I indicated that I intended to engage further with the recent report from the Bible Society on their recent survey indicating an increase in church attendance. Before I dig into other aspects of the report, I want to reflect further on how much we should make of people starting to attend church at least monthly.
One concern I’ve seen raised by a few people is that historically “revivals” have been marked by people desiring to spend as much time with God’s people as possible. This would often lead to phenomena where church buildings would be packed night after night. If we are seeing people popping into church once a month, then this falls a lot short of that.
That is a fair point. However, in mitigation, we might also observe the following. First, that the Bible Society data identifies those attending church at least once per month. It is possible that they are attending more often than that. It is also possible that some may be attending a full church gathering monthly but due to work and family commitments may not be able to attend more often than that. However, they may also attend other gatherings for prayer, Bible Study etc such as Home Groups. We need to remember that the pace and circumstances of life today are different to historical contexts. I’m a firm believer in providing as many connection opportunities as possible for people.
We may also want to consider that a general uplift in attendance might be happening. For this we would need further data. It is possible that as well as seeing some people begin to attend monthly we are also seeing people who were attending monthly beginning to attend fortnightly and so on.
The other thing that I think we need to pay attention to is that if revival is marked by an increased desire to meet together, worship together, pray together, mediate on God’s Word together, confess and repent together then we may well have already seen that phase happening during the COVID pandemic when many people were finding ways to do those things via ZOOM, You Tube and Facebook during lockdowns. I wonder if that was the quiet revival in which case we may now be beginning to see the after effects.
Faithroots 