With the release of the latest catastrophic attendance figures,
the Church of England has been trying desperately to convince us
that the bad news is actually good. The latest wheeze to try to
cover up the fact that one and a half times the number of people
leave the church per week as join it is that the "empty pews
are being filled by migrants." The growth in happy-clappy black
evangelical churches is being flagged up as a wonderful thing by
the Archbishop of Canterbury as he tries to deflect attention from
the fact that between 1998 and 2005, half a million people stopped
going to church on Sunday.
An example of how the Church is trying to bamboozle us was made laughably clear in a report by the Daily Telegraph's religious affairs correspondent, Jonathan Petre. Straining to put a brave face on disaster, he wrote: "The findings will give the churches hope that they are pulling out of the decline they have been in for decades. Overall, though, they are losing far more than they are gaining. While 1,000 new people are joining a church each week, 2,500 are leaving."
Other figures:
6.3% of the population go to church on an average Sunday, compared
to 7.5% in 1998
29% of churchgoers are 65 or over, compared with 16% of the population.
9% of churches have no-one under 11 in their congregations.
Black people make up 10% of all churchgoers in England, while other
non-white ethnic groups add a further 7%. In inner London, fewer
than half of worshippers are white.
NSS September 2006