The fact that the United Reformed Church is not alone in facing decline does not diminish the seriousness of the situation it finds itself facing. Dramatic as its statistics of membership decline are, it is doubtful if they really convey how weak most URC congregations now are.
The perilous nature of the URC’s situation is emphasised when we consider the age structure of the Church. According to the English Church Life Survey of 2001 the most numerous age group in the URC was the 65-74 cohort, which comprised nearly 25% of those attending. Another 20% was in the 75-84 age range. By contrast only 3% of the Church were in the 25-34 age range. Part of the reason for this age imbalance has been the collapse of children’s work in the URC. In 1973 there were 102,027 children in URC churches (or approximately one child to every 2 members). In 2005 there were 21,852 children in worship (or one child to every 4 members). This figure is the total number of children on the register – the actual number attending on any given Sunday will almost always be less. In 1998 Brierley found the average age of attenders as 49, the same as the Methodists, and the equal highest of any denomination (the overall average is 43 (2002, 2.13).
If we take the city of Norwich, formerly an area of some Reformed strength, in 1973 there were six United Reformed Churches with a total membership of 1105 (United
Reformed Church Yearbook 1973-74 p.95). By 2012 there were four churches left with a membership of 254 – a catastrophic decline of 77%. Of these 254 members:
53 were below the age of 65 108 between 65 and 80 77 between 80 and 90 16 were over 90
126 The unbalanced age structure of the Church not only means that membership decline will inevitably continue but that it can be expected to accelerate. The Church Life Survey concluded that URC membership might expect to halve again in the following 20 years. There is already evidence of this. The 2012 United Reformed Church Yearbook reported that the rate of decline of an ‘average congregation’ had increased from 11.3% in the period 2001- 06 to 18.3% in the period 2006-11. The average decline in the number of worshippers had increased from 12.9% in 2006 to 18.3% in the period 2006-11. In the last five year period the number of children associated with the Church has declined by 28.5% and the number of children in worship by 13.3% (2012 p.16-17). It may be that at some point the United Reformed Church membership will stabilise but it will certainly not be at anything like the current level.
The severe nature of the difficulties facing the Church can be seen by comparing the United Reformed Church with the Presbyterian Church at the time of union. Their
memberships are not now very different, but the Presbyterian Church was organised in a relatively small number of numerically strong congregations, most with their own minister. The United Reformed Church by contrast is spread over a much larger number of weaker, smaller congregations, to whom it is increasingly difficult to minister satisfactorily.
Arthur Macarthur recalls that when he first met with Howard Stanley, the then Congregational General Secretary, the Congregationalists had 2990 churches and 212,017 members, the Presbyterians 346 churches and 71,329 members.
I recall some anxiety on our side as Howard Stanley described some of those village churches and indeed the number of churches of all sorts with less than 50 members, closing at the rate of fifty a year. Presbyterians, used to a central finance system, trembled for the economic future (Cornick, 1998 p.173-4).
Another senior Presbyterian Minister, Kenneth Slack warned,
I must bluntly say that reflection … has convinced me that such a union will be virtually irrelevant unless it is followed by a large-scale closure of redundant churches and a drastic attempt to drag many others, in membership and fabric, into the latter half of the 20th century… I recognise that any such process will fall far more hardly on the Congregational Churches (Slack, 2004 p.2).
In fact the number of churches fell at a significantly lower pace than did the
membership. In the first 30 years membership roughly halved as did the number of ministers but the number of churches fell by 20.8%.
Members Buildings Ministers
1972 200 000 2080 1841
127 (Cornick, 2002 p.4).
By 2012 the average United Reformed congregation had only 41 members, compared with around 200 in the Presbyterian Church of England. As for large churches, it was increasingly hard to find any. Not including ecumenical congregations, by 2012 only ten United Reformed Churches had the 200 members which had been the average in the more than 300
Presbyterian congregations (United Reformed Church yearbook 2012.). Writing in 1962, in what was generally a rather pessimistic book, Christopher Driver could write that:
Looking at the Zephyrs, Minxes and Gazelles parked outside the more prosperous chapels of Mill Hill and Bournemouth and Ealing and Purley, it might seem
premature to contemplate the obituary of the species … And indeed, there are some localities, mostly conspicuously among the middle-class suburbs of large cities, where Free Churches are imitating the best features of their booming American neighbours (1962 p.17).
