Christianity and England

England has a tremendously rich history of the Christian faith. The Roman Catholics look upon the beginning of that history with the arrival of St. Augustine (a different Augustine than the one most of us have heard of) in the late 500's, in what is now known as Kent, England. He set up his bishopric in Canterbury, which even today is counted as the center of Christianity in England. But Christianity was certainly here long before that. There is good evidence that there were Christian Romans living here in England during the First Century! However, the Romans withdrew from England sometime around 410 A.D.

For some time, the Angles, Saxons and the Lutes were all making invasions along the Eastern shores of England from the Danish lands they came from. They were all pagans. When the Romans withdrew completely, the so-called Anglo-Saxon invasion got underway in a big way bringing with them their pagan polytheism. Oswald, a prince of Northumbria living with the Scots while in exile, converted to Christianity when he visited the holy island of Iona just off the Western Scottish coast. When he regained power in Northumbria, he requested missionaries from the monastery of Iona to spread Christianity among his people:

"Owing to his past among the Scots, he requested missionaries from Iona, the pre-eminent monastery of the Irish in what is now Scotland, rather than the Roman-backed mission in England. At first the monastery sent a new bishop named Cormán, but he met with no success and soon returned to Iona, reporting that the Northumbrians were too stubborn to be converted. Aidan criticised Cormán's methods and was sent as a replacement in 635.^[2]

Aidan chose Lindisfarne, like Iona an island, and close to the royal fortress of Bamburgh, as his seat of his diocese. King Oswald, who after his years of exile had a perfect command of Irish, often had to translate for Aidan and his monks, who did not speak English at first. When Oswald died in 642, Aidan received continued support from King Oswine of Deira and the two became close friends.

An inspired missionary, Aidan would walk from one village to another, politely conversing with the people he saw and slowly interesting them in Christianity. According to legend, the king gave Aidan a horse so that he wouldn't have to walk, but Aidan gave the horse to a beggar. By patiently talking to the people on their own level Aidan and his monks slowly restored Christianity to the Northumbrian communities. Aidan also took in twelve English boys to train at the monastery, to ensure that the area's future religious leadership would be English." - Wikipedia

Later, the Celtic Christianity of St. Aidan and Roman Catholicism would come to a reconciliation at Whitby Abbey just north of Scarborough, and Christianity spread throughout the land. Even the Vikings converted when they started to colonize the eastern coasts of what became known as the Danelaw.

Today, two universities, Oxford and Cambridge, are considered two of the premier universities of the world. They got their start as Christian seminaries to train priests in theology. One of the first men to make a mark on Christianity as we know it today came from Oxford. John Wycliffe was a scholar and professor at Oxford. He made his mark by protesting the excesses of the Roman Catholic Church in latter 1300's. He also produced the world's first Bible written in the vernacular, that is, in English, so that the common man could read the Scriptures for himself. Until this time, the Bible was written only in Latin, known as the Vulgate translation which was completed in the 400's. He also was the main force behind a movement known as the Lollards, a precursor to the Reformation that took place about 150 years later under the guidance of such men as William Tyndale, Hugh Latimer and Thomas Cramner. The only reason Wycliffe's Bible didn't have a bigger impact than it did was that the Printing Press had not yet been invented. Books had to be hand copied in those days - a very laborious job. Another was that the English language was undergoing a major change that would not settle out until Tyndale's time.

When the Printing Press did come around, men such as Tyndale and Latimer wasted no time in spreading the seeds of the English Reformation. William Tyndale ultimately died before he could finish his complete translation of the Bible into Modern English. But his translation had such an impact that it helped in large part to shape Modern English into what it is today. Henry VIII was in power at this time too and was looking for a way to get his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled or be granted a divorce. Since the Pope was in no mood to grant either one, Henry took things into his own hands and broke the church in England away from Roman Catholicism. Ironically enough, he did this after he wrote a seminal paper attacking the German Reformation movement and in defence of Roman Catholicism earning him the title Defender of the Faith.

From 1525, when Tyndale started publishing his English translation of the New Testament until 1611, there were no less than 7 major English translations of the Bible! Most of these had the blessing of either King Henry VIII or his daughter, Queen Elizabeth I. In the time between them, Elizabeth's older sister, Mary, who was Roman Catholic, tried her best to stamp out the Reformation, having killed over 300 major leaders of the English Reformation. The most popular of these was the Geneva Bible, named so because of where it was printed during the 1540s.

When King James I came to the English throne after 1600, he was approached by officials of the Church of England for permission to render a new Bible translation to replace the official Bishops Bible translation which had not won much popularity among Christians. So from 1605 until 1610, 50 scholars worked to produce a new translation that was printed in 1611, which we know now as the 1611 King James Authorized Bible. Even it too decades to overcome the popularity of the Geneva Bible. Today, millions of Christians in the English speaking world consider it to be the first and only Bible to be used. Strangely enough, it was not published as a Protestant Bible, but to counter the Protestant Bible. Now most Protestants embrace it as their own.

During this time, we also see that the Pilgrim movement and the Puritan movement got their starts. The conflict between the Church of England, which also meant the English government since the Church of England is the State Church, and the Puritans came to a head with a civil war which cost King Charles his head after he was tried for treason by the Puritans under Oliver Cromwell. There were also major conflicts between the Crown and the Scots with their Presbyterian Church under the leadership of John Knox. The people of the United Kingdom took their Christian faith very seriously in those days! For two or three centuries, many English people died as a consequence of which faith they chose and stood by, no matter the price!

