How many people go to Church

There’s a standard fish ’n chips dwindling congregations narrative for the Church of England. It’s almost childishly simple, and goes like this. Numbers of Churchgoers are falling rapidly and inexorably because:

1. Most people used to believe in God and go to Church, but since the 1960’s fewer of them have done either due to the inexorable advance of something called “secularization” which means they get what they used to get from religion from science.
   
   
2. (with spiteful glee for relish) the whole C of E is dwindling away because it's not Conservative enough. If it just held firm to what it was in the 1950’s it would be thriving like Churches in the Gobal South.
   
   
3. (with righteous indignation for relish) the whole C of E is dwindling away because it’s not Progressive enough. If it just ditched everything it used to be in the 1950’s it would reconnect with people, like radical non-Denominational Churches do.
   

These last two points plainly cancel each other out, and probably go beyond strict statistical analysis..

Figures in Church have rarely been collected accurately. There is a varied pattern of some up, some down and always has been. I can only comment on what I see, on the basis of two or three Church registers most weeks from among our 288 congregations in Bucks. Discussing Church attendance with people on the ground, since I started giving any attention to the figures, has led me to question every part of the classic narrative above. Assuming the acuracy of the figures, they’re are all over the place. I’ve seen everythng from decline by up to a third, to a doubling of attendances across a large deanery since 2004.

The grossed up pattern, eliminating places with no return, goes a bit like this: serious general decline in the eighties, accelerating in the nineties, then bouncing along the bottom modestly in the early nougthies, with a modest rise across the board since mid decade. You can find individual examples of anything you like in there somewhere, but there’s no simple linear decline across the board, certainly not the way it was ten years ago.

The fact is that although total numbers of Churchgoers relate to total numbers of attendances, the two are not, in fact, the same thing. People drop out as well as drop in, so apart from the demographics of an aging population which is not replacing itself, churches are running up a down escalator anyway.

Recognizing the distinction, what people characteristically reoprt is that actually more human beings, sometimes many more, are coming to Church. However, the regularity with which they do so collapsed in the nineties (giving rise to rapid decline in many attendance figures), and has become increasingly volatile. Only a very few now come twice a Sunday and every week.

One kind of narrative, as reported: a church where thirty or forty people attended on Sundays ten years ago, but now there were forty or fifty, swinging between 25 and 75 depending on personal factors. However there had been one notable occasion in the past six months where three hundred had shown up for a particular service, not Christmas Day, where years ago the figures were under a hundred. This comes with a very hit and miss pattern of initiatives, most of which have failed to attract new people, but one of which was a spectacular success.

This implies a picture I'd be interested to see empirically disproved, in the spirit of Ronald Reagan’s radical advice “not to be afraid to see what you see.”

It feels like more people are coming to Church, but radically less often and in a far more volatile way. The grossed up result is thus unpredictable, but currently in Bucks, with the balance of everything, it’s gently growing (1-3% annually) across the board. Size of Church of membership is shrinking, but far more stable than that of institutions like political parties, with an increasing number of people acting like consumers rather than stakeholder-members. Meanwhile giving has risen dramatically over 20 years, along with vocations to holy orders — there are now more dog-collars in the county than in 1931 (thank you, Whittaker’s almanac), but a third fewer stipendiaries. Congregations are getting older in line with the national native demographic. Radically fewer children and young people are involved with Church on Sunday, and the Institutional Church’s prime point of contact with them is now through schools or not at all. The big wild card is globalization, and it’s interesting that the thirty odd Churches in our deanery that has doubled regular attendance 2003-8 may be experiencing “the London effect” — the more multicultural a congregation is, the faster it grows.

PS the picture is Counting Sheep by Karen Aune, available here.

Punky Business with Ian Dury

Musical biopics are a funny old genre. Song of Norway is a nice film. People who hate that one, however, may enjoy Mat Whitecross’ Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll. This chaotic picaresque romp contains lashings of all three — exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a 1980’s Hogarth — like Gin Lane 250 years ago, a riot of grotesque caricatures, much exaggerated swearing and snarling rending the air, sordid and messed up relationships.
Very Punk.

If you hate Punk music (and be honest, that’s what you’re meant to do) you will probably think this film is no more than a filthy old mess. The script is a coarse riot. Crude rumbustuous jumble is relieved by curiously clinical flashbacks to a nasty 1950’s Spastics School. This stands for a succession of Establishments against which Dury rebelled in his youth, including Wycombe Royal Grammar School, briefly attended in the fifties. Various iconic moments, such as Dury’s punchup with Omar Sharif, are alluded to but not portrayed.

