What is in Kelvin's Head?

Counting our many blessings – Scottish Episcopal Statistics

17/11/2014
This Sunday is the day when the Scottish Episcopal Church counts how many people are in church. It isn’t a count of the number of people who want to be Episcopalians, it isn’t a count of those who say they are Episcopalians – in fact it isn’t even a count of Episcopalians at all. It is simply a count of the number of people who happen to be there on that particular Sunday.

I like this Sunday because when the people are counted, I find myself counting them as so many wonderful blessings.

I think that statistics are important and that they can tell us things. They can’t tell us everything but they can tell us a huge amount.

Now, whenever we talk about the stats in the Scottish Episcopal Church we end up talking about how we gather them and there’s always people ready to say that the numbers that we gather are the wrong numbers.

Some people want to make a case for gathering them as an average over a number of weeks. Others say that counting the number of people at Sunday services doesn’t come close to saying how many people the church deals with.

To an extent that is true but it then leads on to absurd suggestions that instead of counting the number of people at worship we should count the number of people who come through the building. You get people wanting to count the Tai Chi group, the AA group that hires the hall or the dog club. I think some people are so desperate to pretend that their numbers are not in fact going downwards that they’d be happy to count the dogs.

The truth is, we need to be fairly consistent in what we count. It isn’t the actual number that we arrive at that matters that much, however interesting it might be in any given year. The real question is how we are doing over time.

I’ve been in many a meeting in the church where we assign money or other resources to something that we claim to be mission and then talk in the rest of the meeting as though we have no expectation at all that the numbers will go in anything other than a downward direction.

I wish we did more with our statistics and I’m quite keen that we keep gathering them.

The extraordinary thing that we discovered last year was that there are over 100 000 people in Scotland who think they are Anglicans, Episcopalians, C of E or some other Anglican variant of answering the question in the Census. The question that really should have been at the top of the agenda of a lot of our meetings is why we don’t seem to see more than about 15 000 of them on a Sunday.

Here’s what I think:
- The numerical trend has been going downwards for a long time.
- The really steep fall is in those who claim to be part of the church but who are not communicants.
- We shouldn’t be surprised that non-communicants have disappeared when we’ve been pushing communion as the main service for 40 years or so.
- We don’t generally behave as though we believe our mission plans, policies and strategies are likely to succeed.
- All the evidence points to the fact that our mission plans, policies and strategies (and we’ve had tons of them) have not succeeded.
- The national profile of the church needs to be fixed.
- We need to discover a new, respectful ecumenism that will help us to turn our backs on the kind of ecumenism that harms our ability to speak of having something distinctive.
- Getting people to turn up on more Sundays in the month would give an immediate and dramatic boost to our numbers. We need to speak of why it is important to worship weekly again.
- Churches with poor websites are ~~going to go~~ going out of business and for good reasons. They shouldn’t expect bail-outs from others.
- The Scottish Episcopal Church has only ever really grown when it has been in the business of opening new congregations.
- You don’t plant new congregations unless you are confident that you’ve got something good that’s worth sharing.
- The Scottish Episcopal Church may not be doing as badly as some other churches. We may be increasing in market share but need a bit of research to see whether that is the case.
Anyway, all that being said, this Sunday counts because this is the Sunday when we do count.

If you want to be counted yourself then you need to turn up.

Like with most things.
Christ the King, church statistics, counting

8 responses to “A Christian Country?”

Tim

29/04/2014

Reality is pluralist; a secular basis is good to level the playing-field.

I think Cameron is not so much failing to live in `now’ but hell-bent on dragging the country back to the 50s (mostly the 1850s).

One of Blair’s very few positives was “we don’t do God”, or at least postponing doing God until mostly after he was out of Number 10.

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Fr Steve

30/04/2014

Very good analysis. In Australia I still find I get prickly when people tell me I belong to the C of E! (It has not been formally such since the the 70s)
It is good not to see ourselves in the light of another nation…England…but it is good to recognise to recognise our heritage …Anglican.
I spent part of last year in Hawaii as a locum…..when asked last week by the Mothers’ Union..”What was the difference?” I was a bit glib…but could confidential say “Nothing at all!” Given the fact that 1/3 of the congregation were Filipinos it is an interesting reflection.
Don’t think we should overstate it, but being Anglican is a great thing. But there is much about it that needs a good kick up the backside too!

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Mark

30/04/2014

Though we ought to, maybe proudly, remember that the SEC is not a daughter Church of the Church of England. I’m afraid Cameron isn’t doing himself any favours with the way he’s made these statements, and as far as Scotland goes there’s a large part that has been disenfranchised by any statements that Cameron or any English person says, because they view them as ‘english propaganda’. Sadly, I don’t view the Scottish Government with much love either, having used their position to unfairly tout their party’s stance. Between two opposite poles, both backed by Government, how is one to hear a balanced view, instead of that great love of Blair’s Government, spin.

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Eamonn

30/04/2014

‘I do however have a big problem with starting up a new country and writing Christianity into the constitutional definition of what that country is.’ I agree totally. I lived for 26 years in a country where the constitution, in respect of family matters, reflected the views both of the majority RC church and the Church of Ireland. For example, in order to make divorce possible, an amendment to the constitution had to be passed by a majority voting in a nation-wide referendum. This was only achieved in 1995, and only by a margin of 50.28% to 49.72%. Constitutional definition of religious matters always leads to discrimination.

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Robin

01/05/2014

> ‘I do however have a big problem with starting up a new country’

I have a big problem with seeing Scottish independence (if it were to be re-established following a YES vote in the referendum) as ‘starting up a new country’ . . .

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Alan McManus

02/05/2014

I loathe the smug fortress mentality of many of my co-religionists in RC schools while noting that these schools perform at least as well as non-denominational. I loathe the cowardice of the Reformed churches in failing to speak out against the violence and prejudice associated with a certain group of charitable organisations every July and the complicity of local authorities who DO NOT assure the safety of citizens and of international visitors unused to the historical hatreds of the Scottish central belt. While the latter is true, I continue to support the former and look to Canada as a model of multicultural accommodation than to the aggressive laïcité of France.

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1. Kelvin Holdsworth
  
  03/05/2014
  
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  [vimeo 69307025 w=500 h=281] 20130623 Kelvin Holdsworth Music Sunday from Kelvin Holdsworth on Vimeo.
  
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Allan Ronald

03/05/2014

Given the choice between the venomous and literally murderous hatreds of Central Belt sectarianism and ‘aggressive laicité’ I’ll take the latter any day.

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