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The Growing Importance of Larger Churches in England

The results of the 2005 English Church Census were published in September 2006 in a book called Pulling Out of the Nosedive. The detailed county results are given in Religious Trends No. 6 2006/2007. Both were published and distributed by Christian Research in September 2006.

Figure 1 shows the distribution of churches of different sizes in England in 2005, and how that has changed since 1989.

Figure 1: Size of English churches, 1989-2005

The average size of churches seems to be getting smaller. This is clear from the increasing proportions of churches which are very small and the reducing proportions of churches which have more than one hundred people. In 1989, the average size of a Sunday congregation was 123 people; by 1998, this had become ninety-eight and had dropped to eighty-four in 2005. These figures include Roman Catholic churches which, on average, are four times larger than others, and if these are excluded, the average size for Protestant churches becomes, respectively, eighty-seven, seventy-three, and sixty-seven in 2005.

Churches and Churchgoers
The proportion of churchgoers varies by the size of the church. With two-thirds, seventy percent, of churches having fewer than one hundred people in their congregation in 2005, it is interesting to see that cumulatively these accounted for only a quarter, twenty-five percent, of churchgoers. Figure 2 illustrates the disparity between number of churches and number of churchgoers.

Figure 2: Percentages of churches and churchgoers, 2005

The Largest Churches
The largest churches, some five percent of all the 37,500 churches in England, are collectively responsible for almost one-third of churchgoers. These churches are therefore a significant element of English Christianity.