Well, the results are in. Or rather, out. The Bible Society has been forced to admit that the “Quiet Revival” which it had reported on in 2024, and which has generated reams of op-eds and more one-day conferences than anyone has had time to attend, was based on faulty data from YouGov.
There has been a tug of war over the figures from day one, with many very excited by the findings and others expressing scepticism. Interestingly, the sceptics weren’t just grouchy New Atheists looking for a comeback; they included plenty of committed churchgoers and religious affairs journalists.
The sceptics have more or less been vindicated. Yet anyone who has followed the Quiet Revival discourse will know that one reason it has resonated so much can’t be reduced to bogus statistics but to the fact that many churchgoers, both laypeople and church leaders, have found that it confirms what they are seeing before their eyes as their congregations swell.
So how do we make sense of this disconnect?
The explanation which has seemed obvious to me for a while is this: that there is genuine, remarkable, yet hard to capture growth in some British churches, but that this is nowhere close to offsetting the sheer scale of collapse across most mainstream churches. What’s more, the very growth which some churches are seeing insulates them, and those who hear about their growth, from appreciating just how bad things are elsewhere.
So, who is growing? It seems evident to me, from reportage, conversations with church leaders, and my own experience and gut feeling, that it is two main groups (though some members of the second may take umbrage at my grouping them together): first, evangelicals; second, traditionalist Anglo-Catholics and Roman Catholics.
First, the evangelicals. Cards on the table, this is my tribe. Evangelicals encompass more straight-laced churches; the slightly more upbeat, charismatic Holy Trinity Brompton stream in the Church of England and similar; and various other kinds of charismatics and Pentecostals, including some churches popular among migrants.
Evangelicals remain a fairly low-status demographic, particularly among commentators most often interested in the Quiet Revival, “re-enchantment”, and such like. This is partly the fault of evangelicals themselves, as they have wilfully vacated the field of public conversation and been so focussed on evangelism that they have failed to develop an institutional ecosystem that cultivates public intellectuals. Yet they are also wilfully overlooked by people irked by their low-church aesthetics and commitment to scripture. For instance, as COVID wound down, every single evangelical church I knew, Anglican or otherwise, was open as soon as possible and doing everything it could within the guidance. Yet you wouldn’t have known this from the British right-wing press, who ran endless stories at the time berating churches which they never attended for failing to reopen.
There is a critical mass of anecdotes about unprecedented levels of growth in evangelical churches
Yet, like it or not, evangelicalism is where most of the growth, energy, and money is in the British church right now. Evangelicals probably make up about 3 per cent of the population, around 2 million people — but that’s a fairly dependable figure, as, unlike in other traditions, there is very little “nominal” evangelicalism in Britain. Almost any Brit who self-identifies as “evangelical” actually believes in, and practices, the faith.
There is a critical mass of anecdotes about unprecedented levels of growth in evangelical churches currently — not simply from enthusiastic people posting online, but from national leaders who are positioned to see it. For instance, at the end of 2025, John Stevens, National Director of the FIEC (Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches), a growing group of over 600 churches, noted that the Quiet Revival report confirmed what he had already been seeing for some time: more interest, conversions, and baptisms than in 15 years as a national director and even in 35 years as a Christian. You will hear the same thing if you speak to leaders in other evangelical groups: New Frontiers, New Wine, Holy Trinity Brompton, Church Society, Reform, Elim, Assemblies of God, AMiE, the IPC, and more, all across the country.
My own evangelical anecdotes gel with this. I grew up in an FIEC church in suburban south London, which I still attended until very recently. Last September, the congregation had to split into two morning services due to the level of growth, a significant amount of which is coming from conversions rather than church transfer, many (after years of struggling to reach them) from the local white working class. This growth is so unusual in Britain that the church has formed a partnership with a larger church in Arizona in part to receive guidance in growth management. My family and I recently relocated from there to Oxfordshire and joined a rural evangelical Anglican parish, which has likewise recently had to split into two morning services due to growth.
