Only 1 in 5 weddings in CofE churches

FEWER than one in five couples now choose to marry in an Anglican church, figures from the ONS show.

There were 45,901 ceremonies carried out by the CofE and the Church in Wales in 2015 – 19.2 per cent of the total and down from 20.8 per cent in 2014.

The decline in the traditional church wedding has come amid popularity of marriages in hotels, football grounds and entertainment suites of other ‘approved premises’.

The numbers will be troubling for the Church, which is suffering a fall in congregations, and now has more followers on social media than in the pews. The latest figure is just over a quarter of the 178,700 church weddings recorded in 1968. The figures look even worse for the Roman Catholic church, which oversaw 7,001 weddings in England and Wales in 2015. The figure is less than a third of the number recorded in 1990.

More than 157,000 opposite-sex weddings were solemnised in approved premises, which couples seeking a civil wedding have been able to choose since 1995 as an alternative to register offices.

Nearly 6,500 gay and lesbian couples were married in 2015, the first full year of same-sex marriages in England and Wales, the ONS also revealed.

A further 9,156 same-sex couples converted their civil partnerships into marriage.