Life & Ministry

Is the Church of England growing at last?

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This week, the Church of England released headline figures for church attendance in 2025. This is collated from the parish returns done in October each year, and Ken Eames and the statistics team in Church House do a great job.

Before plunging into the numbers and offering some reflection, it is worth addressing the common objections to doing this at all.

‘We shouldn’t be obsessed with numbers.’ Yet we should be obsessed with people, and numbers represent people. Every number stands for a person who has come to church, and (hopefully) comes to living faith in Jesus. If your numbers in church are going down, you can be sure that fewer people are encountering his life-changing grace.

‘Weighing pigs doesn’t make them heavier.’ No, but unless you weigh them you don’t know if you are feeding them aright, and seeing a change of weight might prompt you to change their diet. The Church of England is in the remarkable position of having substantial historic assets, and has choices to make about how those historic assets are used. We have a duty before God to make decisions that might lead to people coming to faith, rather than not. And we have a duty before the Charity Commissioners to make decisions in the best interests of our organisation—based on evidence. Counting attendance numbers provides that evidence.

Loser! The Art of the Insult

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Mike Starkey writes: During the 2018 Centennial of World War I, Donald Trump was scheduled to visit the Aisle-Marne American Cemetery in France. The relentless rain made helicopter travel to the Cemetery impossible, but aides informed the President he could be driven instead. Trump’s response, according to accounts from a senior Defence Department official, was that he didn’t want to visit the cemetery, as it was ‘filled with losers’.

On the same trip, Trump reportedly said the 1,800 US marines killed in the World War I Battle of Belleau Wood were ‘suckers’ for being killed. When reports of Trump’s dismissive language about dead American service personnel appeared in the Atlantic magazine, a media storm erupted. Trump denied the reports, but in 2023 his former Chief of Staff John Kelly confirmed that Trump had, in fact, used both slurs on the French trip. 

What is beyond doubt is that the language of losers and winners has long been Trump’s characteristic benchmark for evaluating humanity, the trumpian equivalent of Jesus’s sheep and goats. In interviews, social media posts and rally speeches, loser has been his insult of choice.

Is church bureaucracy demonic?

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Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has made a rather startling remark about Church bureaucracy. He was in a conversation at Unherd about evil and the demonic in culture—especially “the erosion of standards of truthfulness in public life and the normalisation of violence in word and deed”. And he was also worried about a church … Continue Reading

The Wisdom of the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals: A Response to Paul Avis

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Andrew Goddard writes: There are multiple visions for the future of the Anglican Communion. One, being offered by Gafcon, is found in the Abuja Affirmation. Another is found in the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals (NCPs) developed by the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith, and Order (IASCUFO), which will be considered by the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) … Continue Reading

Truth, history, the Church Commissioners, and reparative justice

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Professor Richard Dale writes: KICKING IN THE CATHEDRAL DOOR How the Church Commissioners relied on bogus history to denounce their predecessors and vilify their own Church It is over three years since the Church Commissioners published their controversial report on the Church’s links to the slave trade.  Since then critics have challenged the Commissioners’ historical … Continue Reading

The future of the Anglican Communion? part 2

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Andrew Goddard writes: Twenty years ago, in June 2006, Archbishop Rowan Williams wrote in his significant and still-worth-reading reflection, “The Challenge and Hope of Being an Anglican Today” There is no way in which the Anglican Communion can remain unchanged by what is happening at the moment. Neither the liberal nor the conservative can simply … Continue Reading

What has happened to the Quiet Revival?

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In April last year, Bible Society published a report called The Quiet Revival, and I interviewed the main researcher behind it, Rhiannon McAleer. The report made a number of claims, based on research by YouGov, including both a significant change in attitude amongst young people, and a significant change in church attendance. It provoked much … Continue Reading

The Future of the Anglican Communion? part 1

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Summary: This article analyses the significant developments emerging from the March 2026 GAFCON gathering in Nigeria arguing that a key feature of its Abuja Affirmation is not what it includes, but what it omits: any reference to the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA). This “is…a significant missing piece of the complex Anglican Communion … Continue Reading

How do you best spend £730,000?

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John Root writes: The diocese of London has been awarded a grant of £730,000 from the Church of England’s Racial Justice Unit to develop its racial justice work over a three year period. This is part of a national strategy of giving grants to address the issue. In this blog I want to question whether … Continue Reading