energy-sapping superstructure of boards and committees for Mission, Unity, Ministry, Social Responsibility and the like, all of which had been established during the period of decline with the professed aim of widening participation in decision-making and stimulating action. The result, of course, was the very opposite as I discovered as Chairman of the Board of Ministry. Over-worked members of the Diocesan staff found themselves discussing the same issues over and over again in slightly different forums. There were ideas in plenty and not a few “initiatives” but little energy left over for implementation..........No one has ever said to me “if only we had a Board of Mission we would have done some mission”. Instead a black hole of energy was closed and, as a result, effort directed to supporting those individuals and places which signalled life and possessed the missionary gene.....We significantly reduced the number of Diocesan advisers in the belief that financial resources were better deployed in local mission initiatives.

If a Diocese doesn't have a focus and a vision, everyone will do their own thing, and internal divisions will increase: a sense of drift and consequent fragmentation as people identified with their own parish or Area over against the “Diocese”..... introduction of Mission Action Planning focussed attention on growth rather than on the various divisive issues.

Back the missionaries, even if they aren't your type: The local hierarchy was unwilling to see HTB as much more than a conventional parish in the Area, and in particular was keen to restrict the numbers of curates that the Church could employ, even though there was finance available to enlarge the staff. The restrictions were fuelled by a liberal distaste for charismatic evangelicalism and a conviction that the supply of curates should be evenly spread throughout the Diocese, irrespective of the capacity to pay

parish clergy need to be held to account: in one parish which sociologically offered good prospects for the Church of England, an elderly single- handed parson was replaced by the standard bearer for one of the extreme churchmanship factions. The new man was given two able curates financed by the London Diocesan Fund, and within two years the electoral roll which had stood at 110 had been reduced to 75. It apparently occurred to no one that this was a scandalous situation. What right had any outsider to criticise parochial policies?

Technique is no substitute for holiness: The one thing that cannot be delegated is one’s own prayer and study of the scriptures. An MBA in ecclesiastical administration is no substitute for the development of a beginner’s mind and acquiring the teachability with which the Spirit can work.

Find new purposes for old buildings: Chartres gives several examples of redundant churches which were given a new focus - e.g. as a centre for reconciliation. Not every building has to be used to house a congregation, but neither do they all have to be sold off. 

Abolish the 'tax on growth' system of collecting funds from parishes to finance the work of the church: We reduced the mysteries of the old formula by inviting each parish to pay for its ministry costs .... Well-financed parishes were encouraged to pay over the odds to support Christian ministry in areas of need. The effect was to abolish the fine on growth and release money to be spent close to where it was raised. It proved to be possible to support the work of the church in less affluent areas although, as so often, parishes which had been subsidised proved willing and able to rise to the challenge of greater self-sufficiency. 

Reform Diocesan structures so that people are accountable for their actions, and pursue a shared vision: Unity in the Diocesan team and in the structure of the Diocese has been an important ingredient in being able to pursue consistent policies addressed to growth. 

The current way of ever more thinly spread clergy is not sustainable: The healthier financial situation enabled the diocese to avoid the widespread formula of reducing clergy numbers by multiplying the number of churches for which an individual cleric is responsible. This may be an effective cost-cutting strategy but it is not an effective mission strategy and is calculated only to maintain congregations rather than growing them.

The parish system is good, but it's not enough: It is obvious that, while there is huge virtue in the parish church ideal, the parochial system in the Church of England, with its excess of law, is open to being manipulated by small groups who wish to frustrate unwelcome mission initiatives. In an urban setting, while flexible agreements about areas of pastoral care for each parish church are clearly desirable, mission to networks that are not principally defined geographically argues for an unfreezing of rigid parochial boundaries that have long since ceased to correspond to sociological realities. 

criticise well, or don't criticise at all: Publically expressed and constructive criticism should always be welcome, but subversives, “weevils of the commonwealth”, those who damage morale by cynicism and gossip have to be weeded out.

Invest in church planting: ....our pledge of establishing 100 new worshipping communities in London by 2020 ...My prayer is that it will be possible to learn from our experience -- and especially our mistakes -- so that other places will be able to surpass our successes.

Recognise where to engage: The need for greater clarity and a confident response to the incessant propaganda directed against so called “faith schools” has been recognised in the Diocese, and is one of the themes of Capital Vision 2020 which has risen to the top of the agenda in the current year.  

Prayer and vision are fundamental: The Christian community will continue to thrive as long as it is vision-led and not problem-led. Prayer of the persevering kind that marks the 24/7 prayer movement really does open the door to God’s future while the Holy Spirit never leaves himself without witnesses.

sorry about the uneven formatting! Good old Blogger....