The other obvious site of growth is the high church and broadly conservative Anglo-Catholics and Roman Catholics. This is not my crowd, but I appreciate going higher up the candle far more than I used to. This particular strain is harder to quantify than evangelicals for various reasons. For instance, there is a high degree of nominal faith in Catholicism (though 1.2 million in the UK attend mass “regularly”), and conservative Anglo-Catholics are hard to differentiate in the stats from other Anglicans
It seems obvious that some churches in the traditionalist Anglo-/Roman Catholic world are growing significantly, but that they remain far smaller than the evangelicals. You can find some form of evangelical church in almost every town in the country; not so for a conservative Anglo- or Roman Catholic church that worships in the beauty of holiness. These are more confined to urban centres and university towns. I also strongly suspect that more of the growth in these high churches tends to be forms of “church transfer” from people who were formally or nominally Christian or became disillusioned with their existing church tradition, rather than conversions among the completely unchurched. Such growth is difficult to capture in data. Given evangelicalism’s greater emphasis on evangelism (an emphasis we make to a fault, I will admit), I suspect that they take the lion’s share of direct conversions from the unbaptised. (None of this is to say that high churches aren’t reaching the unchurched, or that transfer growth is less valuable).
There has been a wave of high-profile conversions to or at least explorations of high church traditions among the intelligentsia. Through gaps in the incense, one can spy a goodly number of writers, musicians, and hacks during evensong at St. Bartholomew the Great in London these days.
Yet this renewed interest in high churchmanship is not just confined to the tastemakers. There is evidently a level of energy and activity in this kind of churchmanship which we’ve never seen before. St. Bart’s has been filling up with people without a byline to their name as well. Elsewhere, commenting on the Quiet Revival debunking, Bijan Omrani noted that attendance at services at Oxford colleges seems more numerous and committed than it has in 20 years. Notably, Pusey House in Oxford has also gone from strength to strength: someone recently told me that, a decade ago, it was dominated by an insular “red trouser brigade” (meaning awkward posh people, not anything to do with clerical vestments); today, it has become a genuine centre of national intellectual activity and boasts a lively spiritual community.
The development of things such as the Fidelium Network of lay Anglo-Catholics in London is another example of growing interest and numbers. Friends in traditionalist churches tell me reliably that they are seeing unprecedented levels of young people in the pews and at the altar rail each week. Again, this seems largely confined to cities and universities, and there are surely a good few Very Online “converts” in there who have memed themselves into Rad Trad Catholicism and will soon find themselves like the seed sown on stony ground which “because it had no root, it withered away.” But, as much noise as they make, I suspect they are still a minority. Students and young professionals are changing their lives to turn up to church every week, and we mustn’t underestimate the significance of that.
Of course, the quants will be insisting that “the plural of ‘anecdote’ isn’t ‘data’!” Yet one lesson of this whole Quiet Revival debacle is clearly that sometimes you can still trust your gut on nationwide stats and trends if you’re actually involved on the ground. Right now, good data on churchgoing is (quite clearly) hard to come by. Even the “2 million evangelicals” stat I cited is from a 2007 Tearfund report — nearly 20 years ago (though I think the number still checks out). So, until then, large numbers of anecdotes making their way to well-placed leaders with a national perspective is a pretty good barometer. It’s hard not to think of Jeff Bezos’ famous maxim: “When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.”
There are also some suggestive stats, though. Baptisms are the most obvious. Although infant baptisms are declining, in 2024 the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales reported 5,432 baptisms of people aged over 7—the highest in more than a decade, up 21 per cent on the previous year, and above pre-pandemic levels. One imagines these baptised Catholic teenagers and adults will start reproducing soon (as is their Romanist wont), so keep an eye on those infant baptism numbers too. 2024 also saw 8,700 Anglican baptisms for over-18s, up from 7,800 in 2023. As noted, there is no way to differentiate different camps among the Anglicans, but it seems highly likely that these numbers are mostly shared between the evangelicals and the Anglo-Catholics.
