As a side note it's fascinating to see the comparision with how the Church of England deals with the issue of falling attendance....
Church law stipulates that every parish church should have weekly Sunday services, but a new proposal recommends dropping this rule.
Martin Flowerdew serves three parishes in Derbyshire; his smallest church has a congregation of about eight. “If I were on my own leading worship, I couldn’t get round and do all the legal things you’d expect of me on a Sunday. It’s tidying up the law to sit with the practice and I’m quite relaxed about that.”
In the parish of Great Snaith, where Eleanor Robertshaw is rector, there are Sunday services in four out of their five churches every week.“If we’re wanting to grow churches, then we’ve got to think about [how we] deploy our clergy. It’s not necessarily sensible to have them rushing about, jumping from one service to the next, where they don’t get to speak to people,” she says.
Her biggest congregation in one church is about 40; at her smallest, it is five. She says that, even with small numbers, the service – which doesn’t really differ from one delivered to a larger congregation – is equally important. “A lot of people don’t drive and can’t get to the church in the next village, but there’s also the personal relationships, the family connections. People hold that very dear to their hearts, certainly in a rural context.”
The church’s old approach to its smallest congregations, says Hampson, was all-or-nothing: run a Sunday service or close. “What we’ve learned since then is that, actually, there are very good reasons for having two or three services a month or 12 services a year [to celebrate] festivals. That’s now an alternative to closing a church.”