Later, a group of men at Oxford started a Holy Club that promoted a methodical study of the Bible. Out of this group, we gained the two brothers John and Charles Wesley who started the Methodist Movement, which later became a church in America. George Whitehead also came out of this club to become a major Baptist preacher in America along side Jonathan Edwards.

When you travel across this ancient land, you'll also find littered across the landscape, dozens of cathedrals that took tremendous resources to build and several centuries in most cases. Nowhere I have ever been has as many beautiful churches dotting the landscape, ranging in size from small chapels that are works of art in themselves to massive cathedrals that bring to mind the Temples of Jerusalem. Within 15 miles of my home here in Gateshead, I have seen some of the most beautiful churches that I think will stand up against any church in the world for sheer beauty. Too bad these beautiful churches don't reflect the faith of this great nation.

Today, it is a different story. When I first moved here to Gateshead in January of 2007, I was shocked at how many churches stand empty or if not empty, are used for things other than as a church. Out in the rural areas, it's not uncommon to find a fair sized church, or even a large church, surrounded by only a few houses. In cases like these, it's simply a case of villages that used to be large enough to support these churches shrank in population as people moved off to other places or to the cities following the jobs. But to find in many small towns, large towns and even the cities, lots of empty churches boarded up, or sold off to be used as offices for some company, it came as a major shock to me. In America, especially in the South, you'd never find this happening! If a church grows too large for it's building, it usually builds somewhere else a larger building and sells the original to another church looking to upgrade themselves. Or you might find where a church builds a bigger sanctuary next to their former church building and then use it as a chapel. But you'll almost never find a church building abandoned or closed up.

For a country which has a very rich history within the Christian Faith, England no longer reflects this proud heritage! England has 66 million people within her borders (including Wales). Tearfund had this to say about the state of Christianity in England today:

In 2007, Tearfund published the following results of their comprehensive review of British Christian religion in 2006:

“One in four of the UK adult population say they go to church at least once a year. [...] 59% never or practically never go to church.”

Tearfund (2007)₁₀

• 10% of the UK adult population go to church at least weekly.
• 15% attend church at least monthly.
• 26% attend church at least yearly.
• 59% never or practically never go to church.

Self-disclosure polls of church attendance are generally twice as high as reality. Actual measures of church attendance have shown that Church attendance in 1999 was 7.5%, down from 10% in 1989 and 12% in 1979 (declining by about an absolute 2% per decade)[uk.news.yahoo.com 2000]. This trend predicts that in 2007, the rate will be close to 6% who attend, not the 10% who think they do according to Tearfund. This estimate was backed up by the English Church Census 2004.

The Christian Research group's fourth English Church Census (2004) is another professional census whose authors have never shied away from reporting honest statistics, no matter how painful they have been for British Christianity. 37500 churches were invited to take part, and about half did. Some stark truths of Church attendance between 1998 and 2005:

• Between 1998 and 2005, half a million people stopped going to church on Sunday₁₃.
• Daily Telegraph's religious affairs correspondent, Jonathan Petre, says "While 1,000 new people are joining a church each week, 2,500 are leaving"₁₄.
• 6.3% of the population go to church on an average Sunday, compared to 7.5% in 1998₁₄.
• 29% of churchgoers are 65 or over, compared with 16% of the population₁₄.
• Sunday churchgoing is declining at 2.3% per year, slightly slower than the 1990s rate of 2.7% per year₁₃.
• Nearly all Church 'growth' is due to immigrants. A massive influx of Polish workers have filled some churches₁₃.
• "The Roman Catholics have recorded the largest drop [...], it has halved over the past sixteen years"₁₆.
• The drop in the 20-29 age group was 29%₁₆.

"The fastest rates of decline were among Roman Catholics and Methodists; whereas the Pentecostal Churches showed significant growth over the period. As a result, Methodism has dropped to fourth place behind Pentecostalism. If these rates continue, the C of E will overtake the RC Church within the next four years"₁₅.

"London has 11 per cent of all churches in England, and 20 per cent of all churchgoers. It has 53 per cent of all English Pentecostalists, and 27 per cent of all Charismatic Evangelicals. Also, it caters for 57 per cent of all worshippers in their 20s. "I couldn't believe that figure myself, and had to check it again," said Peter Brierley, the director of Christian Research"₁₅. - Religion in the United Kingdom: Diversity, Trends and Decline by Vexen Crabtree, July 2007

In another part of the same report Crabtree shows that after polling 1000 people, 55% consider themselves to be athiests and have no belief in a higher being. The truth of the matter is, here in England, at the most 17% of the population attend church at least once a month. In America, that number is better than 80%!

When I was in high school back in the late 70's, a history teacher of mine, Mr. Larry Harmon taught me to look to England to see where America would be about 50 years later. His theory was that if you wanted to see where America was heading in the next 50 years, study the trends that are prevalent in England today. Looking back over the past 150 years or so, this has proven true in many cases . . . but not all.

Where was it that the English people lost their faith in Christianity? I'm not certain, but if you look to see when the denominations over here changed from growth strategies to maintence strategies, you'll find the answer. I don't know when that happened, but it wouldn't surprise me if it happened after the First World War, or as they call it over here, the Great War. As I said in posts below, England lost more than 3 million people in that war, more than any other war in their history . . . including the Second World War. I'm going to look into this more and see what I can find and when I do, I'll let you know what I find so that maybe, just maybe, we can avoid the same fate.