THE TRUE STATE OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | September 15, 2026

Well, what is the true state of the Church of England?

Ask the men who run it and you will hear about a "Quiet Revival," a warm tide of returning young men and rising Easter numbers. Ask the widow who still turns up on a wet Sunday in a village that has lost its priest, is losing its rectory, and will soon lose its building, and you will hear something else entirely.

A source deep inside the church, and intimately familiar with its real workings, summed it up like this:

"WE are about to see a period of steep decline and closure, with a number of evangelical bishops now adopting a bizarre philosophy that 'church' does not require parish churches and parish priests. Everything can be done by informal lay groups, directed by ever expanding diocesan offices, often many miles away. Rectories are being sold off, clergy not replaced, parishes being merged into large unwieldy clusters, and money increasingly being spent on staff at the office. We literally have bishops who do not believe in ordination or sacraments, and that they are the only actual ministers in the fantasy evangelical church which they have imagined for themselves."

That is not the grievance of a disappointed traditionalist. It is a description of policy. And the documents bear it out.

Managed Decline, Dressed as Mission

Consider the arithmetic that Lambeth would rather you did not do. The Church of England sits atop a Church Commissioners' endowment of some £11.5 billion ($15.5 billion), one of the largest church endowments the world has ever seen. Yet only about eight per cent of the Commissioners' planned annual distribution is ring-fenced for frontline parish ministry. The rest funds a machine.

That machine is now eating its own foundations. Twenty-seven of the forty-two dioceses are running deficits, and their answer, almost everywhere, is not to shrink the diocesan office but to cut the parish priest. The diocese of Oxford maintains barely 310 stipendiary parish clergy while listing more than 150 staff at its diocesan office — a ratio that tells you exactly where the institution now believes its ministry happens.

The campaign group Save the Parish, founded in 2021 and now led by the Rev. Marcus Walker, rector of Great St Bartholomew in London, has spent five years documenting the mechanics. Its chairman calls it a "doom loop": starve the local church of money, merge and close, watch the volunteers quit and the people drift, then use the falling numbers to justify the next round of cuts. Roughly forty per cent of the churches now closing sit in poorer areas, where a struggling diocese has nothing left to give.

Where does it lead? To Wigan. The "Minster Communities" experiment there — the flagship of the parish-free model — turned into a disaster, and now threatens the closure of up to nineteen churches. Truro tried its own version, styled "On the Way." Everywhere the vocabulary is the same, and everywhere it means the same thing: "developing mission and ministry" means fewer clergy; "fruitful and sustainable" means a higher parish share squeezed from fewer people. The instruments are quietly canonical — Pastoral Schemes to amalgamate benefices, Bishop's Mission Orders to dissolve a parish into a "fresh expression," and the sale of the parsonage once the priest is gone. Sell the vicarage, and the church has begun, deliberately, to withdraw from that place — rural or urban — for good.

This is what my source means. The men presiding over it are not vandals; many are sincere. But sincerity that liquidates the parish is still liquidation. This month a joint report by Save the Parish and senior church figures warned, without exaggeration, that the parish vicar is becoming an "endangered species."

The "Quiet Revival" and What It Conceals

Now to the good news, because an honest man reports it. The Church's own Statistics for Mission recorded a fifth consecutive year of modest growth in 2025 — roughly 707,000 people at a typical week's services, up a fraction on the year and about fifteen per cent above the Covid trough of 2021. In April 2025 the Bible Society went further, publishing The Quiet Revival and claiming a twenty-five per cent rise in Church of England attendance between 2018 and 2024.

Seize on those figures if you like. But read the fine print, because the Church's own chief statistician did. Dr Ken Eames, the C of E's senior statistical research officer, states flatly that by almost every measure, in almost every diocese, attendance and participation were still significantly lower in 2024 than in 2018. In roughly half of all churches every attendance measure was lower in 2024 than in 2019; in only about one in eight were they all higher. Adult weekly attendance remains close to eighteen per cent below where it stood in 2019, and Eames warns that the numbers should not be expected to return to their pre-pandemic level at all. The growth curve is concave — the rebound is already slowing.

