Church Growth in a Secular Age

A few rambling thoughts on church growth, “quiet revival”, and ministry in a secular age. Mainly for vicary types and an update from something I wrote a few years ago.

——

Over the past year or so there has been a lot of talk about church growth, spiritual openness, and even the possibility of “quiet revival” in the UK. Newspaper articles appear. Podcasts get excited. Somebody notices twenty-year-olds attending Evensong in London and suddenly we are apparently one step away from the Wesleys returning, though now with artisan coffee and a social media team.

Now, to be fair, there are genuinely encouraging signs in some places.

Some churches are growing.

Some younger people do seem more spiritually curious than they were ten years ago.

There are pockets of renewal.

People exhausted by the flatness of consumer life are searching again for meaning, prayer, transcendence, rootedness — words the modern West spent decades trying to outgrow.

And thank God for that.

Anyone involved in parish ministry has probably seen glimpses of it. Someone wandering into church because they do not know where else to go. A young lad lighting a candle after his mate dies. People who have achieved everything they were told would make them happy and still cannot shake the ache underneath it all.

Grace still leaks through.

But I do think some of the commentary around “revival” needs a little caution.

Because a few green shoots do not necessarily mean winter is over.

We still inhabit what Charles Taylor called a secular age. Not secular in the sense that nobody believes anything anymore — modern people believe all sorts — but secular in the sense that belief in God is no longer the default setting of society. Faith has become one option among many. Contested. Fragile. Difficult.

In older, more enchanted worlds, many people could scarcely imagine what it might mean not to believe in God. Whereas now, even believers — clergy included, if we are honest — can imagine themselves out of faith. Doubt sits much closer to the surface of modern life than church culture sometimes admits.

And that changes the atmosphere in which ministry happens.

The old Christendom world still lingers in fragments. Harvest festivals. Funeral hymns sung by people who have not entered a church in years. Elderly saints praying quietly at a midweek Eucharist while traffic crawls past outside. But much of the deeper cultural memory that once carried Christianity has thinned badly.

And interestingly, not everybody now drifting toward church is necessarily drifting toward Christ.

Some are searching spiritually.

Some are genuinely encountering the gospel.

But others seem drawn toward Christianity as heritage, identity, stability, or civilisational memory in an anxious age.

You can feel it online sometimes — this strange mixture of nostalgia, masculinity panic, nationalism, culture-war grievance, and religious aesthetics. Christianity becomes less the way of the crucified Messiah and more a badge of belonging for people frightened by social collapse.

The church will need wisdom here.

Because not every rise in attendance is revival.

Sometimes people come seeking God.

Sometimes they come seeking certainty.

Sometimes they simply want somewhere solid to stand while the world feels like it is coming apart.

Those things can overlap, of course. God works with mixed motives all the time. Most of us came to faith carrying confusion, ego, fear, loneliness, longing.

Still, the church must be careful not to confuse the kingdom of God with Christian nostalgia or nationalist longing. The crucified Christ does not fit neatly inside projects of national restoration.

The tides pulling people away from church were not created by the current vicar of St Michael’s trying to hold together a congregation of thirty-seven people, three radiators, and a roof quote capable of inducing minor cardiac events.

These are older currents.

Industrialisation.

Mobility.

Screens.

Consumerism.

Exhaustion.

The collapse of shared life.

The slow erosion of institutions.

The strange loneliness of modern Western existence.

Centuries of disenchantment do not suddenly reverse because a journalist discovers young men attending a cathedral.

And so I sometimes worry that clergy serving faithfully in difficult places hear all the “renewal” talk and quietly conclude that if revival is not happening in their parish then they must somehow be failing.

But many priests are ministering in places where secularisation has bitten hard and deep.

Tiny villages where the school closed years ago.

Post-industrial estates.

Coastal towns.

Churches carrying decades of slow decline before the current priest even arrived.

Communities bruised by poverty, addiction, transience, and institutional collapse.

And still they turn up.

They unlock cold churches on wet mornings.

They preach resurrection to twelve people and a dog.

They visit the dying.

They know whose son is back in prison.

They bless food banks.

They sit with lonely people who talk for forty minutes because nobody else has listened to them all week.

Some Sundays the heating packs in, the PCC spends half the evening discussing gutters, and somebody quietly asks whether the church can survive another five years.

And still grace turns up.

Stanley Hauerwas has spent years irritating Christians by suggesting that the church’s task is not first to make the world run smoothly or reclaim cultural dominance, but simply to become the kind of community that remembers how to tell the truth about God in a forgetful age.

I suspect there is something in that.

I sometimes think the church has developed a theology for growth but not much theology for faithful diminishment.

We know how to platform expansion, charisma, innovation, metrics, “vision”. We are less comfortable speaking about the holiness of staying with places that cannot offer momentum, prestige, or success stories.

But there can be a holiness in staying.

A holiness in keeping prayer alive in a place the wider culture has stopped noticing.

A holiness in loving people who cannot repay you with influence or statistics.

A holiness in remaining present where things are fragile, tired, and quietly falling apart.

And perhaps sometimes parish ministry in a secular age can feel less like leading a successful organisation and more like palliative care.

Not giving up.

Not cynicism.

Just refusing to abandon people.

Helping communities die well where they are dying.

Bearing witness gently.

Keeping the prayers going to the end.

Sitting beside something fragile and beloved as it slips away, believing that resurrection still belongs to God even when you may not personally live to see it.

Some churches now feel less like engines of growth and more like hospice chapels for Christendom.

But even hospices are places where tenderness matters.

That is not an argument for complacency. Some churches do need repentance, courage, imagination, change. Some decline is self-inflicted. And sometimes renewal genuinely does break out unexpectedly. God still surprises people.

History is not finished.

The church has looked exhausted before.

Empires collapse.

Cultures shift.

Things buried sometimes rise again in forms nobody expected.

And after all, Christianity began not with influence, strength, or cultural dominance, but with a crucified man outside the city walls.

Abandoned by many.

Mocked by empire.

Followed by frightened disciples who barely understood what was happening.

And yet Christians dare to believe that somehow, in that broken body, God was reconciling the world to himself.

Which means the church should probably not be too frightened of weakness.

Or smallness.

Or marginality.

Or wounds.

The risen Christ still carries scars.

So perhaps smaller, poorer, less culturally central churches are not only signs of decline. Perhaps they may also become places where we learn again what the church actually is:

A people gathered around Jesus.

Prayer offered in fragile voices.

Bread broken.

Mercy practised.

The lonely remembered.

The dead buried.

The gospel whispered stubbornly in a forgetful world.

Some are called to lead large and growing churches. Thanks be to God for them.

Others are called to keep vigil in harder soil, trusting that even here, among smaller congregations and tired saints and uncertain futures, Christ still walks among the lampstands.