Losing our religion?

By Alister McGrath for The Telegraph

26/12/2007

The decline in British church attendance continues. Parents who go to church are less and less likely to pass on their faith to their children. The "Decade of Evangelism" seems to have done little to reverse this trend. As many congregations grow older, there is no sign of young people queuing to fill the empty pews.

The figures hide significant variations. About 50 per cent of British church congregations are slowly dwindling - but 15 per cent are holding their own and 35 per cent are even growing. There are important surges in attendance at Christmas services, especially at cathedrals. Organised religion may be in decline, yet a concern for spirituality remains important for many. Some believe the decline in church attendance mirrors something deeper within society. Changing patterns of work and leisure are disrupting traditional Sunday worship patterns. Sociologists including Robert Putnam and Grace Davie have argued that churchgoing is to be seen as a marker of a general decline in social participation.

Many aspects of social participation, they point out, have declined at similar rates over similar periods. The latest statistics vividly demonstrate the impact of immigration on the shape of British religious life. It is widely agreed that major ethnic minority populations are more religious than British-born whites. Two years ago, who could have imagined that Catholicism would be enriched by a surge of Polish members? The statistics particularly highlight the dramatic rise of Pentecostalism, a recent and vibrant form of Protestantism now thought to have 500 million adherents. Its emphasis on religious experience, its exuberant styles of worship and its commitment to social outreach have given it a massive following among the urban poor in Asia, Latin America and Africa.

It is now a growing presence in England within the Asian and African diasporas, especially in London. The long-term impact of this development on the face of English Christianity will be considerable. The Church of England has been overtaken in attendance by Catholicism. While the Church of England can rightly point to the weight of history, the importance of cultural memory, the largest number of church buildings, and a large penumbra of nominal church members in defence of its continued status as the established church, there is clearly a problem emerging. What happens if the established church becomes a minority church? But for all Christians, the statistics raise a question of whether dwindling congregations mean a crisis of faith in Britain. The response to recent atheist works, such as Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, suggests not.

There is a new appetite for discussion and debate about the place of faith in personal and public life. Dawkins and others have given Christianity a wake-up call, highlighting its need to demonstrate its intellectual roots and cultural relevance. So can the churches recapture the imagination of our culture? If not, many will conclude that they deserve to fade away. Never have Christian leaders been under such pressure to prove their worth to their people. We need visionary leadership. Will we find it?

[An interesting point of view I thought. Does the continuing decline in Church attendance – despite the influx of immigrant believers - reflect a decline in faith or are things rather more complex than that? Are we witnessing the death of Christianity (at least in Europe) or is the method of counting the modern faithful just too simplistic to cope with the complexity of contemporary religious practice?]