The broader picture is bleaker still. By the British Social Attitudes survey, just five per cent of British adults now attend a Christian service weekly, down from eight per cent in 2018, and there is no evidence whatever of the much-trumpeted revival among the young. A "Quiet Revival," then, that is inaudible in the national data and invisible in the CofE's own diocesan returns. A church that must inflate a post-Covid dead-cat bounce into a revival has already told you how frightened it is.

Has ALPHA Jump-Started the Church?

Which brings us to ALPHA, the great evangelistic hope of the age, born at Holy Trinity Brompton and carried worldwide by Nicky Gumbel. Credit where it is due: ALPHA is superbly produced, disarmingly hospitable, and built on a sound instinct — that modern people want to belong before they will believe, to ask their questions over supper before they will kneel. As a tool it has genuine reach.

But has it jump-started the Church of England? The evidence says no, and it has said so for a long time. The classic field research found that some seventy per cent of ALPHA participants arrived through their own churches — they were already churchgoers — and only about five per cent regarded themselves as outside the faith at all. Of the minority who reported a "conversion," most were already in the pews; the honest conclusion was that ALPHA's real effect is to rejuvenate already-evangelical congregations and spread charismatic religion among the committed, not to reach the lost. It is a hothouse for existing plants, not a net cast into deep water.

There is a deeper worry, and it is a theological one. Critics from the Reformed side have long charged that ALPHA leaves the impression that it is experience, not truth, that finally matters — that its converts are drawn to a Christian lifestyle rather than to Christ crucified through the preached gospel. Even the sympathetic sociologist Martyn Percy has faulted the course for thinning its doctrine, exalting private conversion over the church and the sacraments, and speaking in the accent of the comfortable middle class. A course that whispers about sin and shouts about the Spirit's tingle will fill a room, but it will not raise the dead. ALPHA is a symptom of the same evangelical drift my source names — the belief that atmosphere can do the work of ordained ministry, Word, and Sacrament.

Why the Church Is Dying

So the closures are real, the revival is oversold, and the flagship course recycles the faithful. But these are symptoms. The disease lies deeper, and it is worth naming plainly, for the record.

The tide of secularism has become a flood. In the 2021 census the Christian share of England and Wales fell below half for the first time — from 59.3 per cent in 2011 to 46.2 percent — while those professing no religion rose from a quarter to well over a third of the population. Some five to six million people dropped their Christian identity in a single decade. Britain is, for the first time in its recorded Christian history, no longer a Christian-majority nation.

The clergy have lost their nerve. A church that fears to name sin cannot preach salvation, for salvation from nothing is nothing. The historic vocabulary of judgment, repentance, hell, and the cross has been quietly retired as impolite, and in its place we are offered "diversity and inclusion" — a therapeutic gospel with the offense of Christ carefully removed. The energy once spent evangelizing the nation is now spent placating the ever-expanding sexual-identity lobby within the church itself, and blessing what Scripture will not bless.

The church has bent the knee to the state and the age. Terrified of giving offense, its bishops conform to whatever Parliament and the culture demand, mistaking respectability for relevance. But a church indistinguishable from the world has nothing to offer the world. It cannot call men to repent when it will not itself repent of anything.

And into the vacuum steps a rival faith that suffers from none of these doubts. The Muslim population of England and Wales grew by some forty-four per cent in a single decade, from 4.9 to 6.5 per cent of the whole. Islam advances because it is confident, unembarrassed, and certain of its truth claims — precisely the qualities the Church of England has spent two generations apologizing for. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does the human soul.

The Reckoning

There you have it. An £11.5 billion ($15.5 billion) endowment and empty pews. Diocesan offices swell as parishes are sold from under their people. A "revival" that its own statisticians quietly disown. A flagship course that gathers the saved and misses the lost. Bishops who no longer believe in the ministry they were consecrated to guard.

A church that will not preach repentance cannot be surprised when no one repents. A church that will not name sin need not wonder why no one seeks a Saviour. And a church that sells its parishes to balance the books of its bureaucracy has confused the cure of souls with the management of decline.

The true state of the Church of England is this: it is not being persecuted to death. It is quietly, respectably, and with excellent minutes taken at every meeting, arranging its own funeral — and calling it mission.

END