Where are new Christians coming from?

It is a strange question, but one that I believe is a critical one for the church and the wider Christian community to address.

Now there was a report that church attendance figures had increased by 2% - I have searched for confirmation of this, but have not found it. There is some suggestion that there have been increases during the recession, which may well be the case. I am glad that some people, i a time or hardship, find some degree of solace in returning to the church - because that is what is happening, people who have attended churches in the past are returning for a while in a difficult time. These are not new people, and this does not change the overall trend, consistent over nearly a century, of decreasing church attendance.

What is more, church attendance figures are not the same as numbers of Christians.Not everyone who attends church would count themselves as Christian, and not everyone who would consider themselves a Christian goes to church. It is dangerous to equate these, or, for that matter, to equate either of these with a "more Christian country" and similar phrases, because to change the "Christian-ness" of the country requires influential and powerful people to be Christians, something that may happen and may be a result of less influential ad powerful people attending church, or may not. In all honestly, I do not see the power structures of the UK showing any signs of a more Christian approach.

But this is not the core question here, which is, where do we expect new people to encounter, engage with, and accept Christianity from? The days of big rallies with well known speakers like Billy Graham are past - and quite rightly, not because they were wrong, but because they are no longer appropriate or relevant. Churches, which used to do some work in the public gathering places, have tended to reduce this work for a range of reasons, not least because these public gathering places are not the same as they were. There are no places where everyone goes any more, that make sense to focus attention in that way. The world is a different place, the places of meeting, the means of making decisions and choices are different.

This presents an interesting challenge, which some Christian groups are trying to address, but many others are not looking at all - there is, I think, an unfortunate tendency for many groups to simply try the same things they have always done, just louder. The worry I have is that the Christian community is failing to bring new people in. Any new people are family members of existing people, or, as mentioned above, people returning to their faith in times of trouble. People will always leave, and often take their families - and definitely their family connections - with them.

So the question here is, how does the Christian community - church and non-church - bring new people into an engagement with God? People who are not part of any faith community at all - some of the hardest people to reach. How do we actually enable people to engage with God in the 21st century? The problem is that if we don't address this urgently, the community that can make this happen is shrinking, and the opportunities will slip away. The longer we leave it, the more family groups have no contact with the Christian faith at all, and the harder the job becomes.

And sorry that there have been a lot of church-specific posts of late. It is just that I have been made to think about church issues again of late. I tend to post whatever I want to explore, so it goes in cycles. This happens to be one of my current cycles, but I will return to other matters next post.