So, if business is booming for the most active folks at both the high and low ends of the liturgical spectrum, why has the Quiet Revival been basically debunked? And why did that fact surprise so many people?
The answer is that, despite the growth among evangelicals and Anglo-/Roman Catholics, the collapse in more mainstream churches is so catastrophic that growth elsewhere is nowhere close to offsetting it. More than 3,500 churches have closed in the past ten years, and 2,000 more may follow in the next five. Even the most optimistic trajectories for evangelical and Anglo-/Roman Catholic growth can’t reasonably hope to touch the sides of that, even as closures in some places present them with new opportunities to take over buildings or be invited in to revitalise dying churches.
Yet one reason that people got over excited about the Quiet Revival is that those who attend growing churches are insulated from just how bad the decline is elsewhere.
Again, anecdotes come to my aid. Within the last two years, I had rare causes to visit two local non-evangelical churches, taking a Sunday away from the 400-strong congregation I normally attended. One was my local 850-year-old parish for a christening, the other was the local Methodist church for my daughter’s Scout promise service. Despite my cantankerous conservative evangelical priors, I went to both with as genuine a spirit of openness and generosity as I could manage. But I am sorry to say that they were dire. The Anglican parish (where my family of 5 almost doubled the attendance, and which the church warden candidly told me was on the verge of bankruptcy) was celebrating “Creation Sunday”, so read Jesus’ miraculous catch of fish in John 21 and somehow applied this to plastic pollution in the ocean without mentioning the Nazarene again. The Methodists, meanwhile, were more than doubled by the Scouts joining them, and were clearly grateful to have the average age pulled out of triple figures and to have even a pinch of gusto as we sang through a ropy rendition of “Jerusalem” to a tinny backing track. I was not expecting lights and drums and smoke machines (I don’t even like that in evangelical churches), but any sense of commitment to the basic beliefs of Christianity and the seriousness of worship was nowhere to be seen. The only saving grace was that the first trip happened in June, but they managed to avoid celebrating Pride month.
Had I not taken these trips however, my only experience of church in my hometown would have been of an evangelical church that was bursting at the seams, in which the Quiet Revival reporting would have given the impression that our experiences were characteristic of the nation. But outside of our gatherings, most Anglican parishes, not to mention the Church of Scotland, Methodists, Congregationalists, Brethren, Quakers, Baptists, as well as plenty of Roman Catholics, are evaporating. Senior figures in the General Synod committed to parish ministry, but who are unconvinced by the proposals of Save the Parish, have told me privately that they think 25 per cent of Church of England parishes will need to be closed to safeguard the church’s overall work.
There are no guarantees. God answers prayer, and sometimes his answer is “no”
If and when we are able to get accurate data on all this, I imagine we will see two lines: one showing church growth moving upwards for evangelicals and conservative Anglo-/Roman Catholics — at a sharper gradient than used to be the case but still fairly slow and steady — and another showing the mainstream churches going off a cliff. At some point, one imagines, those two lines will meet. It will be interesting to see where that leaves us. Of course, evangelical that I am, I would love to see genuine revival and believe firmly that what’s impossible with man is possible with God. But there are no guarantees. God answers prayer, and sometimes his answer is “no”. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity — even church growth.
Perhaps the most ironic element of this whole story is that whatever “revival” there is hasn’t been the quiet part. In fact, it’s made rather a lot of noise for the past 18 months — and why wouldn’t it? Stories of booming congregations and the dramatic conversions of working-class prodigals, or the slow religious humbling of public intellectuals, make for riveting column inches. It’s the collapse of the vast majority of churches which aren’t growing that’s now happening quietly. Until we get good data, we’d all do well to keep our ears to the ground.
A final anecdote: I mentioned the dire state of my former, centuries old parish, on the verge of closure and struggling with a lengthy interregnum. We moved away from the area recently. This past week though, I was told that the parish has experienced a new lease of life: new families have joined, relations with the school have been revitalised, and there is even a new afternoon service. What’s changed? An evangelical vicar.