Update: Cranmer has also done a presee of the lecture, with chunky quotes from it. Imitation is the sincerest form.... ;-)

Evidence to Action website - worth breaking a fast for

I'm still off blogging for Lent, honest, just a brief interruption to commend the new Evidence to Action website. It's a set of resources for the main themes identified by the CofE's research into church growth 'From Anecdote to Evidence', to help churches reflect on how they rate on each factor, and then to identify what to do about it. It won't do the work for you, but it's a cracking site, not too cluttered, and very very helpful.

It would have saved me a lot of work as Deanery Missioner to have had something like this to point people to, but I'm glad it's there now!

Drat, have to restart the 40 days now.

How to use Diocesan church attendance stats

A few days ago I reported on the latest CofE attendance stats, and noted that Leicester diocese had made a remarkable turnaround. Having lost nearly a quarter of its adult membership from 1990-2010, it has grown modestly in the last 4 years.

During an idle moment (I get 3 a year) I popped along to their website, and discovered this. Think for a moment of the embattled CofE church warden. Every year they are sent a large form from the Diocese to fill in with statistics of all shapes and sizes: baptisms, funerals, how many children were present on the 3rd Sunday of October, etc. Usually all they get in return is a letter a few months later telling them their parish share* has gone up by an eye-watering sum.

Not so in Leicester. All those lovingly collected stats are equally lovingly turned into a detailed report on what is actually happening across the Diocese. Data on church growth and decline, joiners and leavers, baptisms, weddings, size of parish, fresh expressions etc. There are some fascinating breakdowns: e.g. that in the deanery of NW Leicester, the average vicar is doing 30 baptisms, 31 funerals and 10 weddings a year. Give that man/woman a sabbatical!

Coupled with a helpful headlines page, this is a real attempt to interrogate the data and learn from it, to let the stats speak, and to link them to specific initiatives in the Diocese (they have a thing called Mission Partnerships, those churches which are part of one do better), and specific goals (e.g. the number of mature Fresh Expressions by a certain date).

Also worth noting, the stats were collected in November (they cover attendance in October 2013) and reported in the following February. That's a pretty impressive turnaround, and again speaks of a diocese which values the information it's collecting: if it's important and we've something to learn from it, then lets learn it as soon as we can, rather than waiting a year. The CofE national stats this year, for the first time, came out within 12 months of the original data collection. Only in the church would this be seen as a good result, in retail it's more like 12 hours.

I have never seen a Diocesan document like this before, do any of the other Dioceses do something similar? If not, why not? Any diocese serious about looking into the detail of decline and addressing it (or the detail of growth and learning from it) needs this kind of analysis. Well done them.


*parish share is a sum paid to a CofE diocese by each of its churches, which goes into a common pot to pay for clergy, training, central admin and resourcing etc. Because most CofE churches are shrinking in size, any church which has stable or growing membership normally faces a parish share increase which comfortably outstrips their rate of growth. This continues for a few years until the parish share gets so big that the church can only pay it by cutting back in other areas, or diverting resources into fundraising, at which point it joins the massed ranks of declining churches. Yes, I know, you don't have to tell me.... 

Do you have an Ecclesiastical Exoskeleton?

One of the problems of having growing children, is that each time they shed their skin we have to dispose of it in a separate waste container to keep the council happy. I'm joking of course. But churches, that's something else. Churches have exoskeletons, they can grow a bit within current structures/buildings etc., but any serious attempt to change size requires some skin-shedding.

I've just finished 'The In-Between Church' by Alice Mann, (summary here), and it rang a lot of bells. She argues that church growth occurs in steps, rather than a smooth gradient, and the big steps are between 4 exoskeletons (my word). Here are the 4 size categories, the numbers refer to membership, and the descriptions are broad-brush:

Family size 0-50: like an extended biological family, all know each other, addition is by birth and marriage, new members incorporated very  slowly, matriarchs and patriarchs hold authority, clergy part time and short term, function as chaplains to the family. They normally have 1 good community ministry, offered in ‘down home’ style. Clergy are there for pastoral care, but will find it hard to lead change. These can survive both good and bad leadership.

Pastoral size 50-150: multi-cell organism, coalition of several family/friendship networks, unity is based around the pastor. Big enough to look like ‘real church’, small enough to feel personal. 2 or 3 strong ministries, personal touch in worship. Everyone knows the vicar and the vicar knows everyone. Clergy are expected to meet spiritual needs of the members. Works well for clergy with good interpersonal skills, but starts to break down at 130+, as people start to feel they don't know each other. Growth will often depend on the effectiveness/popularity of the pastor.

