'Total Worshipping'

The time has come to compile our annual return to the diocese, a matter I've moaned about before. This year, once again, I reached the dreaded question about how many people have left the 'total worshipping community' and found myself tempted to respond 'All of them. I'm the only bugger here. Now leave me alone' which is not a terribly positive reaction, for me as much as for the powers-that-be.

However, I realised that thanks to my pastoral directory compiled earlier on last year I do actually now have a means of getting a handle on this, provided some limits are set. Who is in our 'total worshipping community'? I decided to exclude special attendances at the Crib Service, or other big services through the year, as I won't know who a lot of those people are anyway, but to include everyone who shows up at a couple of Family Services in a year or who is a Messy Church regular, or to whom we take communion at home. That gave us, according to the Diocese's categories, 44 children, 5 young people, 100 adults under 70, and 77 over-70s, a total of 226. You will notice, perhaps, that this isn't very far off the guesstimate I made a couple of years ago. Of course the figures are very rough as I will have included and excluded various people I shouldn't, but at least it gives a benchmark for being able to answer this question with less stress in the future!