Writing in today’s Telegraph, Jonathan Petre reports on a new study by Peter Brierley of Christian Research. He says this suggests that, if current trends continue, evangelicals will make up more than half of all Sunday church worshippers in 10 years’ time, up from about a third now. Moreover, all but a tiny proportion of the new breed of evangelicals will be theologically conservative, viewing sex outside marriage, including homosexuality, as outlawed by Scripture.
Petre’s full article here does contain some criticisms of the research by Gordon Lynch of Birmingham University. TA will seek more information too.
I must admit I take most of this sort of research with a large dollop of salt. And I always compensate for what I perceive as the biases of the researcher, and of the media outlet printing the story :>) Perhaps it’s just the choice of words that the Telegraph has to use for its wider readership but for me the word “mainstream” seems to have been appropriated here for a type of evangelicalism that most of us would call “conservative”, and it is contrasted with “broad or liberal” which is not a pair of adjectives commonly used to distinguish… Read more »
The Church Times had an article on this, “which you can read here”:http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/templates/NewsTemplate_1.asp?recid=2047&table=news&bimage=news&issue=7330&count=0, and it also published some statistics for Europe, “which you can read here”:http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/templates/ExtendedNewsTemplate_1.asp?recid=2047&table=news&bimage=news&issue=7330&count=0