Program 150-350: Leadership team, has quality and variety in programmes. Critical mass of people from several demographic groups (children, youth, seniors etc) and entry points for people  from various backgrounds. Staff team, often with paid heads of ministry. Basis of unity is a shared vision and programme, rather than shared relationships with leadership/key people. Role of pastor is recruitment, training, supervision, vision & strategy, key ministry is to other leaders, not members. Not a great place for a leader who loves pastoral ministry. 

Corporate 300-500+ institutional presence in the community, key location, big building, large staff. Figurehead leader. In the CofE these are mostly cathedrals, plus a few churches in the larger population centres.

Growth between the sizes can be limited by several bits of the exoskeleton:

 - physical: e.g. parking, cramped buildling, rooms for childrens work

 - community - e.g. fixed population or low-flux culture (church growth is fastest in London, which has a larger population churn rate)

 - organisational: i.e. a plateau between one of these two size categories. A newcomer in a larger 'pastoral' church misses out on a visit because the vicar is too busy. A newcomer in a 'family' church finds they can't break in to the set roles and relationships and gets disillusioned. Etc.

Mann encourages churches to plot their membership/attendance history and note where the plateaus are - are there regular zones where membership levels out, or gets stuck?

Transition from one size to another is a crisis: the church starts to feel the pressure of outgrowing the exoskeleton, and needs to reorient its way of being: from family to pastor focused, from pastoral to programme etc. Evolving through the size stages will be like the Exodus - there'll be times when the cost of leaving 'Egypt' will seem to outweigh the promised benefits, which haven't fully appeared yet. When the old exoskeleton becomes compromised, it has to be shed or the church will hit a ceiling and fall back again. 

It's interesting to compare this to our experience in Yeovil. We have two churches. St. Peters is a 'family' style church, run by a close-knit group of people almost independent of clergy leadership for quite some time. In recent times some of the older members have gone to glory, and several new people have joined us. Several of those, with experience of larger churches, are struggling to work out how things work at St. Peters! The transition is coinciding with a number of new bits of outreach, and some growth.

St. James, the larger church, seemed to be plateauing at 100-120 (combined parish membership 120-140, one vicar, which fits the model). My post was a new 0.5 appointment 8 years ago, followed by a childrens worker 2-3 years later. St. James is now at 160 members, but faces a new exoskeleton, the building. We can't fit the regular congregation into the church, so we're reshaping the building to put in some extra seating. After that, we'll have to look at staffing again, and possibly looking at repeating the main service in another time slot or venue, which will mean identifying and training up some more worship leaders and preachers (which is getting into 'programme' style).

I'd be interested to hear if this all rings true with anyone else, and whether there are particular things which hit particular denominations - Anglicans have lots of 'family' sized churches (240+ of our 500 churches in Bath and Wells are 24 members or fewer). Looking at our recent membership stats (2011-12), out of 37 churches larger than 130 members, only 7 grew year-on-year. In the zone where you''d expect 'pastoral' churches to be compromised (140-200), 20 of the 22 churches in this size group were flat or declining. 

This may also explain one of the findings in 'From Anecdote to Evidence', the report on church growth in the CofE earlier this year. It found that amalgamating parishes was a good way to ensure declining members. Churches in 'pastoral' mode which have to cope with a smaller share of their vicar, will end up with smaller congregations. And it will be very hard for stretched leaders to put the time and energy needed into a church which is trying to shed a skin and grow. 

Latest Church of England Attendance Stats: Making mud seem clear

The latest set of CofE attendance stats has done its job: passed with benign/no headlines, and little quizzing of the facts behind the official press release:

Overall in 2012, on average 1.05m people attended Church of England churches each week showing no significant change over the past decade. Figures for all age average weekly attendance show around 1 in 5 churches growing, and just over this number declining with 57% remaining stable.

In 2012 the Church of England conducted over 356,000 services of baptism, wedding and funerals at an average of about 6,700 each week - almost 1,000 per day - marking the rites of passage in people's lives in communities across the country.

There's plenty to celebrate and be proud of, but lets have a look at the actual stats. Look away now if you're in Lincoln diocese. Here is the Adult Weekly Attendance (the CofE's favoured measure, average number of adults attending a service in any given 7 days) change from 2003-2012. Please read on after the table below before calling for your bishop's resignation....

