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While most of the coverage of the first results of the recent UK census has focused on the 370,000 practicing Jedi in the UK, relatively few have picked up on the most surprising fact: Over 70% of people still classify themselves as Christian.
That's a pretty hard thing to believe given that only around 11% of the population go to church regularly. The hope for the Christian faith in there is that the dropping church attendance are nothing to do with a rejection of the messages of Christianity, but a rejection of the form of Christian worship we'd slipped into. It's the "go and get lectured at on Sunday and then forget about it for the rest of the week". I can see this even in my church, where we often get bigger attendance for Wednesday night Alpha and Bible study. Hell, sometime we get more people to church cleaning than we do to the Sunday service.
I actually don't have a problem with that. To me, time spent in the company of other Christians and study of the Bible are the foundations of a church community. Everything else springs from that. Those initial steps on the Christian path give you a growing hunger for all things Christian, and so you move into more conventional worship from there. The new Archbishop of Canterbury has some interesting things to say about the presentation of the unchanging message in a recent interview, where he comes across as both conservative and forward thinking. That's a good approach for the modern church, in my eyes. Too much damage has been by senior clerics questioning the fundamental tenets of the faith.
70% of the population has some identification with the Christian faith. It's up to those of us who still believe that a parish church has a strong role to play in communities, especially at a time when those communities are disintegrating, to find a way of making those churches welcoming places once more.
That's a pretty hard thing to believe given that only around 11% of the population go to church regularly. The hope for the Christian faith in there is that the dropping church attendance are nothing to do with a rejection of the messages of Christianity, but a rejection of the form of Christian worship we'd slipped into. It's the "go and get lectured at on Sunday and then forget about it for the rest of the week". I can see this even in my church, where we often get bigger attendance for Wednesday night Alpha and Bible study. Hell, sometime we get more people to church cleaning than we do to the Sunday service.
I actually don't have a problem with that. To me, time spent in the company of other Christians and study of the Bible are the foundations of a church community. Everything else springs from that. Those initial steps on the Christian path give you a growing hunger for all things Christian, and so you move into more conventional worship from there. The new Archbishop of Canterbury has some interesting things to say about the presentation of the unchanging message in a recent interview, where he comes across as both conservative and forward thinking. That's a good approach for the modern church, in my eyes. Too much damage has been by senior clerics questioning the fundamental tenets of the faith.
70% of the population has some identification with the Christian faith. It's up to those of us who still believe that a parish church has a strong role to play in communities, especially at a time when those communities are disintegrating, to find a way of making those churches welcoming places once more.
