And that is the reason the CofE is considering blessing same-sex unions and allowing clergy in a same sex relationship to marry: to get it going again.
From here:
Official statistics issued recently suggest that attendance at C of E churches may have levelled out after decades of decline.
A report by the Archbishops’ Council, Statistics for Mission 2012, released on Friday 21 March suggests that, on an average Sunday in 2012 (the latest year with available data) about 859,000 people attended a C of E church. This compares with 901,000 in 2003.
“And Noah went in, and his sons,
and his wife, and his sons’ wives
…of beasts,,,there went in two and two…” + Genesis 7
“But as the days of Noah were…” + Matthew 24:37:
Increase,
according to Hollywood;
or according to JHWH.
The ACoC has seem similar things in membership happen over the years:
1961 increase in membership of 15,399
1962 increase in membership of 3,004
1964 increase in membership of 8,889
1969 increase in membership of 8,429
1973 increase in membership of 2,884
1983 increase in membership of 1,186
1988 increase in membership of 53,017
1990 increase in membership of 2,545
Net Change in Membership from 1961 through 2011
A decrease of 716,614
Point is that it does not matter so much what happens in any one year. You cannot draw any reliable conclusions from a single year over year change. You either need to wait several years to see if a new trend is actually occurring, or dig into some deep research to determine why this one year is apparently different from previous years and make some sort of a opinion as to if the cause is a one time occurrence or a permanent change.
The other thing we need to be careful of is the use of statistics. I notice that they are shifting from Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) to Average Weekly Attendance (AWA). So are they comparing apples to apples (AWA from the 1990’s to AWA from the 2000’s) or apples to oranges (ASA from the 1990’s to AWA from the 2000’s).
Of course weekly attendance at some churches is not the same as Sunday attendance, and the manner of coming up with that weekly count surely can differ among them. Even if we take the 2003 and 2012 figures at face value, without showing raw data of numbers exiting, or statistics for the years preceding 2003, the figures still show a decrease of 42,000, or almost five percent, over those nine years. If you remove from those statistics anything except average weekly attendance on non-special days (thereby excluding Christmas Eve, Easter Sunday, special events, etc.) the numbers would likely be even more unfavourable for the C of E. However, in my opinion, the bottom line is that the base 2012 attendance figure of 859,000, given the total population, is pathetically small, especially considering that the population has increased.