[The] Reverend Donald Davis urged the congregation to come closer.
“There’s not a lot of us today,” he said with his trademark staccato laugh. “Let’s huddle together for warmth….”
…a low point is also where the Church of England – of which St Luke’s is one of 16,000 churches – finds itself. Embroiled in divisive internal arguments over same-sex marriage rights and whether women should be allowed to serve as bishops, perhaps the most serious battle facing England’s state church is against an evermore secular society in which its role is far from clear.
Folks, I got so tired of this sloppy statement: ‘Only 1.1m people are regular churchgoers.’ I have battled against this lazy journalism time and again, even to the point of getting The [London] Times to print a correction. That is the figure for the Church of England alone. The RC figure of average Sunday Mass attendance is around 900,000. Add Pentecostals, Methodists and others and the likely number of regular churchgoers in England would be much higher than the 1.1m cited. Sigh.