Returning to church after Covid

Rev'd Jim Griffiths, North Cardiff Ministry Area, shares lessons from a recent CPAS webinar looking at ways we can encourage people back to church.

In the UK congregation sizes have fallen on average by about one-third since the beginning of the pandemic. Is this the ‘new normal’? Not necessarily, according to James Lawrence of CPAS. He argues that the next 3-4 months provide a unique window of opportunity for us to reconnect with people who have stopped attending church. But how do we go about it?

At ‘How to Encourage People to Return’, a CPAS webinar held in March this year, James began by teasing out four aspects of the decline in congregation numbers:

1. It is an attendance issue. Attendance is important because what we attend to on a regular basis shapes our lives. Habits are powerful.
2. It is a spiritual issue. Faith is caught as well as taught; shared as well as individual. In other words, it is imitative and corporate. Disconnected people rarely grow spiritually.
3. It is a discipleship issue. Gathering together is key to how people grow in their relationship with Christ and are equipped to serve him in the world.
4. It is - and it isn’t - a personal issue. Church leaders may feel the decline in numbers particularly keenly. Decline may feel dispiriting, call into question their competence and bruise one’s ego. In all this it’s important to remember not to take the drop in numbers too personally: our church situation is part of a wider national trend.

At this point in the Webinar there was a poll which gave a snapshot of the situation in the 163 churches represented at the webinar. 92% said that attendance was down post-Covid. 47% said that those who were attending in person were doing so less frequently. Interestingly, two vicars I spoke to that day both said that in their experience it was families in particular that seemed slow to return.

Having identified the issues involved, James went on to suggest some ways in which we could encourage people back to church in the coming months

• Remind people of what is exciting and, thus, what they are missing. A simple way of doing this would be to record 15-20 second videos of people saying something they found positive about a gathering at church. The videos can then be shared on social media.
• Teach people about the ‘why’ of Gathering. Remind people why meeting together is important. This needn’t be through sermons but could be done with a light touch through a weekly newsletter or perhaps at the beginning or end of a service.
• Make each church gathering the very best it can be. We need to be clear why each church gathering is happening and what we can do to make it the best it can be in light of this. James recommended Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering, Penguin (2018)as a practical guide.
• Invite people to contribute to the mission of the church by serving the needs of others. People reconnect with the church by contributing practically to the church’s service to the wider community. A classic example would be initiatives to support Ukraine but countless others could be given.

CPAS has produced a leaflet outlining 15 practical ways to encourage people to return which is available free of charge (together will all sort of other free stuff) on their website: www.cpas.org.uk.

I’ll finish with a hugely encouraging quote from Glenn Packiam that James quoted in the webinar:

‘We don’t know what numbers we are going to get back or what our new normal is. But we do know that if we trust the God that raises the dead, our labour will not be in vain.”