Why, when church attendance is falling, is cathedral attendance soaring?
by Archbishop Cranmer:
An email was delivered to Cranmer’s Tower at 11.15am on Tuesday of this week. It was headed: ‘Record numbers attend cathedrals at Christmas’, followed by a very red, upper-case warning: ‘RELEASE AND STATISTICS EMBARGOED UNTIL 00:01 24/10/18’. Why should good news be embargoed? No idea. You can’t imagine Jesus telling his disciples: “I fed 5,000 on the plains of Bethsaida, but the stat is embargoed for 12 hours”, can you? Perhaps he might if he’d promised Mark an exclusive, but why would he do that? Don’t you want good news to be shouted immediately from the rooftops? Jesus rose from the dead, but the news is embargoed until… O, you get the gripe. It’s not as if any Church of England bad news is ever embargoed, and there’s an awful lot of that.
But it is interesting, isn’t it, in a time of increasing secularity, idolatry, church decline and pervasive Godlessness, that the statistics on cathedral attendance show an increase. A total of 135,000 attended a Church of England cathedral to worship on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in 2017 – an increase of three per cent on 2016, and the highest total since records began. But, interestingly, the growth isn’t only at Christmas. Attendances at cathedral Sunday worship throughout the year continue to hold steady, with average weekday attendances continuing a pattern of increase, with just over 18,000 attending in 2017, compared with 7,000 in 2000 when this data was first recorded. Over 10 years, the total number attending all regular services in cathedrals has increased by 10 per cent. The numbers attending a cathedral on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day has increased by 13 per cent over the past 10 years, evidencing sustained growth.
Why might this be?
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