During October, all churches are encouraged to think about the numbers attending different services for data collected as part of the Statistics for Mission process. Parish Resources Officer, Chris Boden, explores why this is important and who should be counted!
Each year, the national church asks parishes to complete three returns, one on its finances, one on its carbon footprint, and one on attendance at services, which is known as Statistics for Mission. While all the data cannot be entered fully until the end of the year, it is helpful to think about it now, as several of the statistics are drawn from services taken in October.
This data is hugely useful at both a parish and diocesan level and it is important that we collect the right information. When counting people at your services, you should remember to include any non-traditional services that you hold, for example, a café church or other new worshipping community in your church hall. Please also ensure that all children and young people who come into contact with your church are included – we cannot demonstrate progress made towards our target of doubling the number of children and young people in our churches if we haven’t counted them!
By collecting several years of data, we can track trends in our churches across the country and locally in our diocese and parishes.
For example, we know that the number of people worshipping in our communities has increased since 2019 (2023: 13,000, 2019: 12,900), whereas electoral roll numbers are still decreasing (2023: 11,000, 2019: 12,000). This could suggest that people are coming to our churches but not engaging in traditional ways, such as joining the electoral roll. Similarly, we have seen the attendance figures for Christmas Day and Easter services recover more quickly post-Covid than regular attendance.
The Statistics for Mission also have a key role to play when we look at them in the context of an individual parish. When I work with parishes to create a Parish Finance Plan or meet with newly appointed incumbents, there is always some time to look at these statistics, and often they bring pleasant surprises. I get to hear the stories behind the numbers, who has now started attending, who has moved away or died, what new things the churches are doing and the wonderful missional activities that they do to engage their communities. This brings a new way of looking at the trends. Even a small increase in the size of our worshipping communities represents many hours of patient love and care of those who come to our services.
Working with parishes to look at these figures means we see where green shoots are growing and think about how we can better focus the ministry and mission to reflect this. This can be exciting and help change the narrative that we often hear in our churches of decline to be one of hope and growth. It can also help us to access additional funding from the national church and others to put back into parishes.
So please do make sure that your Statistics for Mission are collected as accurately as possible. Everyone who comes to our churches counts and it’s important that they are counted!
If you would like to talk about the data for your parish, please do contact me, and if you would like to look at the National Reports, these can be found on the Church of England's website.
The 2024 Statistics for Mission is open until 31 January 2025 – if you have any questions about how to access this please contact Judith Nex.
Figures provided by the Church of England Data Services team and rounded to the nearest 100.
