The Church of England is losing young people – and fast
by Julian Mann, Christian Today:
Attendance by children in Church of England churches is plummeting. Might that indicate that the push by revisionist bishops to ditch the Church’s traditional teaching on marriage and sexual morality is not persuading young people to join C of E churches?
Andrew Selous MP, who fields questions about the established Church in the House of Commons as Second Church Estates Commissioner, has revealed that the number of children attending C of E churches on an average Sunday has halved since 2003.
In a written answer on April 12 to a question from fellow Conservative MP Neil O’Brien about the average weekly attendance across the C of E in each year since 1994, Selous said the Church “first started collected data centrally in the autumn of 2000; as a result it is not possible to publish data for the period 1994-1999”.
But the data he gave O’Brien showed “the longest period of comparable figures available, from 2003-2022”. These figures showed there were 154,000 children under the age of 16 in C of E churches on an average Sunday in 2003. By 2022 that had declined to 70,000.
That figure was up from 62,000 in 2021 when Covid restrictions were still impacting church attendance. In 2020 when the government imposed the lockdown there were 24,000 children in C of E churches on an average Sunday, down from 94,000 in 2019.
In 2003 the average adult Sunday attendance was 802,000; by 2022 that had declined to 477,000. In 2019, there were 619,000 adults in C of E churches on a usual Sunday. That fell to 272,000 in 2020 and rose to 447,000 in 2021.
As a parish vicar from 2000 to 2019 in a South Yorkshire village, I can testify that the average Sunday attendance figure is the key one. In the church I was privileged to serve, the people who attended the usual Sunday services – as distinct from the people who came only at Christmas or Easter or on Remembrance Sunday – were the core congregation. They were the committed Christian people who gave financially and who took on the voluntary roles without which a local church cannot function.
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