(click to enlarge)
The above chart shows how church attendance in the UK, for a variety of denominations, has changed in 35 years since 1980. The general trend is obviously downwards, although it will be noted that the Pentecostal denominations and what are termed "New Churches" have increased their numbers as have the Eastern Orthodox church. Some of these church groupings may be clusters of church cultures with only marginal commonalities: For example, "Baptist" covers churches affiliated with the Baptist Union and also the Strict and Particular Baptists. "Independents" may cover Brethren, FIEC and various independent evangelical and reformed leaning "Free churches" (Indeed "Brethren" itself breaks down into further sub-groupings). The so-called "New Churches" probably cover various "charismatic" leaning churches such as New Frontiers, Hillsong, Vineyard, Calvary Chapel, Bethel, Potters House, Jesus Army etc.
On a couple of occasions now I have heard some church goers lauding the "New Churches" as perhaps having found the holy grail of church life, namely the spiritual secret of church growth, in so far as they seem to have bucked the trend of decaying church population. But in the absence of more information this is a long shot. Let me explain:
If one of the
components effecting church population is an exponential decay then we will
have:
Rate of decay = a constant x church population
This means that the bigger a church population is the faster it
decays. If this is one of the components at work it would explain the huge drop
in the large traditional church populations of Anglican, Catholic and
Methodists and the relatively smaller drop in other smaller traditional
churches like baptists and evangelical independents.
However, exponential decay is clearly not the only component involved:
Pentecostal churches, which are of a similar size to Baptists, have increased
their population whereas Baptists have dropped. Also, the "New Churches"
have increased. This might suggest that they've cracked the problem
of church growth were it not for the
fact that they are relatively small and therefore more resilient to decay; they
only need a small "trickle-in" component to more than cancel their
slow rate of decay. For example, if just some people coming out of the jaded traditional churches are looking for a new exciting church scene and in consequence turn to the lower end population New Churches that may
explain the growth among these churches; after all these churches tend to address today's Christian existential crises by offering the security of
"spiritual intimacy" and personal epiphany, not to mention the simplicity and certainties found in their style. But even so the New Church growth is not spectacular: It's taken
35 years for this relatively small population to grow by over 100% to
160k - that's about 2.6k per year..
It's worth noting that the tiny orthodox church (and therefore
with a small decay rate) doesn't need much input from the Eastern European
immigrants to buck the trend and grow by 160% in 35 years. (that equates to a
mere 0.5k per year growth!)
The Pentecostals have grown by 36%; that is, by about 2.2k
per year; that's lower than the per yearly growth of the New Churches. That may
be a bad sign: Pentecostal traditionality may be part of the reason, but the
Pentecostals are quite a bit bigger than the New Churches and so their lower
growth rate may, ominously, be evidence that their greater size means that they
are starting to show the underlying exponential decay component at work. If
this is correct and the decay component is actually there all along in both the
Pentecostal & New Churches and that they are actually partly being fed by the decay of traditional church it follows that their growth will slow down as
their populations get bigger and become more vulnerable to the decay component.
This foregoing analysis is rather precarious. After all,
it's a case of looking at the data and attempting to resolve out a superposition of
growth/decay components in a background of a lot of random noise. But then to
my mind this is no less precarious an analysis than those who look at the data
and conclude that the New Churches have cracked the problem of church growth by
waiting on the "spiritual revolution" and therefore the traditional
churches only need drum up the same enthusiasm for this new dawn to solve their
population problem. Moreover, I think we need to factor in here the pattern
often shown when the church feels culturally marginalised; namely, that it
tends to become more spiritually internalized and shifts from an emphasis on the articulations of "logos" to the intimacy of "pneuma"! Sometimes the latter starts to skirt the boundaries of fideism and gnositicism
My best guess is that the real problem is what that
background component of exponential decay really means; that's likely to be
societally systemic and there is not much we can do about it. The nub of the
problem is in the culture beyond, in society at large: The spiritual revolution
needs to grab the outside culture (and not just the church) and turn its
nihilistic malaise on its head! When that happens churches of all sorts may be
left wondering why at one time it all seemed so hard!
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