Defending the rural church: Delusional or Essential?
by Ian Paul, Psephizo:
In a guest post, rural minister and General Synod member Tiffer Robinson writes:
“Rural churches have experienced falling congregations for decades” or so says the Guardian article about the Church of England proposals to remove the need for weekly Sunday services. The Church in the countryside is seen as being in the last stages, the death rattle louder than the dulcet tones of a handful of elderly people singing in a cold damp church in Orbiston Parva. This is what is in the background of this proposal from the Simplification group, to work toward finding a solution to the problem of rural churches. “We simply have too many buildings” I have heard from bishops and laity alike.
And yet, I think the statistics show a different story. The Released for Mission rural ministry report from early 2015 showed that just as many rural churches had grown and declined over the previous decade as urban churches. The same report says that around 40% of worshippers in the Church of England are attending rural churches, which serve only 17% of the general population. I think that bears repeating: over a third of all bums on pews in the Church of England live in these tiny villages, twice the attendance per head of the urban church. What’s more, if you rank all the dioceses by the proportion of the population attending church, it’s the rural dioceses at the top. The one exception is Lincoln, which had a long term strategy of reducing clergy numbers and putting more and more churches together, a strategy they have since reversed. Would that all dioceses would learn from their mistake!
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