A FIFTH year of growth in attendance in the Church of England was reported by Church House, Westminster, on Wednesday.
Preliminary returns for the annual report Statistics for Mission, based on data from about 80 per cent of churches, suggests a worshipping community of 1.023 million — a rise of 1.4 per cent on 2024.
Over a typical week, an estimated 707,000 people attended C of E services, up 0.7 per cent on the previous year, and 15.5 per cent more than in 2021, when attendance first began to rebound after Covid.
Average attendance at Sunday services stood at 590,000 — up 1.6 per cent on the 2024 figure.
Greater growth was recorded at Christmas Eve and Christmas Day services, where attendance was up 5.5 per cent at 1.96 million, in addition to 4.8 million attendances during Advent — a two-per-cent rise. Easter attendance was up by 7.8 per cent at 1.03 million.
A statement from Church House said that attendance remained below pre-pandemic levels. In 2019, the worshipping community stood at 1.11 million. Average weekly attendance was 854,000, and usual Sunday attendance was 690,000. Attendance at Christmas was 2.33 million, and Easter 1.18 million.
A pattern of numerical decline had taken hold in the decades before the pandemic. The 2024 Statistics for Mission observed: “It is impossible to say what would have happened if there had not been a pandemic, but it is reasonable to assume that the decline would have continued. We would therefore not expect numbers to return to their 2019 values, even once all pandemic effects are over.”
It reported that adult attendance in 2024 was below 2019 levels and remained below the projected pre-pandemic trend. Child attendance in 2024 was close to or above the projected pre-pandemic trend, but was declining at a faster rate than adult attendance had been falling before the pandemic.
It is now 13 years since the Resourcing the Future Task Force recommended a shift to a grant-based system of resourcing dioceses in a bid to turn around numerical decline, which resulted in the move to the Strategic Development Fund (SDF) — and, later, Strategic Mission and Ministry Investment Board (SMMIB) — in 2017.
The SMMIB’s annual report, published this month, says that its investments to date — through both the SDF (£180 million allocated between 2014 and 2022) and SMMIB (including £256 million allocated through the Diocesan Investment Programme) — have resulted in 46,000 people “newly participating in different church settings” (News, 8 May).
Both the Bible Society and bishops have observed that decline is, in part, a reflection of the demographic profile of the Church of England, where more than one third of regular worshippers are over 70. “Given our age profile, we have a certain percentage of decline baked in each year as people are promoted to glory,” the Bishop of Hereford, the Rt Revd Richard Jackson, said last year (News, 13 June 2025).
What’s in our hands?, a review of learning from rural projects funded by the SDF, conducted by Brendan Research, suggested that “demographics in deep rural areas mean that maintaining Sunday attendance numbers is growth in disguise and that ‘scaling up’ approaches with ambitious targets are unlikely to work.”
An analysis of 2019 and 2024 Statistics for Mission figures presented to the General Synod last year in response to a question from Amanda Robbie, a laywoman in Lichfield diocese, revealed that 12 per cent of churches had grown across three measures of weekly and Sunday attendance.
Responding to the statistics preview this week, the Archbishop of Canterbury said: “It is so encouraging to see the ways that God is at work in our Church. With more people coming to services on Sundays and throughout the week, as well as during Advent, Christmas and Easter, it shows a yearning for meaning and connection in our often busy and fractured world.
“I give thanks for the clergy, lay people and volunteers who each week make people feel welcome in every parish across our country.”