Tuesday, October 28, 2008

A Nudge to the CofE Statisticians

The Episcopal church have just released their latest membership figures, up to 2007 (Ht Episcopal Cafe). It shows the kind of overall steady decline all too familiar to Anglicans. But what struck me more was the way the reporting was done.

Church of England stats are generally released in table form, Diocese by Diocese, with an almost bewildering array of different measures (usual Sunday attendance, Average Adult attendance, All-age weekly attendance etc.). The Episcopal table has some very simple, but helpful, bits of analysis:
- 2 clear measures of involvement: baptised members and Sunday worship attendance
- change over 1, 5, and 10 years
- & of congregations growing or declining by 10% over the last 5 years
- some breakdown of congregational size (it would be interesting to link this with the growth stats).

Some of this information simply won't be available at national level for the CofE, because of the way we collect the stats, but please can we have something like this when the next lot of attendance stats are released in the new year?


  1. It would be really good to have much more accurate stats all round; though I realise some of our colleagues aren't too keen or good about collecting them. In fantasy land, it would be good to do some really tight study like the Willow Creek reveal survey on how the things we do impact the people who do them... pipe dream, perhaps.

  2. I agree, the Episcopal figures certainly make much more interesting reading than the C of E figures, and definitely indicate some much more complex interactions going on than the headline fall in attendance. Certainly I suspect the C of E figures are masking something similarly complex - certainly the headline trend downwards in the C of E is masking that congregations are growing significantly in some Churches.

    I'd certainly agree with Bishop Alan, although it may well be a pipe dream, if the US figures are similar to what is going on in the UK there is a significant group of growing Churches and it is important that we try and understand what is causing them to grow, whether it is something that they as churches are doing, or some sort of external factor, and whether it is something which can be emulated at the rather larger group of shrinking churches.

  3. CofE figures should be 1, 6, 12 year inntervals due to the 6 year Electoral Role revision cycle.

    See the detailed work that was done in London Diocese.