Where we want to be.

We recently ran a survey where we asked people what they thought we should be doing. We had 124 people reply and this is the results from the survey. All of the information is in the numbers who replied rather than percentages.

People rated their church attendance as:

Not interested in attending	13
Believing in God but not going to Church	23
Attending weddings, funerals and baptisms only	29
Going occasionally	18
Going regularly	34
Belonging to another faith group	5

People were asked to complete the sentence "In my opinion Churches should . . . "

Be more inclusive and adapt to the C21	30
Be more active in the community	27
Encourage questions	14
Be more fun	8
Be historical and traditional	7
Support non church (vulnerable?) people	6
Nurture believers	5
Work with young people	4
Closed and sold off	3
Not bother people who don’t believe	3
Do things as well as Sundays	3
Are important to the community	2
Do different types of worship	2
Work better with other faiths	1

We also asked what we should be offering and people suggested the following :

Meditation	40
Healing Services	22
Services with contemporary music	32
Studies linking life and faith	33
Films and Discussions afterwards	20
Discussions about current issues	38
Services with Classical Music	28
Informal Café Style Services	50

What we think this all means:

We think that churches generally are not seen as relevant, modern or inclusive and will have to work to change this. One of the ways is to offer different types of worship. Our current “hymn sandwich” (prayer, hymn, prayer hymn etc.) was developed in the 17th century to cater for people who were seeking both religious and actual literacy. While it will still continue to work for some people the needs of our society are now different. The survey also shows people are keen to try worship that we would consider as non-traditional. These types of worship can be described as the desire to make collective sense of the world through the lens of faith and ethics and a place to pause and reflect.

We also think that people also want to mark life events. We need to reflect on people’s lives as they are lived today and find ways to mark these in addition to “hatchings matchings and dispatchings”.

Current political events show a distrust of experts and authority figures. As non-conformists our ethos of personal conviction, community and democratic culture could be enormously attractive. But we also need to recognise that increasingly time poor people will not prop up structures that they do not see as relevant.

We also need to tell our story more. We need to come up with a narrative that talks about who we are and what is valuable and special about us. We need to show we add a positive contribution and have something unique to offer.