Clergy warn of ‘doom spiral’ as church attendance drops off at record rate
Sunday church attendance is just 80 per cent of what it was in 2019, Telegraph analysis has revealed, despite the Church of England claiming that it has “bounced back” after the pandemic.
The figures reveal that church attendance has more than halved since 1987, prompting clergy to warn: “This is a doom spiral of the church’s own choosing.”
In 2023, The Telegraph published an investigation which revealed that parishes are closing at a record rate, prompting fears that the Church had been “dealt a death knell”.
The investigation found that almost 300 parishes have disappeared in the past five years alone – the fastest rate since records began in 1960.
I know almost nothing about this issue so naturally I have an opinion -
That Welby chap doesn't appear to be doing anything constructive about it. Whether he could do something I don't know, but clearly identifying partisan political issues and maintaining a sceptical distance from them would be a start. The fictitious climate doom spiral comes to mind.
4 comments:
I know loads about it, and I bet we are not too far apart on this - it all goes to show how knowledge is over-rated!
The higher you go towards the C of E leadership, the more left-wing, pro-Europe, and Net Zeroist people become. Vicars are more left-wing than their congregations, Bishops more than the vicars (Only one bishop was a Brexiteer) and the Archbishops are up there with Corbyn, Monbiot, and Owen Jones. Ex-Archbish Rowan Williams has actually taken part in sit-down climate demonstrations and thinks that you are the sex you identify with. If he were that nice bearded ex-schoolteacher living down the road, you'd consider him barking mad.
So it's obvious that preferment in the C of E is dependent upon having certain views which are massively at odds with the general population. And then the leadership wonder why the public thinks they are irrelevant. Although I've never really found it, there might be something in Christianity itself which appeals to those who long for meaning, and the transcendent. But the C of E seems to be little more than a means of spuriously invoking that transcendence in order to further political aims. An object lesson in Robert Conquest's second and third laws of politics.
Sam - interesting, I didn't realise it was that bad. It sounds as if the C of E really is in a doom spiral if preferment has become so badly skewed. It isn't a surprise in that something has to explain both the decline and the apparent failure to tackle it by emphasising the traditional and spiritual over political fashions.
An anti-woke comedian I've seen on YouTube has said that there is a hunger for anti-woke comedy out there. The C of E may be missing something important.
A relative of mine in her mid-eighties describes, with some indignation, what she calls the ‘P45 sermon’ a couple of years ago in which the vicar of her village church made it abundantly clear that only those who publicly professed their spiritual commitment to God and the Church of England were welcome in his church; anyone else - especially non-Communicants - should stay away in future. She hasn’t been back since and neither have several of her friends, while others have defected to the (much friendlier) local Methodists.
If, as she suspects, this was a diocese-wide initiative or even more widespread, it is hardly surprising attendance has fallen dramatically in rural parishes where churchgoers might well be motivated by a sense of community or social duty and the comfort of tradition rather than spiritual fervour.
(If you’ll forgive a link: https://newgatenews.blogspot.com/2023/09/as-christian-does.html )
Macheath - as an outsider that comes across as the kind of thing a dull bureaucrat would do, a follower of rules rather than someone with more spiritual motives, or even traditional motives. Thanks for the link, it does explain the decline if there are many like that. Bureaucrats do not generally rely on their own initiative.
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