A CHALLENGE to the “Cassandras who simply write off British Christianity” was issued at St John’s, Waterloo, on Saturday, at a Church Times conference exploring “Springtime for the Church of England”.
Delivering the opening talk, the Revd Dr David Goodhew, Vicar of St Barnabas’s, Middlesbrough, Visiting Fellow of St John’s College, Durham University, and the former director of the Centre for Church Growth Research, suggested that there was too much evidence supporting the Bible Society’s report The Quiet Revival to discount it. The Bible Society was “on to something”.
He pointed to data including the explosive growth in the number of churches in London, and polls indicating higher levels of belief among young people. But it was important to look at a range of sources of evidence, including “detailed case studies”, he said.
England was undergoing “enormous demographic change, and many traditional metrics struggle to keep up. . . The reason we have a confused discussion is that people tend to say either it must be growth, or it must be decline. Actually, it’s both; and, if you look across British Christianity, you are seeing a whole load of things going up, and going down, and it depends where you look as to what you are seeing.”
He emphasised the importance of not looking only at the Church of England: “Many Anglican conversations act as if the rest of British Christianity did not exist. It may not be spring in much of the C of E, but it might be spring elsewhere.”
The conference also heard from Dr Ken Eames, senior statistical researcher at the C of E’s data-services team, who showed data indicating post-pandemic increases in attendance. “People came back to church, and not only did they come back, they are still coming back. The numbers are still going up, even years after the pandemic.”
On the back of a century of decline, it felt “unreasonable” to suggest that the numbers were where they were before Covid, he suggested. But the Church was “not far off where we might have been had the pandemic not happened”.
The national figures masked “massive variation”, he cautioned. In around 12 per cent of churches, attendance across three measures was higher than it had been in 2019. These churches were scattered all over the country, he said. “Big churches, little churches, urban churches, rural churches, High churches, Low churches, all sorts of traditions. There is something everywhere that is a sign of hope.”
IT IS now nine months since the Bible Society published its report The Quiet Revival, which drew on YouGov polling of more than 13,000 adults (News, 11 April 2025).
Of the total, 12 per cent of respondents said that they had attended a church at least once a month in 2024, compared with eight per cent in 2018. Growth was more dramatic among those aged 18 to 24, of whom 16 per cent reported monthly attendance, up from four per cent in 2018.
The narrative of revival was challenged last month by Sir John Curtice, Senior Research Fellow at the National Centre for Social Research, who drew on the latest data from the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey. First carried out in 1983, the survey’s respondents are selected at random from those living in private households in Great Britain. Data is weighted to reflect the known characteristics of the adult population. In 2024, 4120 respondents participated.
In 2024, 40 per cent of BSA respondents identified as Christian — the same as in 2017. The proportion who identified as “other Christian”, as opposed to Anglican or Roman Catholic, rose from 18 to 21 per cent, while the percentage who identified as “none” fell from 52 to 49 per cent.
This prompted Sir John to observe: “The long-term decline in the proportion who identify as Christian, or indeed with any religion, has seemingly come to a halt.”
But reported church attendance fell in the same period. In 2018, one in five of “Christian identifiers” reported attending once a week; the figure is now one in eight. Nine per cent reported going at least once a month, down from 12 per cent. Among those aged 18 to 24, the figures were three per cent down from eight per cent.
Sir John said that the data illustrated the diversity of the country’s religious landscape. “One in three of those attending a religious service on a weekly basis are to be found in a mosque, mandir, gurdwara, temple, or synagogue, rather than a church. Moreover, among those aged under 35, less than half of those attending a religious service on a monthly basis are to be found inside a church.”
Professor Conrad Hackett, a senior demographer and associate director of research at Pew Research Center in the United States, has suggested that different methodologies may lie behind the contrast in findings. Pew studies had found that online opt-in surveys “may produce especially misleading results for young adults”, he wrote in an online article last month.
The Bible Society has defended its report, and suggested that recent data from the BSA “should be interpreted with care”. It highlights a change in methodology during the pandemic: a “push-to-web” approach; a drop in response rates (to 17 per cent); and “small subgroup sizes”, such as only 74 young men aged 18 to 24, which, it argues, can make it harder to detect emerging patterns.
“While all surveys have limitations, differences often reflect purpose and method, not error,” it says. “No single dataset should be treated as definitive; relying on multiple sources is standard practice in robust social research.”
Dr Goodhew said on Saturday: “People are very quick to hammer what is seen as flaky ecclesial optimism, but I think we also need some scepticism about ecclesial doomsters.”
He warned against “decline theology, which assumes that the decline of the Church is inevitable. . . It has no basis in the New Testament or the Christian tradition; it’s deeply corrosive pastorally; and it’s shaky when you look at facts on the ground.”
