active involvement.
The church has been self-limiting, first, in its relevance. It has failed to connect with people’s daily concerns. Callum Brown argues that Christian piety was located in masculinity before 1800, but in femininity increasingly thereafter. ‘Paeans of praise were heaped on women’s innate piety whilst brickbats were hurled at men’s susceptibility to temptation’ (Brown, 2009, p. 195). Churchgoing decreased from the late nineteenth century, and the fall-off was especially marked among men, whose social pastimes were ignored or frowned upon. Yet men still had their children baptized and attended the major festivals. They stayed plugged into church because their wives remained committed.
In the 1960s, however, the nature of femininity changed radically. Growing numbers of women entered the workplace, while the sexual revolution challenged traditional ideas of courtship and marriage. Women began to see themselves in a different light, but the church was slow to respond. It held on to a traditional view of the family and women, making it seem irrelevant. Women became less involved, and with them their families.
It is precisely because ‘the personal’ changed so much in the 1960s – and has continued to change in the four decades since – that the churches are in seemingly terminal decay and British Christian culture is in its death throes. . . . The search for personal faith is now in ‘the New Age’ of minor cults, personal development and consumer choice. (Brown, 2009, p. 196)
Though helpful, Brown sees changes in society as the prime cause of the church’s decline, whereas arguably the church’s failure to respond to these changes is just as important. The church has been slow to engage with the day-to-day concerns of contemporary women (as well as men), while remaining faithful to the Christian story. Other organizations have adapted to social change, but not the church. The British retailer Tesco, for example, started with supermarkets, developed hypermarkets and then introduced Tesco Local. It has retained the brand while innovating the outlets. By contrast, a gulf has opened up between today’s postmodern mood and the modernist feel of the church.
Second, the church has been self-limiting in its availability. It has become inaccessible on an everyday basis to swathes of people. Members have tended to set the rules – when they meet, where and the form their meetings take – without much thought for people on the outside. Sunday morning worship, for instance, is almost impossible for people who are in employment at weekends, have sporting commitments at that time or whose family obligations take them away on Sundays.
More important is that any worshipping community will put other people off. Identity is based on identifying with particular groups of people and not identifying with others – ‘birds of a feather flock together’. This goes beyond older congregations not appealing to the iPod generation. Obvious and less subtle cues, from social background, to educational level, to values and interests, will tell a visitor whether the congregation contains ‘my kind of people’. Most people find it difficult to join a group that seems strange and different. Large segments of the population, therefore, will not identify with the church for social rather than religious reasons, and this necessarily makes the church self-limiting.
Rational choice theorists, such as Roger Finke, maintain that the scale of church attendance is linked to the number of options available. Put simply, if the church narrows down the options for people – in terms of when they can worship, the style on offer or the social nature of the groups they can join – fewer will be likely to attend. Well discussed by Grace Davie (2007, pp. 67–88), the theory suggests that where people can choose from plenty of different churches, as in North America, churchgoing flourishes but where the choice is less, as traditionally in Europe, attendance declines. Finke goes so far as to say that an increase in religious supply creates an increase in demand, not the other way round (cited by Davie, 2007, p. 73).
Though the theory has a strong intuitive appeal, it has been remarkably difficult to prove. Daniel Olson has examined attempts to relate the pluralism index – the number of religious groups in an area and the evenness of their sizes1 – to religious involvement for the whole area. He found that
just about any measure of pluralism that one can think of is likely to have a non-causal, mathematically necessary component in its relationship with just about any measure of religious participation and belief. . . . This leaves researchers in the frustrating situation of having many theoretical reasons for thinking that religious pluralism should cause religious participation and belief to either increase or decrease, but with no reliable way of studying these effects. (Olson, 2008, p. 101)
Despite the lack of formal proof, it is highly plausible that if you widen choice, individuals are more likely to find an expression of church that appeals to them and get involved. Failure to widen access, it is fair to assume, has put the church in a missional straitjacket.
Third, the church has been self-limiting in its organization. Robin Gill (2003) attributes much of the drop in attendance to excessive church building, especially in the nineteenth century. Competition between denominations and over-optimism produced too many churches and churches too large for the local population. In some areas, such as Cornwall, many of the churches could never be full, even if a substantial proportion of local residents attended. Over-provision meant that maintaining buildings consumed excessive resources. Clergy were allocated to buildings – often largely empty in rural areas – rather than to people, so that the deployment of clergy failed to mirror the distribution of the population. Maintaining near-empty buildings discouraged local congregations, which bred disillusionment, which led to decline, which bred further disillusionment.2
It was not just that too many churches were built. Gill notes that the rural model of church was unsuited to the urban contexts of the mid nineteenth century. Churches failed to provide the small networks that might have preserved religious communities in urban areas. ‘Fragile beliefs depend for their survival upon small-scale communities. In the absence of such communities, religious beliefs soon withered in cities and a gradual demise of churchgoing inevitably followed.’ (Gill, 2003, p. 3) Once decline in attendance was well under way, Christian belief followed suit. There was no corporate experience to sustain it (Gill, 2008).
Gill’s doubts about the prevailing church model are supported by the mid 1970s research of the Church of England’s Urban Church Project (Urban Church Project, 1974; Wasdell, 1977, pp. 366–70). The research showed that membership of the local church as a percentage of its parish population dropped drastically with a rise in population. Small churches in small parishes reached a higher proportion of the population than large churches in large parishes. Large size constrained congregational growth. A greater number of small congregations would make mission more effective. Subsequent research (for example, Jackson, 2002, pp. 108–45; Schwartz, 2006, pp. 48–50) has confirmed that small churches are more likely to grow than bigger ones. The church has had too many buildings, it seems, but not enough congregations.
The Urban Church Project argued that the self-limiting size of congregations was largely due to clergy-based mission. The laity tended to add fewer people than those who died or left a congregation. It was left to full-time clergy to make up the shortfall. If they failed to do so, the congregation would shrink till a balance between gains and losses was reached. Only in rare
