‘Invisible Christians’ live out faith as churchgoing declines

Polish Catholics working in the oil industry have bolstered an unexpected two per cent increase in churchgoing in Aberdeenshire, but elsewhere across Scotland numbers have plummeted.

The 2016 Church Census by the Brierley Consultancy found that the number of people regularly attending services in Scotland had fallen by more than half over the last 30 years and stands now at around 390,000, or 7.2 per cent of the population. Of them 32 per cent are Catholic. It showed that 42 per cent of churchgoers are over 65 and that the number of congregations, as opposed to churches, dropped from 4,100 in 1984 to 3,700 in 2016.

The last Church Census was carried out in 2002 but not all the comparisons relate to that census.

Lead researcher Dr Peter Brierley said that the figures indicated a crisis in Christianity across Scotland. He said: “We are living in the twenty-first century and one of the features of the twenty-first century is that people’s allegiance to particular faiths is no longer as strong as it used to be”. The decline was also attributable to the fact that the proportion of congregations who are elderly is much greater than in the population of Scotland as a whole. “So, you have a great number of churchgoers dying,” he said. Also there are some “Invisible Christians” who believe in God, but they have moved house and not found a new church.

The census found that four-fifths of churchgoers attend every week and an extra three per cent, especially Roman Catholics and members of the Church of Scotland, attend Christmas services. Mid-week services were popular with younger worshippers, especially at Roman Catholic, Pentecostal and Baptist churches.

The vast majority – 94 per cent – are white, with  African, Caribbean or black groups making up half the remaining six per cent – four times the total in the national population. Of these churchgoers,  many are aged 25-34 with Pentecostals, a group that has doubled since 2002 to 19,000 today, making up five per cent of all churchgoers.

A spokeswoman for the Catholic Church in Scotland said that social changes in recent decades meant that fewer professed the Christian faith or belonged to a Church. She accepted recent scandals within the Church “had some effect on the commitment of individuals”. However the 2016 census showed that there were 100,000 more Scots identifying as Catholic than recorded by the Church. “Non-attendance doesn’t mean that people don’t pray or live a Christian life with [its] values. Caring Christian values aren’t on the decline in Scotland, however many people manage to make it to church on a Sunday,” she said.