Looking Back: Census will show how Scots have fallen away.

From 1985

By the Editor

Figures will soon be available to show how Scots have lost the regular practice of churchgoing. A census of Scottish Church attendance due to be published at the end of this month is expected to show a falling away in attendance in most major denominations and a distinct slump from the result shown by the last major statistical exercise in this field more than a quarter of a century ago.

The Scottish results will compare favourably with other parts of Europe, and even of Britain. But preliminary indications, including statistics published locally in parish magazines, suggest that leaders of the Kirk must brace themselves to discover that average weekly congregations muster (if only adults are counted) about half of the one attendance figure given in Church statistics, that for coming to at least one Communion service a year. This was reported to last year’s General Assembly as 542,922.

The census is also expected to show that women greatly outnumber men in the pews and that older people and children form a disproportionately large part of regular attendance. Despite the decline in Sunday school attendance, children are likely to add a substantial percentage to the Kirk adult attendance figures.

The census was jointly sponsored by the MARC Europe organisation and the National Bible Society of Scotland on the general lines of previous Church attendance censuses of England (1979) and of Wales (1983). The figures will be based (for Protestant denominations) on returns made by individual congregations based on attendance during March 1984, though estimates were made for those congregations (about 25%) who dd not reply. Roman Catholic statistics will be based on official figures (for November 1983) which local congregations supplied as part of the Roman Church’s own procedures but which were made available to the census organisers.

MAIN STATISTICS

The census has ran into some difficulties by a fairly high non-response rate in some denominations, the different basis on which Roman Catholic statistics were compiled and supplied, and the absence of any machinery for independent verification.

Nevertheless the census will represent the first major nation-wide attempt to calculate Scottish Church attendance since the work of Dr John Highet, then of Glasgow University, in the late 1950’s.

- Extract from a longer article

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