So what of Ian Dury? He caught polio at age seven, he believed from a swimming pool. His schooldays were nasty, brutish and degrading, kindling lifelong rage and a rejection of all adult authority. His grown days were one perpetual run-in with the bottle. Especially after he’d had a few, he saw himself as a kind of Spartacus figure for disabled people. He pioneered wearing of razor blades as ear rings. While his band was based in Aylesbury he drove a maroon van bearing the words “Danger — Inflammable.” Bus full of nutters.

Dury was capable of moments of great affection, but fundamentally incapable of sustaining a grown-up relationship. He was an atrocious husband and father, but one who raised atrociousness to an art form. One sub-theme of this film parallells his parenting performance with that of his own old dad. Dury was very clever with words, and his furiously alienated stance made him a kind of mirror for the rest of us from somewhere way beyond decent society.

The film’s highlights are its occasional set piece numbers, includng such unexpected surrealistic pleasures as Hit Me with your Rhythm Stick performed underwater in a swimming pool, delivered with blazing energy and freewheeling anarchy. The film’s climax, though, is a riproaring Cover of Ian Dury’s contribution to the International Year of Disabled people (1981, you remember) — tastefully entitled Spasticus Autisticus:

I'm spasticus, I'm spasticus
I'm spasticus autisticus
I wibble when I piddle
Cos my middle is a riddle...
Hello to you out there in Normal Land
You may not comprehend my tale or understand
As I crawl past your window give me lucky looks
You can be my body but you'll never read my books...
I'm knobbled on the cobbles
Cos I hobble when I wobble
Swim!
So place your hard-earned peanuts in my tin
And thank the Creator you're not in the state I'm in
So long have I been languished on the shelf
I must give all proceedings to myself...
54 appliances in leather and elastic
100 000 thank yous from 27 spastics...

Ian Dury himself would have loved the look and feel of this film, probably as much as, if not more than, Grieg would have enjoyed Song of Norway. Andy Serkis does an energetic, more than capable job of impersonating the Diamond Geezer, assisted by authentic Blockheads. This is quality casting and acting, ladies and gentlemen. If you’ve given up reading this in disgust, Mr Dury would be tickled pink. If you haven’t, you probably should try and catch this film while it’s going by. I suspect, however, that its blend of blazing anger, pungent irony, verbal tiddlywinks, and angry toilet humour will not easily travel far beyond these shores.

Dury’s basic questions about how exceptional people are seen in society, their room for freedom not to be helped by well-meaning people, a notional right for anyone to define themselves however they damn well want, disability and autonomy, could still do with answering, thirty years on. And punk? Like most fashions it probably wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It seems little more than a rabid “Mr Angry” protest against the stifling conventionality of Britain in the fifties and sixties. Its incoherence makes it more like a burp in the face of the Establishment than an alternative way of life. Take away the object of its loathing, and all that is left is sound and fury, signifying, er, not a lot. But Dury’s fury was profoundly authentic, and this film is worth a look, especially if you are intrigued by the raw energy of Punk. I wouldn’t, however, take my mother in law. Seven out of Ten stars.

Michael Jackson Dead

The Death of Michael Jackson is a significant milestone, if not quite a Kennedy moment. Thriller remains the highest selling album and video ever, and cutural historians may well see him as the Elvis of his generation.

However repellent and bizarre the Sun’s “Wacko Jacko” had come to look and sound, with his strange colour, weird childish ego and nose jobs, Jackson was an astonishingly able entertainer. For all his undoubted personal and musical eclipse, he still managed to sell out a run of 50 O2 concerts next month.

Jackson’s stage act defined a central strand of a whole generation’s culture. His seamless song and dance fusion and OTT stage effects had astonishing visual impact, delivered to audiences at one fell swoop and largely without computer graphics, fusing talent, hard work and meticulous craftsmanship. Fred Astaire once phoned him to compliment him on his dancing. Along with Freddie Mercury’s performances, Jackson’s were the popular entertainment phenomenon of their age, and his videos defined the field for a new art form.

Parents may well wag their fingers and draw attention to the ludicrous aspects of Jackson’s strangely blessed and stangely cursed fifty years — they certainly give pause for thought to any pushy mummy tempted to shove her little darling onto the stage at age 6. Good news — you become an icon. Bad news — your whole life is messed up. Just say no.

Driven by a desperate need to be loved, combined with an inability to grow up, Garland’s Law still applies, in good ways and bad: “Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else” Jackson’s ability and inability to do that, musically and personally, were the rub. It’ll make a hell of a movie, someday.