Falling church attendance: has anything gone wrong?

The decline in church attendance recorded over the past 40 years of Sunday Mass censuses has brought out an enormous response from people in putting forward opinions, plans and actions to strengthen our Catholic faith.

Discern, the Institute for Research on the Signs of the Times, which produces the Sunday Mass censuses, is hosting the annual Benjamin Tonna Lecture on this topic and has invited Professor Robin Gill to share his thoughts on 'Falling church attendance: has anything gone wrong?'

Professor Gill has over 35 years' experience as a sociologist and theologian and is the current Michael Ramsey Professor of Modern Theology at the University of Kent in Canterbury. He has published a number of books on the decline in church attendance in the UK - The Myth of the Empty Church, Church-going and Christian Ethics and The 'Empty' Church Revisited - and he is therefore well placed to contribute to the debate. The lecture will analyse the state of the Church in the world today and there will be ample opportunity for those attending to share their thoughts when the discussion will be opened to the floor.

In Malta, Professor Gill sees our increased encounter with the wider Western pluralistic, non-church-going culture as the main counter-influence on family traditions for young Maltese. It is however easy to blame almost anything for the decline in church-going once it has begun, and it is therefore important to critically analyse the various explanations for change.

For example, while many have blamed the horrors of the two World Wars for the decline, Professor Gill reports that even before World War I there were signs of a fall in attendance in the UK and one is also unsure of the effect of urbanisation, which in some countries has acted as a catalyst for church growth.

His thesis is that the incredibly powerful symbol of the 'empty' church may not only be a result of external factors, but that structural problems within the Church may also share responsibility. In the UK the Church of England and the Free Churches were slow in responding to the huge population shifts of the 19th century and these internal mistakes of the Church contributed to the mostly empty churches of today.

Empty churches feed empty churches as the young find a discouraging atmosphere, and this, coupled with low birth rates, means that the future for the Church in the UK and other Western countries is not promising. Encouragingly, Professor Gill recognises that in the West, non-church-goers are not atheists and there is much hope in the growth of the Church in Asia and Africa in modern societies.

The 2007 Benjamin Tonna Lecture by Professor Gill will be held at Le Meridien Phoenicia, Floriana, on Thursday at 7 p.m. All are welcome.