The Quiet Revival: Growth in the UK Church

One of the things I have noticed in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic relates to a change in the spiritual atmosphere in the nation. FIEC churches have been reporting significant growth in attendance and more conversions and baptisms.

In addition, congregations are more ethnically diverse, and churches are finding people coming to church to seek after God on their own initiative, often because they have been reading the Bible for themselves or engaging with the gospel online.

We have heard similar reports from evangelical churches in other denominations and groupings too.

Amongst ourselves, we have described what is happening as “low-level revival”. It has been more encouraging than at any point in the past twenty years.

Growth among young people

What we have sensed anecdotally has now been confirmed by a major report published by The Bible Society: The Quiet Revival. They have undertaken a massive piece of research, surveying a sample of over 13,000 people, repeating similar research undertaken in 2018.

The results reveal a very significant increase in church attendance over the past six years, especially amongst young people aged 18-24 and in particular young men. It turns out that it is my own generation, Gen-X, which is the least religious.

The data puts a lie to the common assumption that churches will continue to decline and that each successive generation will be less religious than the last.

This report is understandably good news for Christians here, who feel somewhat beleaguered in a secular and post-Christian culture. The truth is that church attendance and Christian adherence have been in near-continuous decline in Britain since the high point of 1858, with just a short period of sustained growth between the end of the Second World War and the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

Less than half the population identified as ‘Christian’ in the last national census in 2021, and the vast majority of those have no real understanding of what Christianity is and are not involved in church. They are nominal, cultural Christians.

The mainline denominations are experiencing catastrophic meltdown and face a demographic time bomb due to their aging congregations. This includes the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, and the Church in Wales, as well as the Methodist Church and the United Reformed Church. It is unsurprising that Christians are increasingly marginalised and have little political or cultural influence.

The Quiet Revival report suggests that this pattern of decline is not the whole story.

In the past six years, churchgoing Christians have increased from 8% to 12% of the population, or numerically from 3.7m to 5.8m people. The number of 18-24 years old attending church has risen from 4% to 16%, with young men increasing from 4% to 21%. Only 12% of their female peers are churchgoers. 19% of churchgoers are now from an ethnic minority, but this rises to 32% of churchgoers aged 18-54.

Growth in churchgoing

The growth in church attendance has not been uniform across denominations.

The greatest growth has been within Catholicism and Pentecostalism. Catholics have increased from 23% of churchgoers in 2018 to 31% today, and Pentecostals from 4% in 2018 to 10% today. In contrast, Anglicans have dropped from 41% to 34%.

Young people say that they are more spiritual, with 35% of 18–24-year-olds saying there is "definitely a God/gods or higher power" and 40% praying at least monthly. Those who attend church report higher life satisfaction and connection to their communities.

Whilst the report makes encouraging reading, we need to exercise a measure of caution about how we respond to the findings.

There is a danger of being too desperate to find positive hope amid a bleak context. We need to bear in mind that churchgoing is not the same as genuine Christian faith, and a rise in cultural Christianity, even if expressed more actively, is not the same as a revival.

Much of the growth is also attributable to the effects of migration. There is currently a net migration rate of 728,000 per year to the UK, and the large rise in the number of Catholics and Pentecostals is almost certainly a result of migration from Africa and elsewhere bolstering the number of church attenders.

The UK population has grown by just under 2 million people since 2018, which is almost the same as the increase in church attendance. The overall statistics conceal the challenge of re-evangelising the indigenous population.

However, despite such cautions and considering our own experience and the reports from evangelicals more widely, there does seem to be a new move of God in Britain and a greater openness and response amongst young people, especially men.

From a human perspective,e a major factor seems to be the desire to find real hope and meaning.

Secular liberalism has not delivered the happiness and freedom that it promised, with ever-increasing loneliness and mental health issues. Young people bear the impossible burden of having to define their own identity, and young men are tired of the relentless castigating of so-called ‘toxic masculinity’. Some of the same pressures that have led to a rise in populist policies and alt-right influencers are causing people to turn to church for answers to their pain and frustration.

Desire for authenticity

The churches that are growing fall into two broad categories.

On the one hand, some young people are turning to Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. They are attracted by the solemnity and historical rootedness of formal ritualism. The more sacramental style fits with the zeitgeist of nebulous spirituality and the desire for transcendence that rises above the mundane.

The other growing churches are those that faithfully preach the apostolic gospel in all its depth and provide a warm and welcoming community to all comers.

The churches that are declining are the mainstream churches that have abandoned the biblical gospel in favour of a liberalism that reflects the progressive culture, or those shallow, seeker-sensitive, light-weight evangelical churches that seemed trendy in the 1990s but now feel like a tired and insubstantial chat show.

The lesson is that people want substance not superficiality.

It remains to be seen whether the turn to Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy endures, or whether this is a natural swing of the cultural pendulum that will prove to have been a spiritual fad of the moment.

I am more convinced of the enduring significance of the growth of evangelical churches, with real conversions and commitment. Research undertaken by the Evangelical Alliance to be published later this summer will confirm growth in all groups and will show that very simple factors lead to people becoming Christians in evangelical churches.

The most important factors are having a Christian friend and reading the Bible for yourself. We can often make evangelism and church growth far more complex than it really is and forget that it is the work of the sovereign Spirit.

Pray for kingdom growth

These signs of new evangelical life in the UK are an encouragement for us to have confidence in the gospel and to persevere in gospel ministry.

It has been at the darkest times in our national history, spiritually speaking, that God has been gracious to send reformation or revival.

The decline of the church and the triumph of secularism is not inevitable. In many ways it is far easier to preach the gospel in a post-Christian, liberal progressive culture than to try to fight the battle to maintain cultural Christianity and its attendant morality because the light and truth of the gospel shines more brightly against the background of its alternative.

Our task is not to preserve a Christian culture through politics but to seek to convert people into the kingdom of God. Then, as the church grows, so the society will be influenced and changed just as it was after the 18th century revivals with the high point of evangelical social reform. In God’s mercy, such transformation is possible again.

The Bible Society is to be commended for the significant investment it has made in producing this report and the encouragement it has brought. We probably need to discount some of the bare statistics because they do not reflect real gospel growth, but within them, there is confirmation of our anecdotal evidence that God is at work in a greater way than we have been used to.

Let’s pray for ‘the quiet revival’ we are experiencing to become a mighty revival that transforms the church and the nation.

That is what we need.