Finding a church : reasons people give for joining and moving from churches

Abstract

This thesis investigates the levels of types of church growth in England in recent years, especially in the church of England, with a view to assessing the value of church planting as a strategy for increasing church attendance. In order to do this, it was first established that church plants do have a strong tendency to grow. Because there were no published data on the rates of different types of church growth it was then necessary to produce some base line figures, especially on transfer growth rates. The level of transfer growth was found to be about 50% of all growth in church attendance, slightly lower when assessed by leaders, slighty higher when assessed by church attenders themselves. Individual churches were then studied, some by using data supplied by church leaders, others in more detail by questionnaires filled in by people attending those churches. The key conclusion was that the church plants studied have not grown disproportionately by overall transfer growth, but that they have tended to attract more people from other denominations, which makes the transfer growth more noticeable. Their increases in attendance do therefore mean that church attendance has been higher than it would have been without church planting. Besides providing statistics on the levels of church growth in Wakefield survey enabled the reasons for joining and leaving churches to be studied. It was found that people moving house tended to look for the nearest church, usually of the same denomination; people dissatisfied with an existing church were more concerned about worship, and were much more likely to change denomination; people attending for the first time also looked for the nearest church where they found it to be friendly. In qualitative interviews all groups spoke of worship and of the importance of good personal contact, but it was the relative order of importance that varies. These results showed that people finding churches had similar reasons to people finding faith. Comparison with previously ignored research from the 1940's showed that these reasons had persisted for at least the last 50 years in England.