By the beginning of the twenty-first century the obituary would not have seemed so
premature. The churches in the suburbs might still be stronger than those in the inner cities, but their members were older and the numbers slipping. Purley for example, which in 1972 was the fourth largest United Reformed Church with 594 members and 121 children, by 2011 had 145 members, an average congregation of only 75, and 7 children in worship.
Of course there are churches that have held their own or in a very few cases grown. But the scale of the collapse needs to be grasped. In most churches there are now
congregations of elderly people carrying on with diminishing numbers and declining hope. The question “How much longer can we go on?” is a real one in many congregations. David Thompson comments: “We are now smaller in size in England and Wales than the
Presbyterian Church of England was in 1972. This means that we have changed from being a small ‘large Church’ to being a large ‘small Church’. That may require further changes in structure” (Thompson, 2012, p.3). That puts it as positively as anyone can. The United Reformed Church is not facing imminent dissolution – indeed the evidence of bodies such as the Free Church of England, or the Wesleyan Reform Union, is that declining religious organizations can continue forms of residual life long after they have lost social significance. None the less any projection of the future must assume (unless the Church enters an
ecumenical union) accelerating membership decline, an increasing inability to maintain national and synod structures, the closure of the majority of the remaining churches, and a relegation of whatever Church remains to increasing ecclesiastical insignificance. Whether we consider the dream it embodied, its numerical strength, or its identity and vitality, the failure of the United Reformed Church is stark and unmistakable. Born in illusion, without real purpose or coherence, it has declined to the point where its future is, at best, problematic. Michael Davies’s judgement, that the state of the United Reformed Church today is, “pretty awful” (ibid. p.7), is hard to dispute.
128 A poignant moment for the Church came in 2009 when ordination training ended at Mansfield College in Oxford. Mansfield had opened in Oxford in 1886 after the ancient universities were opened to dissenters. Its Champneys neo-gothic building was an assertion of Congregationalism’s intellectual and social status. Of the 154 students admitted by the first Principal Fairbairn to courses of at least two years, all were already graduates and 54 were graduates of Oxford or Cambridge (Kaye 1996). Scholars such as Fairbairn, Selbie and Cadoux personified Congregationalism’s liberal theology, Micklem led the New Genevans, Routley was Congregationalism’s most eminent musicologist, Dodd and Caird were
distinguished New Testament scholars, and John Huxtable was a Mansfield man. The decline of Congregationalism in the twentieth century, however, meant that even by the nineteen- twenties the college was in financial difficulty and short of intellectually adequate students. Facing possible bankruptcy under John Marsh the college moved to admit non-theological students. Inexorably the college secularized with George Caird the last URC Minister to be its Principal. The Sunday congregation, which under Selbie had been one of the largest in Oxford, dropped away. Elaine Kaye remembers as a post-war student at Oxford the college chapel was three-quarters full on a Sunday. “Then when I came back to Oxford in 1972 and went to Mansfield on a Sunday I was appalled because there was George Caird, an out- standing preacher, and there were fifteen people” (Kaye, interview, p.1).
After Caird’s departure in 1977 to be Dean Ireland Professor in the University there was no longer a major URC theologian in the College, reflecting in part the declining academic resources of the Church. The intellectual standards of the ministerial students declined too with ordinands no longer having to be graduates and sometimes taking only a certificate. Tony Tucker, Assistant Director of Education and Training at Mansfield from 1989-96, discovered, “there were many people in the college who felt that the theological link was a hindrance. They felt students were coming in as ordinands who might not have won a place there otherwise” (interview, p.4-5). Finally the declining number of ordinands in the United Reformed Church led, after a period of equivocation, to the end of ministerial training at Mansfield. If Mansfield’s opening epitomised Congregationalism’s moment of Victorian pomp, the end was a sign of the extent of its decline. Clyde Binfield says:
What I think was tragic beyond measure is that we did not find new uses for
Mansfield. I think the pass had been sold considerably earlier – but here was plant in the University of Oxford, one of the great universities of the world, that could be used for Reformed scholarship. It didn’t have to be for ordination training, there were all sorts of other possibilities. And the moment it is lost we will never return to it. The College will become, one hopes, a most distinguished college of the university, but if ever it remembers its religious origins it will assume it was some sort of milk and water Anglicanism. I regard that as an unmitigated tragedy (Binfield, interview, p.5- 6).
This possibly overstates the matter. Westminster College, which also had a distinguished intellectual history, remained open at Cambridge, although now increasingly as a resource centre for the United Reformed Church and a conference centre, rather than simply a
129 theological college. But nothing spoke more eloquently of the URC’s decline than the failed hopes of Mansfield.