The cost of urgent repairs to the UK's 47,000 places of worship is estimated to be around one billion pounds, according to the National Churches Trust. The Trust surveyed more than 7,200 volunteers or staff members responsible for the complex of buildings at a worship site. The report describes the UK's churches state of repair, revealing worrying trends in maintenance: 10% of churches are in urgent need of repair to roof, or rainwater disposal systems; of the churches in poor or very poor condition, only half are carrying out regular maintenance; and for all churches although 80% are maintaining their building regularly, only 13% do so in accordance with a formal schedule of planned maintenance.

In a statement the NCT commented on how some of this maintenance burden might be addressed:"What we would like to see in the coming years is a move towards more open discussion and partnership between organisations, and government schemes which support churches, chapels and meeting houses across the UK. We also remain grateful to the DCMS for continuing the LPOW Grant Scheme, albeit in a revised form this year." Later in the same statement they said "What must be borne in mind when we consider the total cost of urgent repairs for the UK’s buildings is that the majority of these costs, (up to an average of 85%) are met by the churches and their local communities themselves; through local fundraising and their own income. It is the work of organisations such as ourselves to offer support and advice to these communities, and to provide direct grants where suitable."

Church buildings play host to a rich ecology of activities through which the local community benefits. Around 40% of churches are using their buildings, which in this definition includes church halls, meeting rooms, and other associated buildings for non worship, mission related activities. 60% are opening them to the community either through events organised by church volunteers or through independent organisations. Urban churches are more likely to host independent organisations, while in rural settings community engagement appears to be led by volunteers associated with the building. As the number of volunteers a church has increases, so its use by the community increases. For all churches there is a tendency to favour uses which benefit the whole community, such as childcare groups and counselling services, as opposed to events for the benefit of private individuals. Churches rely heavily on their volunteers, although 30% of churches use part time salaried staff such as specialist cleaners, or an administrator. Rural churches tend to have fewer volunteers than their urban counterparts. This may largely be a factor associate with church and population size but may also be related to differences in the profile of the population the church serves. 38% of rural churches have more than 20 volunteers and across all churches 60% have between 11 and 50 volunteers. Interestingly many churches have volunteers who are not part of the regular congregation. Across the whole sample 85% of volunteers were regular members of the congregation, meaning that around 200,000 people across the country regularly volunteer at their local church, even though they do not worship there.

Church buildings which have more volunteers are likely to be better maintained than those with fewer, although on average volunteers only spend 18% of their time repairing or cleaning the building. Of the remaining time 21% is devoted to community activities and 26% to faith based activities. Between 9 and 18% of churches in the sample had a 'Friends group' with 70% of these being in rural areas. These groups, like volunteers, clearly contribute substantially to the upkeep of church buildings and can connect large numbers of people to the church without the expectation that they should be joining the community in worship. The report is based on a survey which was predominantly carried out online, and generated around 9,000 responses of which, after weighting to ensure the sample was representative of the known numbers of churches across the UK as a whole, and discarding corrupt samples 7,200 remained. Response bias means that there may have been a tendency for more active churches to be more likely to complete the survey, and there are no indications in the report that the degree of this bias has been estimated. For churches where there was little activity and few volunteers the survey's response bias means that churches may overall be in worse repair than the NCT suggest, leading to more urgent repairs and higher costs overall. Similarly there may be fewer volunteer hours being contributed, and less community activity occurring across the country than the survey suggests, but further research within the original 17,000 strong sample of churches would be required to ascertain the degree of bias. In a statement the NCT said "Whilst we accept that, short of a 100% response rate, we cannot know the responses for every church building in the UK – we believe strongly that the UK-based estimates presented in the report are representative of the UK’s church building population. The methodology used for our analysis takes into account the factors we felt would most affect the level and type of response we would received, as detailed in the full report."

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The age distribution of the church in developed countries is becoming skewed towards the elderly because it is economically rational for potential believers to delay participation in religious activities till they are older. Such is the the claim of a paper by Papyrakis and Selvaretnam, who are economists at the University of East Anglia and St Andrews respectively.

However, empirical evidence, drawn from the same data sources Papyrakis and Selvarentnam used shows that people do not become more religious as they age Marion Burkimsher from the University of Geneva wrote recently "the pattern we see today in western Europe of older people being more religious than younger people is effectively a relic of older generations being more religious in the past and then maintaining their level of religious participation over time." This report is available here

The authors claim that their cost benefit model explains not only the changing age distribution of religiosity, but also the historic reduction in overall levels of observance in the developed world. Their analysis uses a three period model (young, old and afterlife), and allows for members of a population to become religious during the young period, or the old period, and to change their decision at the boundary between the young and the old period. The model uses a number of variables, including the probability that heaven or hell exists, the social and spiritual benefits of religious observance, and the time, and hence income lost, that results from participating in religious activities.

