More people going to church despite Sunday decline

THE number of overall churchgoers rose in the past year, despite a decline in attendance at traditional Sunday services, the latest figures reveal.

The Church of England’s annual survey said that the number of those attending at least once a month grew by around 2,000 to 1.138 million churchgoers last year.

At the same time, regular Sunday attendance fell by 2.9 per cent to 756,000 and regular weekly attendance also fell by 2.9 per cent to 895,000.

Various clerics told The Daily Telegraph that people’s busy modern lives – which increasingly mean working across seven days of the week – were partly behind the Sunday decline.

However, regular attendees had taken advantage of new initiatives to hold services and events at more convenient times and places.

The Rev Linda Tomkinson, who started the Freedom Church Mereside in Blackpool two years ago, spends her Sunday mornings addressing congregants at a prayer tent erected within a nearby car boot sale.

She also holds her Sunday service at 4.30pm to allow parents to attend after taking their children to sports or doing their Sunday shop.

The service now attracts a congregation of 35 regulars whereas only around three of the congregation had attended a service before the new church was founded. “Rather than just opening the doors and expecting people to come to us, we are going and engaging with them where they are,” said Ms Tomkinson.

“We could see people were going to the car boot sale on Sunday morning in their droves, so rather than compete with it we thought we would go to it and bring faith there.”

The Rt Rev David Walker, the Bishop of Manchester, attributed the general decline in Sunday attendance to the frenetic pace of modern life. “I am old enough to remember when nothing much happened on a Sunday but things have changed radically,” he said. “Frankly, people are very tired by Sunday. People just want a rest.”

Another way the Church is trying to reach its increasingly fragmented flock is via social media.

The Church’s Royal Wedding prayer and videos for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex were watched more than five million times online.

The figures also showed that last year more people attended Christmas services than in any year since 2007. Numbers for festive worshippers in 2017 grew to 2.68million, an increase on the figure for 2016 of 3.4 per cent. For combined special services, including carol services, there were nearly eight million attendances over the festive season last year.

Bishop Walker said Christmas allowed people to connect with their faith without the pressure of having to attend weekly.