MEDIAN all-age weekly attendance at a Church of England church in 2024 was 26, down from 34.5 in 2019, Statistics for Mission reported (News, 31 October 2025). This means that half or more of services have this number or fewer worshippers most Sundays.
Anyone who attends a church of this size and perhaps many who worship in larger congregations will have felt a certain sense of precariousness during the past few years. The idea of “fragile churches” was first suggested by Anne Lawson, who interviewed clergy in rural parishes in the diocese of Chester before the Covid pandemic. Among the signs of fragility which she noted were struggles to maintain historic buildings and to find lay people to fill crucial posts such as that of churchwarden.
We picked up this idea and incorporated some items about fragile churches in the two surveys that we ran with the help of the Church Times in 2020 and 2021, during the pandemic lockdowns. We phrased them to gauge anxiety about the future: “Our church building will not be financially viable” and “Key lay people will step down and be difficult to replace.”
The aim was to see whether people in rural churches had a greater sense of fragility than those in other churches, and, then, whether the sense of fragility worsened as the pandemic wore on. The first survey results (Comment, 20 November 2020) suggested that 34 per cent of the clergy in rural parishes thought that their building would not be financially viable, higher than the equivalent figures for the clergy with parishes in towns (20 per cent), suburbs (18 per cent), or inner cities (24 per cent).
When it came to finding it difficult to get lay people to fill key posts, the figures were 29 per cent in rural parishes, 24 per cent in towns, 23 per cent in rural areas, and 20 per cent in inner cities. Our second pandemic survey suggested that pessimism about human resources had increased among both the clergy and he lay people, especially in rural areas, where 49 per cent of the clergy in our survey thought that key lay people would be difficult to replace.
IN 2024, three years after the last pandemic lockdowns, we ran another survey with the help of the Church Times and others within and beyond the Church of England. Part of the aim of the survey was to see how things had changed since the pandemic.
We know that numbers in churches fell dramatically, even when in-person worship was possible in 2021, but there has been a partial recovery since then. Has this been matched by increased optimism in relation to fragile churches?
Our survey garnered more than 5000 replies, of which 3826 were from the Church of England. Of these, 701 stipendiary parochial clergy and 1943 lay people completed the two key items on fragile church. We changed the wording to reflect present realities rather than future possibilities. The results are shown in the table, which gives the percentage of each group who agreed with the two statements.
FOUR important trends are apparent in these results.
First, the clergy tended to be more pessimistic than the lay people about maintaining buildings and finding lay people to fill key posts. In both items and every location, a higher proportion of clergy than laity agreed with our statements. Is this because clergy tend to be naturally more pessimistic than laity? We have data on that, too, and the answer is almost certainly “No.” Instead, it may be that clergy are more acutely aware of the problems because they feel the pressure more directly. Ask any incumbent as the annual parochial church meeting approaches but there are still no nominations for replacement churchwardens.
Second, there is greater disparity between the two items than during the pandemic. Fears about the unviability of buildings have generally not been realised, but fears about human resources seem worse than was expected. Somehow, we manage to keep our buildings going, but finding people to lead congregational life is proving to be the greatest challenge.
Third, people in rural churches remain more pessimistic than those in urban areas. This was true for both the clergy and the lay people, and for both items. This is not to say that non-rural areas are not feeling the pinch. About two-thirds of the clergy in these areas struggled to replace key lay people, but the figure for rural clergy was a staggering 87 per cent.
Fourth, the situation with replacing key lay people has dramatically worsened since the pandemic. Taking clergy responses from rural parishes: in 2020, 29 per cent considered that such people would be difficult to replace, a figure that increased to 49 per cent in 2021 and stood at 87 per cent in 2024.
If there is some evidence of growth in attendance since the pandemic, it may be that this is caused by the arrival of younger or less experienced churchgoers who do not feel able to fill the posts that are vital to a thriving lay ministry in parishes.
More research needs to be done to find out exactly why churches are flagging when it comes to finding lay people to step into parish ministries. At a time when the Church nationally is promoting the importance and necessity of a thriving lay ministry, it seems that the laity may be lacking confidence to step up to the plate.
The Revd Andrew Village is a Professor Emeritus, and Canon Leslie J. Francis is a Visiting Professor, at York St John University.
Read a more detailed account of this research in Rural Theology, and the references therein, here.