The model under discussion (Click to enlarge

The paper claims implicitly that its results hold true for all religions although it uses explicitly Christian language throughout "Regular church attendance remains very high in countries such as Nigeria, Pakistan, and El Salvador...", and the statistics that are referred to in the section of the paper where the authors present limited empirical evidence for their claims all relate to Christianity. However evidence is emerging which suggests that the decline in attendance which they report has, at least in the UK ceased, and in fact is rising in some denominations (as they acknowledge is true for the Pentecostal community) and is beginning to rise in other denominations.

Church Attendance 2001-2009 (click to enlarge)

Dr Papyrakis, of the School of International Development at UEA said: “Many religions and societies link to some degree the cumulative amount of religious effort to benefits in the afterlife. We show that higher life expectancy discounts expected benefits in the afterlife and is therefore likely to lead to postponement of religiosity, without necessarily jeopardising benefits in the afterlife." However because their model considers the decisions of hypothetical individuals, and the effect of the increased life expectancy which is found in developed countries relative to less developed ones, the paper cannot without further work define an end state for the religious community, or even the age distribution which one would expect to find. Were the findings of this paper true, it would be expected that in developed countries the age at which people first become religiously observant would be likely to show a marked skew towards the older generations. However several studies show that this is not the case as a report from the Barna Group, a leading US research organisation shows: "The current Barna study indicates that nearly half of all Americans who accept Jesus Christ as their savior do so before reaching the age of 13 (43%), and that two out of three born again Christians (64%) made that commitment to Christ before their 18th birthday. One out of eight born again people (13%) made their profession of faith while 18 to 21 years old. Less than one out of every four born again Christians (23%) embraced Christ after their twenty-first birthday. Barna noted that these figures are consistent with similar studies it has conducted during the past twenty years."

It would also be expected that where there was a significant disutility to practicing a religion for reasons of persecution, for example the early church or early non-conformist communities in England that religious participation (either among the young or the old), would be suppressed, and this paper makes this point. In illustration of this argument they cite a paper: "e.g. in the early Christian Church), these costs are particularly high (see Bruce, 1993 for a discussion) and may hence discourage religious participation." However examination of Bruce's work shows that he argues that the economic model for restriction of church growth is flawed:

"The early Christian Church had very high start-up costs: Christians were persecuted, and some were used as lion feed. The early English Quakers were persecuted but thrived ... At this point in the argument it is enough to note that there appears to be no universal connection between 'costs' and adherence."

Dr Papyrakis' said in conclusion: “To increase overall attendance, religious establishments should aim to reduce any discomfort of entry to religious newcomers, both old and young. This may involve making information about the organisation easily accessible to them and helping new-comers to follow religious activities without feeling lost or uncomfortable." He went on to suggest that emphasising the socio-economic and spiritual benefits that religious observance brings would counterbalance the negative impact of life expectancy on religiosity. As conclusions these are substantially anodyne. It makes intuitive sense for any Christian church to do all he suggests, but his conclusions are so general that it is difficult to attach them to the findings of his model. His conclusions also fail to take account of the fact that the demographics of many developed countries are such that there is an increasing proportion of elderly people in the population, and as such even if churches are perfectly representative of the population there would be a skewed age distribution within them.

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Do you believe in hell? - if so, it might be affecting your outlook on a wide range of issues, or so suggests a recent paper by Professor Treisman, Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California. In the paper he shows that, at a regional level in Europe and parts of Asia, differences in the level of fear of the consequences of possible future events, such as nuclear war, swine flu, may be partly explicable by the strength of belief in hell held in that region. Commenting on his research Professor Treisman said: 

“Some previous research has found that people who are more afraid of nuclear war are less likely to save. Others have speculated that fearfulness might predispose people to support authoritarian government, but I have not seen any systematic evidence of this. I do find using survey data from Europe that, even controlling for the level of economic development, in countries where people are more fearful the average levels of happiness and life satisfaction are lower.” 

Professor Treisman’s study used existing data from the Eurobarometer series of opinion polls for Europe and the Asia Europe study, which performs a similar function across Asia and Europe to construct his index of fear, which is statistically reasonably robust. However these studies did not ask directly about belief in hell so their results, at a country level had to be associated with the World Values study which, in 2000 did ask about belief in heaven and hell. Because the World Values study used a different set of participants to the other studies, this means that the association between fear and belief in hell can not be explored at the level of individual subjects, and makes the overall findings of the research less certain.

Professor Treisman himself says “I should emphasize that it remains a conjecture that needs to be confirmed by further surveys. Why would belief in hell correlate with a greater predisposition to fearfulness? One possibility is that belief in divine retribution creates a general sense of anxiety that manifests itself with regard to particular dangers. Another is that belief in hell is associated with the belief that people are naturally evil, at least to some extent, and that therefore one should anticipate harm from others.” 

One feature of this research which is important to developing a fuller understanding of the implications would be to know what proportion of people who believe in hell in Europe are actively practicing Christians. If belief in hell is a partly culturally determined phenomenon, then for the purposes of interpreting the findings, it would be important to find out find out whether people who were actively practicing Christians and believed in hell were more or less fearful than those people who had a culturally determined belief in hell, but did not practice Christianity. 

