UK CHURCH STATISTICS 2:
2010 to 2020
Editor Peter Brierly
ADBC Publishers. £27.00
Available from: Brierley Consultancy, The Old Post Office, 1 Thorpe Avenue, Tonbridge, Kent, TN10 4PW or peter@brierleyres.com
The (nominal) Christian church is awfully big. I think of my own church as being busier than I can deal with on a Sunday morning, but that’s just peanuts compared to the size of the church as a whole.
This is enumerated in some detail in the excitingly titled UK Church Statistics 2: 2010- 2020. Just as the biblical writer of Numbers enumerated the people of Israel according to their tribes, so this book counts up those calling themselves Christians according to region and denomination.
Big picture for Britain
Roughly 5.5 million people were church members in 2013; about a tenth of the adult (15 and over) population. The big picture over the five years from 2008 to 2013 is one of stability in overall church membership in England, declines of roughly a tenth in Wales and Northern Ireland, and a substantial decrease of almost a fifth in Scotland. Much of this decline in Scotland is found in falling numbers attending the Church of Scotland (the largest denomination) which has seen membership decline from almost half a million to less than 350,000. Outside of Scotland the decline in the size of the Methodist church is particularly striking with more than 800 churches closing. Many other denominations have seen smaller decreases in size, with these being somewhat balanced out by increased membership in Independent and (even more so) Pentecostal and Orthodox Churches, with the growth of the latter somewhat fuelled by immigration.
Intriguing mysteries
Other statistics emphasise the sheer scale of Christian activity in the UK. For example, almost one in eight of all infants born in England were baptised in the Church of England in 2012. Almost half of all deaths in England were marked by a CofE, Catholic or Methodist funeral (statistics for other denominations were not included).
Within the detail of the many pages of this book are a few intriguing mysteries. How do the four priests of the Armenian Orthodox Church spread themselves across 22,000 church members without burning out? Does the single pastor working in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Iceland in England struggle with pride because of having 300 church members compared to the mere 30 attending the church of his Scottish colleague? Why, exactly, does the Non-subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland employ a minister in England when there are (apparently) no church members?
All of this points to a more fundamental issue with statistics of this kind – we can see the ‘what’ but not the ‘why’. Just as the beginning of the book of Numbers tells us how many Israelites there were, but does not (initially) tell us whether they truly loved the Lord, so these statistics paint an interesting picture but cannot truly reveal the health of the church. What they do tell us is that despite the overall decline in size, the church is still pretty big. The fields are ripe for harvest and (in theory) the workers should be plentiful.
