Month: May 2025

When prayer changes history

Sometimes it happens

A high wall is cracked open by a growing tree
Photo by Murewa Saibu on Unsplash

It’s quite good to notice that sometimes big things happen. In a world of monstrous, deepset, intractable issues–our world–sometimes things shift. The tide turns. And you sort of gasp.

  • Back in the 1990s, it seemed the low-level conflict in Northern Ireland would not end. The Unionists wanted the IRA to give up its weapons. That seemed like a silly request, an ask so certain to be refused, a surrender, that the only reason for making it was gesture politics. Yet it happened. And we had the pictures of Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley laughing and joking together. I still think that was one of those times that reality wobbled and reset in a different place.
  • The recent church statistics: steadily down for a hundred years, aged and hunched congregations, the situation as long as I had been watching it. Except now, church attendance going from 8% of the nation to 12% in eight years, with a zealous infusion of youngsters. And perhaps the sound of a flywheel starting up: more people, more youth, more confidence, more growth. Another wobble to the way things just inevitably are: a new story, a flex in history.
  • Then a report I just read about Iran. The ‘death to America’ slogans being discarded; the American flag on which you had to tread to enter the Tehran University being taken away. The religious police turning on veil-vigilantes rather than veil wearers. The ayatollahs wanting to cling on to power even if it means playing nicely with America. The virus of Islamism, perhaps, mutating into less harmful forms in the two great rivals, Iran and Saudi Arabia. And underneath that, in Iran at least, another flywheel spinning as more and more Iranians meet Jesus. The black tide that swept the world, and which I spent a lot of my professional life recording, has, I think, receded in part.

So we keep praying through the dark hours of the night. We keep believing Jesus is Lord and is on the throne. We hold in our hearts the promises he has made to our hearts that live there but not yet in the world; I have some of these promises lodged in my heart as I guess you do too.

I am translating the Book of Revelation for fun, for myself, at the moment, and I am struck by how much suffering that book indicates will happen before the unfolding of justice and grace and glory. It is so slow. The Iranian revolution has been going on since 1979, all my adult life. Think of the masses given show trials and then hanged; the masses sent off to war. One memory of all the reading I’ve done about Iran (and I wrote a book too): a teenage girl went swimming in a pool in her own garden. Somebody looked over the wall and reported her for being inappropriately dressed, in her swimming things in her own garden. She was charged and sentenced to 32 lashes. The terrified teen only received 16 or so, because before the end of the punishment, she was dead.

Just today I read of the dream the anti-Nazi heroine Sophie Schol had the night before her execution1: she was carrying a baby up a hill to be baptised in a church at the top of the hill. A great chasm opened in front of her. She put the baby down before herself disappearing into the chasm. She explained that our ideas (and perhaps, I would add, the promises of God) do not perish even if we do.

Slow, slow, slow. So much suffering. But it moves!

It’s stable because it’s complicated and dynamic

Photo by Alvin Mahmudov on Unsplash

It shouldn’t be a surprise that things are stable most of the time because they are

  1. Free to move about to a certain extent but also
  2. Interlinked.

In this way creation reflects the Trinity, the creator. An atom isn’t an immutable particle, as originally conceived, but a complicated nucleus with a probability-governed blur of electrons around it. Stars and galaxies, the other end of the scale, don’t generally exist on their own but in whirling communities and the interdependence of the universe means today’s stars are the recycled remains of older ones.

Life develops because of interdependence as much as through survival of the fittest; without both together the engine of evolution doesn’t work.

So it is no surprise that the Creator is himself a Trinity (yes, language is strained), a whirling interdependent dance of Father, Son and Spirit. The dance, not the individuals in the dance, is the deep reality.

All of which explains the limits of humans (or perhaps, nations) going solo, going me first, striking out on one’s own. Interdependence in everything is slow but essential. Hillary Clinton (remember her) was fond of what she understood to be an African proverb: ‘If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far [or I would say, last enduringly] go together.’

The revolution in UK churchgoing

Thousands are turning to Christ. No, really.

For someone who has been quite involved in surveys about the UK Christian scene since the 1980s, here is the most extraordinary piece of research I have ever seen.

It was published by the Bible Society on the day that the Archbishop Justin Welby resigned, and that news overshadowed this news. It should have been the other way around.

Bible Society did a survey of church attendance and attitudes in 2018 and then repeated the survey in 2024. These were national surveys conducted by YouGov with more than 10,000 participants each time.

The 2018 picture was one we have grown very familiar with: 8% of UK adults were attending church at least monthly — 6% of British men, 9% of British women. Older people (14% of all the old were attending monthly) were much more likely to show up in the pews than under 35s (4% attending monthly).

  • The 2024 picture, post-Brexit and post-covid, is a different story.
  • 12% of British adults are attending church at least monthly.
  • 33% of British churchgoers are aged 18-34
  • and the revival is led by men: 21% of British men aged 18-24 are regular churchgoers.
  • Church attendance in Britain has increased by half in six years. The increase is led by younger people and more by men than by women. Male churchgoers (13% of the population) now outnumber female churchgoers (10% of the population).

Allow me, if you would, an extended quote from the Baptist Times2:

The report’s co-author Dr Rhiannon McAleer said, ‘These are striking findings that completely reverse the widely held assumption that the Church in England and Wales is in terminal decline.

‘While some traditional denominations continue to face challenges, we’ve seen significant, broad-based growth among most expressions of Church – particularly in Roman Catholicism and Pentecostalism.

‘There are now over 2 million more people attending church than there were six years ago.’

There are now over 2 million more people attending church than there were six years ago.

