Church Attendance in October 2022: Post-Covid-19 Trends, Patterns and Possibilities
This is a report that compares church attendance in October 2022 and October 2019 in five dioceses. There is a summary hosted on the Oxford diocesan website here, and the full report (pdf) is here.
The Church Times writes about the report under the headline: Cutting services is a key cause of decline in attendance, report suggests.
Thank you for posting this. Since lockdown I have attended services at 981 churches across 28 dioceses in England and Wales. As some of you will know I have been undertaking a pilgrimage across the country for about 15 years. As the Church is in such an advanced state of decline, it has become something of a lunatic race against time. Prior to the pandemic I had obtained details of service patterns for almost every benefice in more than 30 counties: this took a great deal of labour and entailed many physical reconnoitres given the variable and often unreliable status… Read more »
I should add that if a multi-parish benefice is only holding one service a week, then it usually takes two forms: (i) a particular church will be singled out, leaving the others to subside towards something approaching festival status, it being assumed that having one unit showing signs of vitality will more than offset the reluctance of parishioners in the Cinderella units to travel; and (ii) the single service will rotate amongst all of the units, which can sometimes reduce all of them to de facto festival status. As Dr Butler and I have noted on several occasions, it is… Read more »
Yes, yes, yes! Bob Jackson has done the statistical research on this (bean counting for Jesus…) – his advice is that: services happening occasionally in a church leads to declinetherefore each church / community should have a service every week at a time and in a place that do not vary. I usually add in teaching about this: we cannot staff this aspiration with clergy – stipendiary or not – therefore we need to value and resource lay ministry – especially Readers. We need to go for focal ministry (every church has a minister – not necessarily ordained – maybe… Read more »
You are absolutely right that it is better that something happens rather than nothing, but the something should also be at a regular time. It takes an age for people to remember what time a service is in any particular church, so any pattern that has different times on different Sundays of the month is going to alienate many who are not already part of the club. This is not a new observation – I once saw a booklet published by a former Bishop of Norwich about 30 years ago encouraging people in multi-parish benefices to make sure that something,… Read more »
Good for the then BP of Norwich. It is a pity that more bishops don’t encourage their clergy to consider the liturgical provision in their parishes, times of services, importance of well prepared public worship, relevant preaching etc.I think this is even more important with the plethora of texts and in my view inadequate training of clergy in the study of liturgy and the actual taking of services. Few newly ordained clergy have grown up in the C of E now, been choir boys or girls, altar servers etc and so more comfortably ” inhabit” the liturgy.Our worship is surely… Read more »
Many thanks TA and Froghole for this wonderful reflection on Church pandemic decline. Sadly we don’t have any of those kind reflections here on my RCC, even less a serious look on that. Maybe; from time to time such a mainstream press venture will make a report on the subject with such a “clickbait” title on the matter, but nothing else special over there… And not surprisingly; things here where I live are exactly shaping like Froghole has described them on the CofE, especially related to rural areas. The Priests shortage has made most of the rural area Parishes to… Read more »
My first parish was a multi-point. Because everyone wanted the “prime” time for their service (7:00 pm was preferred, and Sunday morning was discouraged because of the practice of having a big Sunday dinner at noon), service times rotated. In the smallest congregation, attendance 6, that did not matter, because those 6 were devoted to keeping their little church going and would turn out at any hour. The others all had people who would only come at their preferred time. Because all were close-knit, rural communities, people knew who to call to find out the service time, if they had… Read more »
Thank you for sharing this. It’s interesting to compare what is reported here with the experience of my own parish, which has Sunday attendance above the 2019 level, but weekday attendance noticeably down. That may be due to the fact that we resumed Sunday worship as soon as we were able to do so, but only resumed weekday worship much later, allowing the habits of weekday attendance to fall away. The summary seemed to me to be helpfully honest in its description of “Leadership challenges”: I certainly recognise “personal exhaustion, reduced volunteer energy,… and damaged church finances” as major challenges… Read more »
Fr Dexter, if I remember correctly, your church is based in the city centre and so, as well as resident parishioners, I imagine that a significant proportion of your midweek worshippers may have been those working in the city centre or who were visiting the city centre for whatever reason. Presumably, the fact that many of those who might have been working centrally are still often working from home must have an impact. I would often catch a lunchtime Communion Service when I was working centrally in my nearest city, or occasionally one immediately after work, but that has become… Read more »
Yes, we are based in the city centre. However, our weekday lunchtime Masses are continuing, albeit with smaller congregations than pre-pandemic. Those that might have been thought to appeal to the local resident population rather than visitors, eg. 6.30pm on a Tuesday or 10.00am on a Friday, are the ones no longer taking place as the congregations just fell away.
From the full report:
“Some dioceses (notably, the Diocese of Sheffield) are changing their leadership model by introducing Focal Ministers to lead large numbers of their churches.The evidence collected so far suggests that most churches grow numerically when a Focal Minister takes over from a multi-church incumbency model.”
When people have a clear responsibility, they rise to the challange.
Thanks for engaging with our report, friends. It’s not exactly rocket science to discover that if you don’t hold a church service nobody comes. But I think we have shown that attendance not fully recovering is a supply side problem – where church is well supplied attendance is back to 2019 levels. I’ll look again at your exchanges if I may to see what I can learn – keep thinking! Bob Jackson
It is sometimes claimed that The Forsyte Saga killed off Evensong when in 1967 people chose to see what Soames and Fleur were up to on television rather than attend evening worship. Thankfully, the Temple Moore church that I see from my Study window on the opposite side of the Slad Valley still maintains an excellent Choral Evensong on the first Sunday of every month. For that I am enormously grateful and greatly appreciate the high standards of the choir in offering wonderful music to the glory of God. It seems to.me that similarly, the Covid pandemic may well have… Read more »
It is certainly true here in Coventry that there are fewer 8am BCP celebrations than there were pre-Covid. I can’t comment on what is or isn’t happening elsewhere.
Certainly the same in Montreal. I have not resumed my 8:00; average attendance pre-pandemic was 4; of the stalwarts, 1 moved across the country but attends online (at 8:00 his local time during the summer, 9:00 during the winter), and the other 3 attend at 10:00. 2 of the 3 other churches in my deanery that had 8:00 services have not resumed them. Midweek services are also slow to resume. We dropped our midweek service in January 2020 as all the regular attendees had either moved or had ceased attending because of health issues, and a couple of online experiments… Read more »
Thank you everyone for the thoughtful comments posted here; as ever, I’ve found it really interesting to discover what conversations our work has prompted. As far as I am aware, there is no good dataset regarding the types/times of services that are offered. If “A Church Near You” were used widely and consistently (over time, and from church to church) to advertise service times – which would assist with Froghole’s pilgrimage -, and if I could get hold of the archive, there might be useful information there; I suspect that both “ifs” are wishful thinking. My assumption, not based on… Read more »