Holy Trinity Ripon appears to be part of the 34% of churches which are growing in the UK. The Ripon church's 2007 electoral roll shows 227 members, approaching double the figure of 130 from five years ago:


This is set against a context of general decline in church attendance in the UK:

•  Every week in Britain , 1,500 people leave the church (1)

•  In the 1990s 1 million people left church in nine years

•  Between 1989 & 1998 in England , 1,867 churches opened and 2,757 churches closed—that's a net loss of 890 churches (2)

•  A Huddersfield survey in the late 1990s discovered that an astonishing 58% of adults claimed never to have been in church.” (3)

•  A March 2007 Tearfund survey found that 66% of the population still have no connection with church.

Despite these gloomy figures, people are genuinely interested in their own spirituality and are anxious to explore God:

•  Tearfund's 2007 survey also found that 3 million people in the UK would go to church, if only they were asked!

•  And the picture is healthier outside of the Western world: globally, every day, around 70,000 people become Christians—half of them in China . In the last 30 years the number of Christians in Africa has increased from 120 million to 343 million, in Latin America from 261 to 470 million, and in Asia from 94 to 301 million.