400 churches closed in 10 years

Over 400 churches have been closed in the country in the last decade alone, due to a lack of attendance and support from the local community.

WORLD JANUARY 6. 2022 15:16

Citing a sharp decline in the number of believers, 423 churches were closed between 2010 and 2019 in Great Britain. When looking at the last three decades, the same figure rises to 940, leaving only 15,496 in operation across Britain.

The Dean of Southwark Cathedral, Andrew Nunn, described the number of church closures as “shocking,” saying, “I share the concern of many people that the policies that lead to the closure of churches may also mean that we will be seeing more and more changes to the parish system, which is, after all, the bedrock of the life of the Church of England for England.”

The senior Anglican priest suggested that the church closures may be more a result of churches being “in the wrong locations” as “communities have moved away and left the old infrastructure of society stranded.” However, the Anglican Church has been seeing a gradual decline in worship over the past decades. The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) taken in the 2011 census estimate that 59% of the population in England are Christian, falling from around 72 per cent in 2001.

In July of 2020, the Church of England claimed that during the pandemic they had attracted 200-300,000 new or previously irregular online worshippers, but had possibly lost between 100-200,000 pre-Covid worshippers.

A series of scandals around the Church could also play a role in the decline in the number of worshippers. For example, it emerged in 2017 that the Church of England under Archbishop Welby had been baptising hundreds of asylum seekers — with some alleging that this was only to help people with their asylum applications rather than for religious convictions. It is believed that the taxi bomber Emad Al Swealmeen, who attempted to blow up a hospital in Liverpool was one of these Christian „converts”.

During the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, several churches installed pro-BLM displays, such as a painting depicting a ‘black Jesus’.

Data show that Islam is the fastest spreading religion in the UK, and for the time being, Muslims are the biggest religious minority in the country, with one third of people under 16 identifying as Muslim.

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