Emma Thompson makes for an unlikely rebel. Her Christian faith was nurtured through Anglican choral music and the Book of Common Prayer. She teaches Sunday school and conducts a choir in her church.
“The local level, in my book, is where all the good happens — the love, the looking after your neighbour, the delivery plan for being a Christian,” says Thompson, a former City solicitor and now a company secretary and freelance journalist.
Her passion for local parish churches is fierce to the point that, she says proudly, the two most senior clerics in the Church of England have described her as a “rascally voice”.
Attendance in the Church has fallen by nearly 40 per cent since 1979, according to the British Religion in Numbers online data resources, and by more than 15 per cent alone since 2013.
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