Lausanne World Pulse – Pulling Out of the Nosedive in the United Kingdom!

July 2007

By Peter Brierley

The Census found other factors were important as well. The larger the church:

  • The greater the proportion of people under age thirty. Could this be because of suitable midweek activities? Young people also like to be part of larger groups for friendship and interaction.
  • The greater the proportion of non-white churchgoers in attendance. Could this be because they like to attend “successful” churches which a growing church appears to be? Perhaps they feel more at home because they are less conspicuous.
  • The greater the proportion who come to church least frequently, that is, less often than once a month.
  • The greater the proportion of visitors. Could this be because of the friendly welcome or because in a larger church there is a greater likelihood for anonymity? This is perhaps especially true of the Cathedrals.

The larger churches are likely to become increasingly important as the years move on.

5. The Challenge of Greater London
 In seven Inner London Boroughs there are over fifty Black Majority Churches, and thirteen out of the eighteen Inner London Boroughs saw churchgoing numbers increase between 1998 and 2005. In Greater London there are:

  • eleven percent of all the churches in England
  • twenty percent of all the churchgoers, making London’s churches twice as large on average as those elsewhere
  • twenty-three percent of all the Evangelical churchgoers
  • fifty-three percent of all the Pentecostal churchgoers
  • fifty-seven percent of all churchgoers who are in their twenties (against nineteen percent of the population)

Such is the strength of London’s church attendance. It will find its supreme test in how they can work together for mission with the coming 2012 Olympic Games. Is it possible for the rest of the country to learn from London?

The flipside of London’s strength is that other parts of England are relatively weak, especially in having relatively few churchgoers in their twenties. If 131,000 of the country’s 231,000 people aged twenty to twenty-nine who go to church go in London, that leaves 100,000 people to be spread across thirty-three thousand churches! As this implies, not everything is good news. There were some serious weaknesses exposed by the Census as well.

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Dr. Peter Brierley is the Senior Lausanne Associate for Church Research. He attended Lausanne I in 1974 and has been involved with the Lausanne movement since 1984. Formerly a government statistician, he is currently executive director of Christian Research, a UK charity which produces resource volumes like Religious Trends and the UK Christian Handbook. Brierley can be reached at [email protected].