Some of the increase in churchgoing has been driven by an increase in the ethnic minority population across England and Wales – among whom churchgoing rates tend to be higher – resulting in greater ethnic diversity in the Church. Today, around one in five churchgoers (19 per cent) are from an ethnic minority. Among 18–54-year-olds that figure rises to one in three (32 per cent), pointing to a Church which is increasingly diverse, and more so than the general population. However, there has also been a significant increase in churchgoing among the white population.

Dr McAleer said: ‘The stereotype of churchgoers is that they are predominantly old, white and female. Increasingly, that is no longer the case. We’re seeing increasing ethnic diversity, but also large numbers of younger people from all ethnicities and many more men attending church.’

Alongside this significant demographic change within churches, the report highlights evidence of ‘an active and vibrant Church’, said Bible Society. Both Bible reading and confidence in the Bible have increased among churchgoers compared to 2018, ‘indicating that new attenders are even more engaged in Christian belief and practice’.

Furthermore, the report identifies both a greater openness to faith and spirituality, and to churchgoing in general, even among non-churchgoers. Younger people are particularly warm to spirituality, with 40 per cent of 18–24-year-olds saying they pray at least monthly and 51 per cent saying they’ve undertaken a spiritual practice in the last six months – the highest of any age group.

Among non-churchgoing 18–24-year-olds curiosity about Christianity is also typically higher than average, with 34 per cent saying they would attend church if invited by a friend or family member and a quarter (25 per cent) saying they would be interested in discovering more about the Bible – again, the highest of any age group.

The report also shows how churchgoing affects both individual wellbeing and the local community.

The report’s co-author, Dr Rob Barward-Symmons, added: ‘With much of the population struggling with mental health, loneliness and a loss of meaning in life, in particular young people, church appears to be offering an answer. We found that churchgoers are more likely than non-churchgoers to report higher life satisfaction and a greater feeling of connection to their community than non-churchgoers. They are also less likely to report frequently feeling anxious or depressed – particularly young women.’

Communities are also impacted, as churchgoers are more likely to participate in activities that benefit their neighbourhoods than either other religious groups or the general population. The report found that churchgoers are more likely to volunteer, donate to foodbanks and give to charitable causes. For instance, 18–34-year-old churchgoers are almost twice as likely to donate to a food bank as their non-churchgoing peers.

Dr McAleer said: ‘Our report does not challenge the well-established fact that fewer people in England and Wales are choosing to identify as Christian.

‘However, it is the first large-scale study to concentrate not on self-declared Christian identity but on actual Christian practice. By this measurement, the Church is in an exciting period of growth and change.

‘The findings of the report should change how we think about faith in England and Wales, and particularly about Christianity. It should encourage church leaders and decision-makers to plan for growth rather than decline, and it should challenge the media and civic society to engage with and represent this significant and growing section of the population.’

Bible Society’s chief executive Paul Williams said,‘This is a highly significant report which should transform the perception of Christianity and churchgoing in England and Wales. Far from being on a slippery slope to extinction, the Church is alive and growing and making a positive difference to individuals and society.’

The one-size-fits-all guaranteed easy to use popular Christian talk

Coming to a church near you

Here’s what you do.

  1. Read a Bible story at some length, always picking something that involves a miraculous transformation. There are plenty of these available, enough for a whole year’s preaching or more.
  2. Here’s your main point: someone in the story met Jesus, or God if it’s the Old Testament, and their life was transformed. Tell this story with as much drama as you can muster.
  3. Salt your story with promises plucked from elsewhere in scripture, again, plenty to choose from.
  4. Tell some stories about yourself or your children that vaguely illustrate the same point.
  5. Repeat (that’s a sermon series). Or write down (that’s a book).
  6. Change the theme slightly, and repeat again. So instead of ‘secrets of healing’, you could branch into ‘living a life of victory’ or ‘total financial freedom’ or ‘being a person of power and authority’.
  7. On you go. Same talk. It’s a career.

There are consequences to this Christian populism.

  1. You are pointing people to Jesus, perhaps the best thing you can do for anyone.
  2. Unfortunately the Jesus you are pointing them to is a one-shot wonder worker, a stripped-down version of the real thing.
  3. You’re missing the slow. We not finished, in both senses. We are still being patched up, and we are still pressing on in our incomplete state. Blessed are those at the end of their rope, broken, mourning, hungering, thirsting. Every day we search our minds and hearts to conform them to God’s will. Through faith and patience we inherit the promises. Suffering produces character produces hope. Not a charge to victory, methinks, a patient plod.

Bridging the gap between healthcare and wellbeing #4

A final (for now…) post on the interesting shifts of culture and practice that might get state-supported health care and the church’s role at the heart of local communities finding common cause and networking together.

It could be a (quiet, slow) revolution in healthcare and it would not be the first time that church initiatives have altered the national landscape.

  1. The probation service was started by a pair of Anglican missionaries in the early twentieth century, and eventually nationalised.
  2. Educating the working classes was a job pioneered by the Christian churches, with both Catholic and Protestant examples. In the UK, Sunday Schools were teaching literacy and numeracy (and Bible literacy) to a quarter of the eligible British population of children by 1831. 3. (Schools until then were largely private, fee-paying and for the upper class and middle class boys.) In 1870 came the Education Act which made state education compulsory and a state responsibility.
  3. The hospice movement which had earlier (and largely Christian) precedents but in its modern form was established by the devout Christian Dame Cicely Saunders. So far the UK’s 220 or so hospices have escaped being swallowed by the NHS but at Dame Cicely’s death in 2005 were caring for 60,000 people in hospices and 120,000 people in their homes in the UK 4. Eight thousand other hospices followed her model around the world; part of the landscape for the dying. (Interestingly, Dame Cicely was a passionate opponent of assisted dying.)
  4. Possibly, hospitals themselves, invented early in the first millennium by St Basil and his fellow Cappadocian Fathers.