Direct link to NBER's paper download site:  http://www.nber.org/papers/w16838

Download a draft of the paper from Professor  Treisman's site: here

Read the Wall Street Journal's blog on the paper: here 

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In the light of the recent controversy around the question about religious affiliation asked in the 2011 census and the attempts by certain interest groups to actively influence the outcome of the census it seemed pertinent to post an article at greater length than Research Brief permits of the process of selection and validation which National Statistics used to generate the questions asked in the census. 

The 2001 Census was the first time a religion question had been asked in England, Scotland and Wales to learn more about religious affiliation as a variable in its own right, collect data on religious minorities that cut across national and ethnic boundaries and capture data on two ethnic minority groups (Sikhs and Jews), ensuring that obligations under the Race Relations Act could be met.

A variety of quantitative and qualitative methodologies were used to test the questions recommended for inclusion in the 2011 Census. Qualitative question testing on religion has primarily been conducted by the data collection methodology (DCM) branch in ONS through a programme of cognitive testing, running since February 2005. Quantitative question testing has been conducted at various intervals since May 2006 using a variety of methodologies.

Measuring ‘religion’ is notoriously complex as there are a number of dimensions to the concept of religion. The key dimensions for survey and census questions about religion are affiliation, practice and belief. Based on the evidence of a lengthy programme of research and consultation, ONS believes that the most appropriate question for the 2011 Census is one that asks about religious affiliation rather than practice of belief. Several different question wordings have been tested, including:

• What is your religion?

• What is your religion or belief?

• What is your religion, even if not currently practising?

• Do you regard yourself as belonging to a religion?

• Which of these best describes you?

Testing found that the question ‘what is your religion?’ best meets the requirement of collecting good quality data on religious affiliation within the space constraints of the census questionnaire. The question will also provide comparability between the 2001 and 2011 Censuses. 

To find out more use this link:

http://www.ons.gov.uk/census/2011-census/2011-census-questionnaire-content/recommended-questions---religion.pdf 

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This lunchtime I visited the head office of Barclaycard for their annual carol service. The invite came from my friends who run the Christians@Barclacyard fellowship. Given the high profile stories that there have been of persecution in the workplace, I wanted to share this story of Christians who are supported in the workplace.

It's worth knowing a little about the building in Northampton. It houses over 3000 staff and is largely open plan with a central street running the length of the building - 260m long, 9m wide and 3 or 4 stories high. It as at one of this street that the carol service was held. The design of the building means that the carol service was not going on behind closed doors somewhere, it was right out in the open, and could be heard by many staff whether they chose to attend or not. For those not down our end of the street, there were also a total of 8 plasma screens used to relay the live video.  This is the opposite of Christian persecution in the workplace.

A local primary school was involved in the service. There was  a poster competition to design the posters that were used throughout the building to advertise the service. The children sang songs and helped to illustrate the Christmas story. Their headmaster read Matthew 2:7-12. The children were treated to lunch and given goodie bags to take home from the Chrstians@Barclaycard. But the best treats of all for them were seeing themselves on the TV screens, and the novelty of being on a revolving stage!

The carol service was well attended by staff, pensioners and a few people like myself who used to belong to the Christian fellowship. This year there were no spare seats, with standing room only at the back and staff leaning over various balconies to listen to what was going on.  The chair of the pensioners group read Matthew 2:1-6.

The CEO of Barclaycard, Val Soranno Keating, who normally works in London, attended the whole service and read Isaiah 9:6-7. She seemed to be really enjoying it, and spoke to the children and congratulated the Christians@Barclaycard at the end of the service. This is the opposite of Christian persecution in the workplace.

Following the service there was lunch for all, including delicious hot chocolate.

It was a great event - with the love of God being talked about, and demonstrated, in the heart of one of the largest financial institutions in the UK. There was absolutely no hint of persecution in the workplace here, quite the opposite. It wasn't even as if Barclaycard just 'tolerated' the carol service. It was a real celebration, totally supported by the organisation - including the CEO personally. Well done Christians@Barclaycard.

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‘When I was a stranger you welcomed me’ (Matthew 25.35 CEV)

How well do churches welcome the stranger? And how important is it anyway?

From our Faith Journeys research, I know that most people become Christians before the age of 20 and have come from a churchgoing family -  so they would be relatively familiar with church. When you are familiar with the language and activities of church, then it must be more difficult to imagine what it would be like to come to a normal service for the first time. As I am a relative newcomer to church, it's easy for me to empathise with the 'stranger' entering the relatively alien environment of church. As our nation becomes more and more 'unchurched' there will be there are increasing numbers of strangers who need to be welcomed. This is important.

It is  important because first impressions count. For many people on the edges of Christian faith our churches are the 'shop windows'. Once someone plucks up the courage to cross the threshold then this encounter could either encourage them to go further or, at worst, cause them to reject the Christian faith altogether. So how do we find out how well churches welcome strangers?

I'll share the findings from our ChurchCheck research in a future blog. Come back soon to find out why I've stated 'Churches are more welcoming than people think they are, including churchgoers!'

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