This is a sample article featured in the July 2003 issue of Quadrant

The second English Church Census took place on Sunday, 15^th October 1989 with a form being sent to all 38,000 churches in England. A total of 70% of these were returned, with Anglican churches returning 75% of those sent to them. This was an unprecedented response.

Churches 1989. One of the questions asked the minister to describe the churchmanship of his/her congregation, and this question was answered by 89% of those who returned the questionnaire. As a consequence the churchmanship of nearly 11,000 Church of England churches became known. In 1989, 18% of these stated they were evangelical.

Churches 1998. The 1998 English Church Attendance Survey was not answered anything like as well, attracting only a third of the response previously given by Anglican churches. However it also included a question on churchmanship, and this showed that during the 1990s a number of churches changed churchmanship. While some Anglican evangelical churches no longer were evangelical, a greater number had changed in the opposite direction, so that in 1998 22% of churches counted themselves as evangelical, almost 3,600 in total.

Attendance. The average Sunday attendance in churches in 1998 was 73 in churches of all non-Catholic denominations and 326 in Roman Catholic churches. Naturally this varied by churchmanship and by denomination. For Anglicans as a whole the average was 60 people per church, the smallest of all denominations, although the Methodists were very close at 61. Attendance at evangelical Anglican churches was however almost double that of non-evangelical churches (94 in evangelical churches to 51 in non-evangelical). Thus the proportion of Sunday churchgoers who are evangelical, some 35% of the total, is greater than the proportion of churches.

Evangelical groups. On the questionnaires, respondents were able to tick more than one box to describe their churchmanship. It is thus possible to break down evangelicals into three sub-groups, broad, mainstream and charismatic. However, as many charismatic churches in 1989 simply called themselves evangelical in 1998, it is better to take mainstream and charismatic together as a group. If we do this, we find that while the total evangelical congregations in the Church of England grew some 2% between 1989 and 1998 (from 331,000 to 338,000), broad evangelicals declined 23% from 164,000 to 126,000 and mainstream/charismatics grew 27% from 167,000 to 212,000. So of the 35% evangelical churchgoers, 22% are mainstream/charismatic and 13% broad, and by average church size 104 to 82.

The future. If these trends continued, and they may well not do so (trends very rarely are uniform), then the proportion of Sunday churchgoers in the Church of England in say 2010 who are evangelical could increase from 35% to 50%, of whom just 8% might be broad evangelical. This assumes that congregations remain within the Church of England.

Church income. Christian Research had the privilege last year of undertaking a very large survey on many aspects of church growth for one of the major denominations (not the Church of England), some of the results of which are in Religious Trends No 4. A fuller summary is contained in Leadership, Vision and Growing Churches. This survey went to an appropriately balanced sample of some 3,000 churches, and asked not only churchmanship and denomination but church income. The results showed that the PCC income of evangelical Anglican churches was greater than that of non-evangelical churches, which might be expected given that evangelical churches have larger congregations. The average PCC income for non-evangelical churches in 2002 was Ł40,000 or Ł15 per week per average attender. For evangelical churches it was Ł84,000 or Ł17 per week per average attender.

Too high? These figures are roughly double the average giving published by the Research and Statistics Department at Church House, but their averages are based on the numbers on the Electoral Roll, which is higher than Sunday attendance (though not double). It may be that PCC income reported to Church House (which would include grant income) was different from the “income of the church” given in response to our survey.

However, the figures in our survey suggest that the total giving from evangelical churches would be about 40% of total PCC church income (as given by Church House).

Clergy. There were 9,490 Church of England clergy in 2000. A sample of 3,029 of these was carefully selected in a study commissioned by Springboard. All were looked up in Crockford’s to ascertain the Theological College at which they were trained. Twenty were shown not to have any college affiliation, but this may simply be an absence of information rather than the lack of training! Almost half, 45%, of these trained in an evangelical college. This does not mean that that is the percentage of clergy who are evangelical because non-evangelicals can train at evangelical colleges, and some trained at evangelical colleges become non-evangelical. Equally however the process also goes the other way – some evangelicals trained at non-evangelical colleges and some non-evangelicals become evangelical during the course of their ministry. So at best the percentage gives an order of magnitude of the training of current clergy, which might be equated to indicating their churchmanship. As it happens, it is the highest percentage relating to evangelicals in this brief article.

Other data. It would be tempting to ask if other analyses could be undertaken, such as the percentage of evangelicals by county (from which Diocesan information could be estimated) or whether there are more evangelicals in suburban areas than inner city or rural areas. Many have a feel in their bones of what answers might be shown, but the basis on which such estimates could be made is limited, and the results subject to wide margins of error. If the next large scale study drew a high response such information would then be available!

Sources: Prospects for the Nineties, Trends and Tables from the English Church Census, MARC Europe, London, Page 42; The Tide is Running Out, What the English Church Attendance Survey reveals, Peter Brierley, Christian Research, London, Table 41, Page 146; Religious Trends No 4, 2003/2004, Christian Research, London, July 2003; Church Growth in the 1990s, A statistical report, Peter Brierley, Springboard, Abingdon and Christian Research, London, 2000, Table 18, Page 19; Leadership, Vision and Growing Churches, Christian Research, London, September 2003.

Early in July the Church of England Newspaper (CEN) published an article by Christian Research under the headline “The strategic importance of Anglican evangelicals.” Subsequently The Baptist Times devoted a whole front page to it adding information from a forthcoming book Coming Up Trumps. The Tablet took it up, as did the Church Times which used data from Religious Trends No 4. Details also appeared in The Times, The Independent and the Daily Telegraph (with a major feature on August Bank Holiday Monday). Several local radio stations then asked for interviews.

Although the original article related solely to Anglican evangelicals in England, we reproduce it here (updating publication references) for our non-Anglican readers.

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