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Latest Religious Trends publication ‘flawed and dangerously misleading’

8 May 2008

Projections and comparisons published by Christian Research in its Religious Trends publication are flawed and dangerously misleading, the Church of England said today. “These statistics are incomplete and represent only a partial picture of religious trends in the UK today. In recent years, church life has significantly diversified so these traditional statistics are less and less meaningful in isolation,” said the Rev Lynda Barley, Head of Research and Statistics for the Archbishops’ Council.

“These figures take no account of the rapid growth in ‘Back to Church Sunday’ initiatives that are drawing thousands back to church. Nor, being based purely on numbers in church buildings on Sundays, do they take account of the thousands joining the Church through ‘fresh expressions’ initiatives meeting in other places, on other days.”

Across Christian denominations and other faiths, the research does not compare like with like. The number of active Muslims, for example, is an estimated projection based on halving the number of people who said they were Muslim at the last national government census in 2001. The same process for those who said they were Christian at the last census would yield about 20 million active Christians of whom around 14 million are active Anglicans (based on recent national surveys).

Instead, this research estimates Christian 'membership' using, for example, the number of adults on the Church of England's local parish based formal voting lists as the sole measure of its active 'members'. Huge numbers of people worshipping every week and involved in their churches in all sorts of other ways are consequently missed.

“There are more than 1.7 million people worshipping in a Church of England church or cathedral each month, a figure that is 30 per cent higher than the electoral roll figures and has remained stable since 2000,” said Lynda Barley. “More are involved in fresh expressions of church and chaplaincies across the country and we have no reason to believe that this will drop significantly in the next decade. Of course, we hope and pray even more people will come along and see what they're missing.”