Is the Church of England growing at last?
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.
