Worship Weblog
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Bookshelf: ‘The ‘Empty’ Church Revisited’
Gill, Robin. The ‘Empty’ Church Revisited (Explorations in Practical, Pastoral, and Empirical Theology) (Ashgate, 2nd ed., 2003). [P-A-toc]
Where do empty churches come from? Or, perhaps more accurately, when did British churches and chapels start to appear more empty than full, and why did this happen? I am going to struggle with these seemingly naïve questions throughout this book. I have deliberately chosen the empty church as a focus, rather than some broad concept of church decline or (worse still) religious decline. There is an obvious physicality about the empty church that avoids the usual wrangles about what does or does not constitute `religion’ and whether largely invisible features of Christianity still permeate British society. I do not intend to decry the latter. Rather, I believe that too little scholarly attention has been paid to churches in all their religious physicality. In contrast to an immense literature on the architecture of churches, and a growing literature on church furnishings, it is a rare book that sets out to study the social history of church buildings as places of worship. Intro ...
It is time to take stock. This is a book about the empty church, and it is also a book about some deeply ingrained myths. At the outset I listed ten widely held propositions that seem to explain why British churches are now empty However, given the welter of data presented in the last three chapters, these propositions now seem highly questionable. Their mythological status should be apparent to all. The first proposition held that before the First World War a majority of churches in Britain were full. ... p.135
Related Book:
Davie, Grace. Religion in Britain Since 1945: Believing Without Belonging (Blackwell, 1994). [P-A-G-toc]
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