Long View

One of the first little tasks I undertook at Swanvale Halt was to go back through the old service registers to discover what had really happened in terms of numbers attending the church, rather than what people thought had happened. I tabulated the average number of communicants in October each year, as October is the month the Church nationally asks us to look at when we do our annual returns, for as far back as we have records in the church (the older ones are now at the local archives centre). This took us back to 1965. What I discovered was a huge spike in the late '60s as my charismatic predecessor at that time finally abandoned sung Mattins on Sunday mornings and reorganised the Eucharist, reaching a peak in 1970 at about 185 communicants on Sundays. This fell off a bit quite quickly but remained at the 140-150 level right until about 1996 when it suddenly began dropping and has stuck at about 80 since 2002.

This I knew. What I hadn't done until a few weeks ago was to compare those figures with the Christmas and Easter communicants. Interestingly when I carried out the same exercise these data showed something very different. There is the same long-term decline; but, while both sets of figures show a spike during the earlier part of the incumbency of the great Father Thingy (1970 for the Easter communicants, 1971 for the Christmas ones), those spikes don't take the communicant figures much above what they'd been a few years before, and without any of the earlier data they may represent nothing more than normal year-by-year fluctuation. The Christmas and Easter communicant levels have also fallen further over the 1965-2014 period than average October ones: the latter are just under a half what they were, the former under a third. 

This all suggests two things. Firstly, if the great festival attendances represent the sort of people who self-identify as Christians but only come to worship now and again, that 'hinterland' has declined over five decades faster than the worshipping community itself, which has important implications for the church's scope to recruit people whose commitment can be increased. Secondly, the liturgical revolution of the late 1960s and the 'golden age' of Father Thingy's incumbency didn't actually have much impact on the community at large, however much it may have energised and enthused the church internally. That tells you a lot, too.