Here we provide religious statistician Peter Brierley’s estimates of UK church membership, number of church buildings and clergy for the main Christian traditions from 2000 to 2006.
Click here to download the spreadsheet.
The definition of membership is fuzzy, with church attendance substituted for denominations which have no concept of formal membership, such as the Roman Catholic Church and most New Churches and Pentecostal churches.
The estimates were originally published in the Religious Trends compendia, and are reproduced with the kind permission of the organisation Christian Research, original publisher of Religious Trends.
Brierley continues to publish religious statistics, including the recent UK Church Statistics, 2005-2015 (Tonbridge: ADBC Publishers, 2011). This is underpinned by a fresh compilation of the number of churches, ministers and members in the UK, conducted by Brierley in mid-2010 by means of a form sent to each denomination, large and small. Missing data were either estimated from previous figures or repeated from the last edition of Religious Trends. Statistics are given for each denomination for each year between 2005 and 2010, with a forecast for 2015, and disaggregated by the four home nations.
Overall, there were 340 Christian denominations active in the UK in 2010 (as against 275 four years earlier), with 50,700 churches or congregations (2% more than in 2005), served by 36,600 ministers (4% up on 2005), and with 5,515,000 members.
More details are available at the following BRIN news post:
http://www.brin.ac.uk/2011/uk-church-statistics-2005-15/
Eddie You can email them to c.d.field@bham.ac.uk Best wishes. Clive