by Rt Hon Sir Tony Baldry, who was MP for Banbury (1983 – 2015), Second Estates Commissioner (2010 – 2015) and Chair of the Church Buildings Council (2015 – 2019)
Before the pandemic, if one asked for statistics about church attendance, you would probably have been told that on average 3.5% of the population of England regularly attended Church of England services and another 3.5% attended several times a year such as Christmas, Easter and some other occasions.
Some 7% or so of the population and then in addition there would be those who came to church during the year for weddings, funerals and baptisms.
The pandemic has caused regular church goers to “self-certify” themselves as being members of the congregation by providing parish administrators with their email addresses so they can be emailed the Zoom link for when the services, such as Sunday Evensong take place by Zoom.
That is good news.
A far better, more accurate and more immediate record of those who consider themselves to be members of a church congregation that any parochial electoral roll ever succeeded in showing.
The bad news is that the other 3.5%, those who came to church occasionally, seem in large part to have given up coming to church at all.
Obviously, like everything in the Church of England, I will quite rightly be told that every church is different, and that one should be careful not to generalise but I would be prepared to wager that it is now rare for most churches to see worshippers whom they would not consider to be regular members of the congregation, and whose email details they don’t have on record for Zoom services.
And weddings and baptisms in church seem to have tailed off dramatically.
There are all sorts of reasons why I suspect the other 3.5% have stopped coming to church.
- They’ve got out of the habit during the time that churches were completely shut.
- They do not feel sufficiently strongly about coming to church whilst it is still mandatory to wear face masks, and
- They are not keen to come to church when they are not able to socialise and meet friends and neighbours after services.
Reconnecting with these Easter, Christmas and a few times a year church goers, must be a very real priority once the worst of the pandemic has passed.
We should make a special effort to invite as many friends, neighbours and missing faces to Easter Sunday services in earl April and services to mark the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee in early June.
The evidence suggests that once people stop the habit of going to church, even if that is only a few times a year, visits get increasingly rare or stop altogether.
Zoom has been a wonderful boon during the pandemic by keeping regular congregations but as soon as possible, we need to reengage with the other 3.5% and more widely who had, pre-pandemic come to church from time to time.
Any thoughts?