From The Guardian-The graphs in the latest of the Church of England's attendance figures look like the cool-down portion of a bicycle ride – the precipitous and frightening descent is over, and now there is just a gentle slightly downward path. The problem for the church is that they all look like that whatever is being measured. There isn't really a large portion of hope in the age profile and there is nothing in the figures to supply a cheerful story, equivalent to last year's cathedral figures.
The British Humanist Association was quickly out with a press release pointing out that the figures show the church is still irrelevant to most people and to argue that this shows the wrongness of establishment. But this could have been written at any point in the last 20 years, and almost certainly has been. A possibly more interesting question is whether things are going to change, or whether the church will pootle along, like an exhausted cyclist, until it finally wobbles over and collapses.
Most of the people who really believe this as a matter of urgency are other Christians. Catholics have grown rather less self-confident about reconverting England since their experience of the former Anglicans in the Ordinariate. But the various evangelical and charismatic groups, most of them loosely organised as Baptists, remain confident that liberalism will erode the church and that only the rotten media are propping up its rotting facade. Then they see themselves inheriting the remains.
More here-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2013/may/07/anglican-faith-church-attendance-not-enough
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