Church attendance in the United Kingdom is in rapid decline in actual numbers:
-in 1979, 5.4 million people attend church on a typical Sunday,
-in 1989, 4.7 million people attended, and          
-in 1998, 3.7 million attended (Brierley, 2000, p.27).

During that same period, the population increased from 46 million people to 50 million.

This means that the proportion of the population attending on a typical Sunday has reduced from 10.9 per cent in 1979 to 7.4 per cent in 1998. Peter Brierley, the author of The Tide is Running Out, points out that if this rate of decline continued, less than 1 per cent of the population would be attending church on a typical Sunday in 2016.

The picture varies considerably from one denomination to another.

Attendances in the major denominations, Catholics, Anglicans and Methodists have dropped by around 40 per cent in 19 years. Attendances of some small denominations such as the Salvation Army, Lutherans, Churches of Christ and the Christian Brethren have also fallen in numbers. Baptist and Pentecostal attendances have declined slightly.

Among those that have risen have been some small groups such as the Quakers or Religious Society of Friends and the closed Christian Brethren. But they have both grown from a very small base.
More significant growth has occurred in the development of what are known in the United Kingdom as the New Churches. These include groups such as

- New Frontiers International
- Ichthus Christian           
- Fellowship          
- Covenant Ministries
- Association of Vineyard Churches.

How do these declines compare with Australia? Comparable figures are not easily found, partly because of the lack of accurate estimates of children in church in 1979. Another problem is that the Australian measures are based on self-reports of attending weekly while the English numbers are based on counts within the churches on a typical Sunday. The critical factor in looking at change is that the numbers are calculated in the same way each time, however, Australian data could be biased by changes in the public acceptability of saying one does not attend church.

It would appear from the best estimates that the drop in attendance in Australia has been considerably less than the drop in England. While Brierley estimates that 7.4 per cent of the population attended church on a typical Sunday in England in 1998, the NCLS estimated that 10.4 per cent of Australians, including children, did so in 1996 (Kaldor, 1999, p.15).

Table 2. Change in Church Attendance in UK and Australia
Country          Attendance          Attendance          Change          %
                    1979/82          1998                    (Numbers)
Australia          2,252,000          1,980,000           -272,000          -12

England          4,025,000          2,997,600          -1,027,400          -26

Note: Attendance at church on a typical Sunday of adults 15 years or more based on sample surveys.

There are some similarities in the patterns of growth and decline in the various denominations in England and Australia. The mainstream Anglican, Uniting and Catholic churches have declined in attendance, while groups such as the Baptists have maintained their numbers. In Australia, Pentecostal denominations have grown significantly, while they appear not to have done so in England. Only a few of the New Churches which have grown in England have major representation in Australia (Kaldor, 1999, p.24). It is interesting to note that attendance in the Salvation Army has grown in Australia while it has declined in England.

Brierley also examined the trends by the theological position of the congregation as stated by the leader or person completing the survey. Those which described themselves as 'Catholic' (sometimes referring to being part of the Roman Catholic Church, sometimes referring to being Catholic in a more general sense) have declined most, followed by the Broad churches and Liberal Churches. The Low, Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic had changed little. Evangelicals are the largest group representing one third of all attenders on a typical Sunday (Brierley, 2000, p.52).

The decline in attendance has been greatest in the north of England, with comparatively little change in attendance in London and the South-east.

Brierley argues that the decline has occurred not just because people have dropped out of church life altogether. One third of the decline in the 1990s can be attributed to changes in the frequency of attendance. People who attended weekly are now attending occasionally, perhaps only the major festivals. Brierley estimates that 10 per cent of the adult population attend a church at least once a month, and another 16 per cent attend once a year (Brierley, 2000, p.90).

In Australia, a similar trend has occurred. While the estimated numbers attending weekly fell by nearly 300,000 between 1982 and 1998, the same method of estimation suggests that the numbers attending within a month rose by about 21,000. In 1998, 20 per cent of the Australian population claimed to attend church once a month or more often.

The English church aged considerably between 1979 and 1998. Attenders over the age of 65 made up 18 per cent of all attenders in 1979, but in 1998 were 25 per cent of attenders. At the same time, the numbers of people under the age of 30 had halved and the numbers between 30 and 64 had dropped by nearly one quarter. The churches have failed to attract anything like the numbers of children that they did twenty years ago and Sunday Schools have declined dramatically as shown in the figure on page 10. Brierley says that 2,200 people are ceasing attending a church on Sunday every week and 1,000 of these are children under the age of 15 (Brierley, 2000, p.230).

Excluding children from the statistics because of the lack of Australian data, the following comparisons can be made of those attending church 20 years of age and over in 1998. The age profiles in England and Australia appear very similar.

Table 3. Age Profile of Attenders (Percent of all Attenders by Age Group)
Age Group                    Australia % England %
20 to 29 year olds                    11.8                    11.7
30 to 44 year olds                    24.4                    23.2
45 to 64 year olds                    32.6                    31.8
65 year olds plus                    31.2                    33.3

There are some other interesting trends in England. The number of people from minority ethnic groups attending church, people from Africa and India, China and the Caribbean has risen markedly. Brierley estimates that one in eight people attending a church in England is from an ethnic minority, and that proportion is double that in the population at large (Brierley, 2000, p.140).

Another trend is in the variety of forms of involvement. Increasingly people are attending services mid-week, in many cases, instead of Sunday. Brierley estimates that 0.7% of the population, or 335,000 people attend a mid-week service, and among those perhaps as many as 75% or 250,000 do not attend a service on Sunday. A similar number of people attended an Alpha course in 1999. Altogether, Brierley says, perhaps as many as 1,200,000 people or 2.4% of the population were involved in mid-week church activities, but did not attend a church on Sundays (Brierley, 2000, p.175).

Brierley argues, on the basis of his figures, that denominations and local congregations need to focus on children, teenagers and people in their twenties. These are the areas in which the churches are weakest.

Comparisons between attendance in England and Australia suggest that similar trends are occurring. In both countries, there has been substantial decline in church-going. In both, church congregations are aging rapidly and are likely to see further substantial declines in the near future.

The comparisons suggest that church attendance levels are not primarily the result of local factors, nor of national factors, but the product of trans-national cultural trends. Similar influences are operating in England and in Australia in terms of the nature of community, religion and society.

It is interesting to note that the patterns are not uniform. It has been suggested that involvement in churches can take three different forms:
- cultural heritage
- contract -- with a committed group
- consumer-driven.

On the basis of that very rough categorization, one might say that those churches that depend on cultural heritage as the basis of attendance, such as the Church of England and Catholics, are declining rapidly. Those that depend on contract among a committed group of people are maintaining their numbers. Those churches orienting themselves to the new 'consumer' market in spirituality are growing.

There are many small indications in the work of Brierley, as have been noted in Australia, that the picture is not simply one of decline but of change. The nature of religious faith in Western culture is undergoing transformation. New forms of Christian community, new ways of expressing faith are beginning to emerge. The tide which runs out on some beaches may run in on others.

Philip Hughes

References

Brierley, Peter. 2000. The Tide is Running Out. London: Christian Research.

Kaldor, Peter, John Bellamy, Ruth Powell, Keith Castle and Bronwyn Hughes. 1999. Build My Church. Sydney: NCLS Research.