Christmas Church Attendance
During last month the Church of England published its provisional church attendance figures for 2007. The accompanying press release highlighted a number of findings, one of which was captured by a headline in the Church Times; “More go to church when Christmas falls at weekend”. The opening paragraph reported a senior church statistician as saying that “Churches should consider shifting some of their festivities to the weekend before Christmas, in order to maximise Christmas congregations”.
Apparently it seems there is a general trend, when Christmas Eve falls on a Saturday or Sunday, for there to be considerable increases in attendance at church services. I decided it would be interesting to see whether this was the case in the Diocese of Chelmsford. This was easy to do as in 2001 a new system was introduced for collecting attendance data and, since we already have 2/3rds of the forms in for 2008, we can look at the pattern from 2001 to 2008. Churches are asked to return the numbers of people of all ages attending any service (day or evening) on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, as far as possible counting each person only once in that period even if they attend more than once. I’m sure the latter requirement is quite a challenge where congregations are really large; nonetheless here are the results excluding the Cathedral.
For convenience each year is marked with the days on which Christmas Eve and Christmas Day happened to fall. The attendance averaged 100,000 from 2001 to 2003 and 107,000 from 2007 to 2008. This of itself confirms the anecdotal evidence that church attendance over Christmas is on the increase. However it is plain that attendance peaked in 2005 and 2006 at 109,000 and 119,000 respectively. The highest attendance was when Christmas Eve was on a Sunday. That headline was right: more do go church when Christmas is at the weekend, but what about moving festivities to the weekend before Christmas?
One last point: over this period all-age attendance on a normal Sunday has averaged 37,000, which makes attendance at Christmas nearly three times that figure.
Canon Don Cardy
26th February 2009
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