How many people attend Sunday worship in Essex and East London?

How many people attend Sunday worship in Essex and East London?

by Canon Don Cardy, Chair of the Budget Sub-Committee

Nearly 166,000 people go to church in Essex and East London every Sunday. In broad terms a quarter are Anglican, nearly a third are Roman Catholics and more than four in ten are Nonconformists.

At the end of 2007 parts of the national press carried a story that for the first time the number of Roman Catholics at Sunday mass exceeded the number attending Church of England services.  The story originated from results of the 2005 Church Census conducted by Christian Research, an independent organisation, and no doubt was expected to surprise us all. Links were made with the numbers of immigrants from Eastern Europe.

Sunday church attendance in Essex and East London

Source: Christian Research (2005)

I was immediately reminded of a series of lectures I attended a few years ago at Essex University given by Dr James Bettley who has since become the Chairman of our Diocesan Advisory Committee.  The subject was the Church of England and its Rivals in 19th Century Essex.  Early on we learned about the Census of Religious Worship in March 1851 carried out at the same time as the ordinary National Census of population.  It was a census of places of worship and was completed by clergy and lay church officials from all denominations.  It happened to be on Mothering Sunday which in subsequent Parliamentary debate was claimed to have distorted the attendances.  Information was collected about the number of seats available for public worship and the numbers attending Divine Service in the morning, afternoon and evening.

We were provided with the results of the census for the County of Essex which at that time was virtually the same as our Diocese of Chelmsford, although the diocese was formed much later in 1914. What this showed was that there were 746 places of worship of which 429 were Church of England, 9 Roman Catholic and 312 Nonconformist.  The numbers in attendance of all ages were 154,823 Church of England, 2,245 Roman Catholic and 110,115 Nonconformist, equivalent to 72% of the total population of 369,300.

For those interested in more recent attendance patterns the best source is the series of Church Censuses conducted by Dr Peter Brierley, until recently executive director of Christian Research.  He conducted a census in 1979 which was published by the Bible Society, another in 1989 published by MARC Europe, then in 2001 published by Christian Research, and finally the one in 2005.  One of the problems with these surveys is that they are reported by local authority so the Essex data needs to have the details of our five London Boroughs added it to give statistics for the whole diocese.  Since these boroughs are contained within the Greater London results and not published separately, Peter Brierley kindly provided the necessary details.

In 1989 there were 1,696 places of worship of which 596 were Church of England, 158 Roman Catholic and 942 Nonconformist.  The numbers of all ages in attendance were 51,200 Church of England, 68,800 Roman Catholic and 84,800 Nonconformist, equivalent to 8% the total population of 2,552,200.  So in our diocese our numbers at worship on a Sunday were well out-numbered by both our Roman Catholic and Nonconformist brothers and sisters.  I therefore found the recent press story rather unremarkable, although in other parts of England it may have been a surprise.

What interested me the moment I discovered all this back in 2002 was why such a pattern in Essex?  We would all expect Roman Catholic numbers to be high in Liverpool, for example, but why were both Catholics and Nonconformists so prominent in Essex?  A Census conducted by the Bishop of London, Henry Compton, in 1676 to discover the number of Anglican conformists, Roman Catholic recusants and Protestant dissenters suggested even then that Essex was the strongest Nonconformist county in the Province of Canterbury.

It’s here that I must leave it for church historians to explain fully but it is clear that Essex had particular features which led to competition with the Established Church after the Reformation.  We were close to the continent and its influence; Bibles, printed on the continent, could be smuggled through our small harbours, Cambridge University was close at hand and had some strong Evangelical and Puritan colleges.    But what of the growth of Roman Catholic numbers since 1851?  In 1829 the Catholic Emancipation Act gave back political and civil liberties to Roman Catholics and then from 1845 the Potato Famine in Ireland resulted in many Irish immigrants settling in the industrial centres, including London, and hence Essex.  The rest, as they say, is history!

The figures raise many other questions the figures and we will return to some of them on another occasion.

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