The end of mainstream Christianity in Britain...

Because of a lack of maintenance, a chunk of the east wall has fallen away. If anyone buys it there will be hundreds of thousands of pounds needed to shore up the crumbling masonry.

St. Wistan’s isn’t alone. Several of the churches around where I live in Leicestershire have already been decommissioned, or are in the process of being sold off. You can buy one here if you like.

Lots of other churches without much of a congregation are still technically open, but only for festivals or special occasions.

In various villages in my constituency people are trying to figure out and talk to the Church of England about whether there is a way to prevent their church being closed and sold off. People are trying to find ways to keep them open for community use and occasional worship.

Where they are sold off, it is profoundly sad to see something that was so important to so many people turned into a house or a carpet shop.

But the costs of keeping them open are formidable, and getting harder for the C of E to meet with a shrinking number of worshippers.

In Britain there isn’t the same separation of church and state as in the US, so I asked some Parliamentary Questions to the Church Commissioners about how many people are involved in the Church of England these days. The results are pretty doomy for the C of E.

The number of new members, as measured by Confirmations, is about a quarter of what it was in the mid-1990s:

The number of adults going to church on a Sunday is down about 40% since 2003, from 802,000 to 477,000. But the number of children going to a CofE church on a Sunday is down even more sharply over the same period, to less than half of what it was in 2003:

To put this in context, the Church of England has about 16,000 churches. Running current trends forward a few years it seems impossible that the C of E will be able to maintain anything like that number, with a congregation measured in the tens, not the hundreds of thousands.

It is the same story for other mainstream churches. The equivalent statistics for Catholic churches are below, and I suspect something similar is true of the other main mainstream denominations.

The Catholic Church in the UK has fewer really, really old buildings. Having lost its original buildings to the reformation, it wasn’t until Victorian reforms that Roman Catholics were allowed to build visible places of worship again. But there are still 3,200 Roman Catholic churches in the UK.

There are counter-trends to the decline of the mainstream churches. All over the periphery of London you can find exotically named charismatic churches, and see worshippers zipping about in their little white minivans.

And not just in London. In Leicester a megachurch is trying to convert an old warehouse into their new HQ. I did wonder why they don’t put their new church in… one of the many old churches, but I guess that isn’t how these things work.

And here and there you can find examples of much more “trad” churches that are thriving too. A little Catholic Church in a village near us was reopened after a long closure three years ago, and now has a thriving congregation. But this is against the trend.

During the heyday of EU migration there was a lot of discussion about whether lots of migration from Poland would boost up mainstream churches.

While migration is changing the religious balance of the country, it doesn’t seem to make much difference in terms of Christianity.

There is a yawning gulf between the large number of people who are culturally Christian (46% give that as their religion in the census) and the much smaller group who are active worshippers.

The share of those moving to the UK from overseas who describe themselves as Christian is very similar to the share of those born in the UK. Census data shows the main difference between those born in the UK and those who have come to the UK is a much smaller share of people of no religion, accompanied by a larger share of Muslims, Hindus, and somewhat more Buddhists and Sikhs. The pattern is similar if we just look at post-2001 migrants. Migration certainly doesn’t seem to have changed any of the trends above for the mainstream Christian denominations.

The mainstream churches still have quite a large and positive influence. The C of E alone has something like a quarter of all primary schools and secondary schools in England. They have more youth workers than local authorities and has spent about £40m since 2022 on youth work. People still go for “hatches, matches and dispatches.”

But the gradual disappearance of Christianity in Britain seems set to continue – at least in the mainstream form we have known it.

Even as an atheist I find this kind of sad. Christianity inspired so many to do amazing things. It played a central role in the abolition of slavery.1 It played a huge part in the end of Communism, most famously through the role of the Catholic church in Poland2 but also through the role of the Protestant Churches of the old East Germany and more. It has been a central part of life in Britain since the third century. It provided comfort and purpose and meaning for so many people.

Fired by religious devotion, people created music and objects and buildings of incredible beauty.

It would be a huge shame to lose them, so what will we do with all the churches?

Many are in villages where they are the only shared space for people to meet – I can think of several locally where the Church allows lunches and coffee mornings.

Most people consider them beautiful and don’t want them to fall down. The cheapest way to prevent this is to prevent them getting into a bad state in the first place. It’s much more expensive to fix than prevent problems on old buildings. But even that preventative maintenance is not cheap.

If we want to keep them for community use, and in something like their current state, the cost of maintaining all these churches will have to be borne by the wider community, as the number of worshippers will just be too few.

One possibility is that (secular) Parish Councils might pay towards their upkeep. That makes sense – places can look after their own churches if they value them. Although there’s been some legal confusion about whether this is allowed, it basically is. But Parish and town councils only cover around 36% of the population of England (it’s far more in the rest of the UK.)

That leaves a lot of beautiful churches to keep up and no obvious group to do it.

There are voluntary groups doing what they can. I can strongly recommend the amazing Friends of Friendless Churches3, and the Churches Conservation Trust.

One part of the answer is a degree of central government funding. George Osborne as chancellor provided funding for Cathedral repairs. I would certainly rather spend the DCMS budget on this, rather than some of the stuff it currently funds.

Perhaps there’s some way government funding can catalyse or seed community groups to take on their churches long term.

All over the country there are local conversations going on in communities that want to keep their churches – at least as open buildings for the community.

In many cases there is a solution to be had in which it will stay open for community use and occasional worship.

My worry is that many churches, like St Wistan’s, will get into a bad state of repair before they are placed in the trust of the wider community, making it difficult for local people to keep them going.

We have built so much that is boring, ugly or disappointing in my lifetime. It would be tragic to let the beautiful things we do have to fall into ruin. Worshippers understandably hate to see a church shut its doors or fall into disrepair. But if we are going to avoid that on a huge scale in the coming years some creative solutions will be needed.

END

The end of mainstream Christianity in Britain…
… And what will we do with all the churches?

By NEIL O’BRIEN
April 25, 2024

…Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came…
– Philip Larkin

St. Wistan’s Church in Wigston is being decommissioned. It’s to be sold off.

It has been shut for several years, and is profoundly sad to visit.