'Do you still want the church to exist for your children and grandchildren?'

This is the question that opens the current issue of my local parish newsletter. What is happening to the Church of England is happening to all the mainstream denominations, Roman Catholics, Methodists, United Reformed, and so on. Church attendance is dwindling, there is less income, fewer ordinations. Predictions are that in two or three decades all of these organisations will be effectively bankrupt.

The local parish I live in has a population of about 400, and the village I live in is technically a hamlet. The parish church is a mile away in a once proud neighbouring village, but decimated by the Black Death. The original huge rectory was sold, and made into offices. The modern building which the rector lived in when we came here nearly 30 years ago no longer houses a rector, and is an ordinary family house. Our rector has the pastoral care of two other parishes besides our own, all equipped with medieval church buildings, with proud spires. And predictably all three church buildings will have ceased to be in use every Sunday, as they still are now, and his job will have been rationalised away, before another 30 years elapse.

Does this mean that the church is dying?

It depends what you mean by the church. As a building, yes our local church is dying. It is fullest for weddings and funerals. On Sundays the dozen or so who attend have an average age of over 60, and the average age of the youngest three would be close to 50. As an organisation too the Church of England will have to abandon its parish system fairly soon. There will still be bishops and priests, and they will wear the same (or probably more ornate) distinctive clothing, but attendance at church will be even lower than at present as a percentage of the population.

Our local rector may believe that he is observing the decline of Christianity in England. But I think he is wrong.

If you read the New Testament you will find nothing about church buildings. You will read about apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. You will read about the church in so-and-so's house, and about the overseer (episkopos - bishop), elders (presbuteros - presbyter), and stewards (diakonos - deacon). Full time ministers were very few, and even apostles might support themselves by an artisan trade.

Now I do not attend a house church, but I know a lot from first hand about the house church movement. Many of the people who might otherwise worship alongside me at my local C of E church are in a house group, or hired hall, locally. And they are not part of the statistics for the number of worshippers on a Sunday. Christianity seems to be recovering its origins, and with it its vitality. And the number who meet to worship on a Sunday, or to pray and study together mid-week, is almost impossible to count, for much of it is happening in ordinary houses.

I personally do not fret over how many people attend a church building on a Sunday, but I do care a lot for how Christians spend their time on a Sunday. I am writing this on a Sunday. I also know that the total number of Christians who celebrated the memorial of a saving death by breaking bread together today, both locally and nationally, is far larger than the number who attended a church building.

Society is changing around us. Forty years ago when I first taught in a school, perhaps only one child in 10 of a typical school class did not live at home with a mother married to their father. Now in some areas the number will be 5 out of 10 not living at home in a traditional two parent family, and in other areas the figure will be higher. It is not only the church that is changing. Two out of every five children born today will have been born to a mother not married to the father of the child.

Being a Christian is what I do with my life, not where I go on a Sunday. The number of true Christians in any community is hard to count (only God knows the real number). So the message my local parson needs is that while the church as an organisation may seem to be declining to the point of ineffectiveness, and his buildings may not be used any more in a decade or two, God has still the same purpose: through His people to be the salt that preserves, the light that shines. And many of them are recovering the principles of organisation that the first generation of Christians used, and recorded in their writings.