The Myth Of The Empty Church

This title was first published in 2003. When did churches start to appear more empty than full - and why? The very physicality of largely empty churches and chapels in Britain plays a powerful role in popular perceptions of 'religion'. Empty churches are frequently cited in the media as evidence of large scale religious decline. The Empty Church Revisited presents a systematic account of British churchgoing patterns over the last two hundred years, uncovering the factors and the statistics behind the considerable process of decline in church attendence. Dispelling as myth the commonly held views that the process of secularization in British culture has led to the decline in churchgoing and resulted in the predominantly empty churches of today, Gill points to physical factors, economics and issues of social space to shed new light on the origins of empty churches. This thoroughly updated edition of Robin Gill's earlier work, The Myth of the Empty Church, presents new data throughout to explore afresh the paradox of church building activity in a context of decline, the patterns of urbanisation followed by sub-urbanisation affecting churches, changes in patterns of worship, and changes within the sociology of religion in the last decade.

When did churches start to appear more empty than full - and why? The very physicality of largely empty churches and chapels in Britain plays a powerful role in popular perceptions of 'religion'. Empty churches are frequently cited in the media as evidence of large scale religious decline. The 'Empty' Church Revisited presents a systematic account of British churchgoing patterns over the last two hundred years, uncovering the factors and the statistics behind the considerable process of decline in church attendence. Dispelling as myth the commonly held views that the process of secularization in British culture has led to the decline in churchgoing and resulted in the predominantly empty churches of today, Gill points to physical factors, economics and issues of social space to shed new light on the origins of empty churches. This thoroughly updated edition of Robin Gill's earlier work, The Myth of the Empty Church, presents new data throughout to explore afresh the paradox of church building activity in a context of decline, the patterns of urbanisation followed by sub-urbanisation affecting churches, changes in patterns of worship, and changes within the sociology of religion in the last decade.

False news is not limited to politics. There is a pervasive myth circulating that says the church is dying. GLENN STANTON rebuts that fake news and paints a truly positive picture of America's churches. Much has been made of the so-called "nones" - those who claim no spiritual affiliation. Media has spun the nones into a chicken-little the sky is falling narrative. The nones are an infamously difficult subsection to understand and there is a lot of false information on them. Glenn Stanton believes the nones story has become overblown and has become "a thing" due to curiosity and repetition of their supposed irreligiosity. THE MYTH OF THE DYING CHURCH digs deeply into the research concerning spirituality in America and reveals the hope and truth about the vitality and future of the church.

In the early twenty-first century it had become a cliché that there was a 'God Gap' between a more religious United States and a more secular Europe. The apparent religious differences between the United States and western Europe continue to be a focus of intense and sometimes bitter debate between three of the main schools in the sociology of religion. According to the influential 'Secularization Thesis', secularization has been an integral part of the processes of modernisation in the Western world since around 1800. For proponents of this thesis, the United States appears as an anomaly and they accordingly give considerable attention to explaining why it is different. For other sociologists, however, the apparently high level of religiosity in the USA provides a major argument in their attempts to refute the Thesis. Secularization and Religious Innovation in the Atlantic World provides a systematic comparison between the religious histories of the United States and western European countries from the eighteenth to the late twentieth century, noting parallels as well as divergences, examining their causes and especially highlighting change over time. This is achieved by a series of themes which seem especially relevant to this agenda, and in each case the theme is considered by two scholars. The volume examines whether American Christians have been more innovative, and if so how far this explains the apparent 'God Gap'. It goes beyond the simple American/European binary to ask what is 'American' or 'European' in the Christianity of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in what ways national or regional differences outweigh these commonalities.

Counting Religion in Britain, 1970-2020, the fourth volume in the author's chronological history of British secularization, sheds significant new light on the nature, scale, and timing of religious change in Britain during the past half-century, with particular reference to quantitative sources. Adopting a key performance indicators approach, twenty-one facets of personal religious belonging, behaving, and believing are examined, offering a much wider range of lenses through which the health of religion can be viewed and appraised than most contemporary scholarship. Summative analysis of these indicators, by means of a secularization dashboard, leads to a reaffirmation of the validity of secularization (in its descriptive sense) as the dominant narrative and direction of travel since 1970, while acknowledging that it is an incomplete process and without endorsing all aspects of the paradigmatic expression of secularization as a by-product of modernization.

Global Christianity has been experiencing an unprecedented historical transition from the West to the non-Western world. The leadership of global Christianity has taken on a new face since the twentieth century. Christendom in Europe and America has experienced a great decline while there has been a rise in Majority World Christianity. Churches in the Global South have given their voices to global Christianity through their leadership, world mission movements, and theology. The phenomenal church growth has risen from the Pentecostal and Charismatic movement. Pentecostalism has become the dominant force in global Christianity today. The Rise of the Global South examines the significance this shift has had on global Christianity by going through the history of Christianity in the West and the causes of the shift.