2003-2012 Adult Weekly Attendance Change
London	1.2%	Liverpool	-13.6%
Southwark	-0.4%	Carlisle	-13.7%
Newcastle	-3.1%	Southwell & Nottingham	-13.7%
Sheffield	-4.7%	Chichester	-13.8%
Europe	-5.4%	Exeter	-13.8%
Coventry	-6.1%	Portsmouth	-13.9%
Birmingham	-7.4%	Oxford	-14.3%
Guildford	-7.5%	Leicester	-14.4%
Manchester	-7.5%	Wakefield	-14.7%
Gloucester	-8.4%	York	-15.0%
Rochester	-9.2%	Salisbury	-16.0%
Chelmsford	-10.0%	Worcester	-17.7%
Bath & Wells	-10.1%	St. Edms & Ipswich	-20.0%
Lichfield	-10.1%	Ripon & Leeds	-20.2%
St. Albans	-10.2%	Sodor & Man	-20.4%
Canterbury	-10.4%	Blackburn	-21.2%
Ely	-10.7%	Peterborough	-21.7%
Durham	-11.2%	Bradford	-22.0%
Chester	-11.6%	Hereford	-23.8%
Total Church of England	-12.3%	Norwich	-24.9%
Winchester	-12.4%	Truro	-27.0%
Derby	-12.6%	Lincoln	-35.8%
Bristol	-13.6%

So far so consistent, compare and contrast with last year, or with the overall picture since 1990. 

But: the CofE has changed its method of collecting stats for this year, after finding several problems with the data in previous years. That's one thing that explains why it takes 18 months from when this data is collected (October) to when it's published. In brief, we have been overestimating attendance so far. So whilst the 2003 figures for the chart above are in the 'old money', the 2012 figures are more rigorous, and therefore lower. This exaggerates the decline in the figures, but that's not to say the decline isn't still there. 

(If you want the details, parishes which had 1 or 2 services a month, with, say 20 attending, were counted as having an AWA of 20, even though the people attending may attend other churches on the weeks with no service at their local. So there's been a lot of double counting, particularly in areas with lots of small churches that meet infrequently, e.g. rural dioceses like Lincoln)

Frustratingly, there are no revised figures available before 2008  - the official stats portal on the CofE site still has the old figures in its handy spreadsheet of diocesan stats. So it's impossible to independently check the statement that there's been 'no significant change over the past decade'. We can't do any fair comparisons for years up to 2007, all that can be said is that any comparison which uses the old data before 2008 will make things look worse than they really are. But that shouldn't be an excuse: only 90% as bad is still bad. 

But we can look at the data for 2008-12. Is the Titanic showing any signs of turning?

No.

 

Adult AWA Change 2008-12
Leicester	10.4%	Rochester	-4.8%
London	4.8%	Guildford	-4.8%
Bristol	4.8%	Salisbury	-5.3%
Sheffield	2.6%	Canterbury	-5.7%
Exeter	2.0%	Portsmouth	-6.0%
Durham	0.0%	Hereford	-6.6%
Newcastle	-0.8%	Europe	-6.6%
Norwich	-1.9%	Birmingham	-6.6%
Derby	-2.0%	Gloucester	-6.8%
Southwell & Nottingham	-2.1%	St. Albans	-7.2%
Carlisle	-2.3%	Southwark	-7.4%
Coventry	-2.3%	Chester	-7.8%
Chichester	-2.5%	Peterborough	-8.8%
Liverpool	-2.7%	Wakefield	-9.2%
Lichfield	-2.7%	York	-9.3%
Oxford	-3.2%	Truro	-9.8%
Worcester	-3.3%	Manchester	-9.9%
Ely	-3.4%	Bradford	-10.0%
Winchester	-3.5%	Sodor & Man	-10.0%
Chelmsford	-3.9%	Blackburn	-11.4%
St. Edms & Ipswich	-4.0%	Ripon & Leeds	-12.5%
Bath & Wells	-4.2%	Lincoln	-20.4%
Total Church of England	-4.2%

Five Dioceses growing, one static, the other 38 declining. And sadly even on the revised stats Lincoln is in trouble. Overall CofE attendance has fallen 37,000 in this 3 year period. That doesn't look like 'no significant change' to me, but maybe I'm working on the wrong definition of 'significant'?  

It's also worth saying that there are no surprises in the top 5. All are intentional about church growth.

Year on year, (2011-12) the stats show growth in a few more Dioceses, but even then it's difficult to draw conclusions. Our Diocese, Bath and Wells, shows a 1500 rise in attendance for 2011-12, yet I know for a fact that reported membership fell in those years in Bath and Wells by 1300 people, 5.6%. So what's going on there? 

The commentary in this years stats is fairly open about how much estimating they've had to do, and the shortcomings in the collection system. There's also an attempt to look at a new measure of membership, joiners and leavers, rather than attendance, though measuring this has problems of its own. 

Until all the silt is cleared out of the system, it's hard to do any proper analysis beyond this: the Church of England stats up to 2012 shows no signs that we are pulling out of the slow nosedive. I really hope that not many people believe the press release on this one: yes there are good signs in the CofE, but we are still in crisis and until we completely understand that, we aren't going to make the radical changes we need to. 

back to the Lent blogging fast. Sorry God....