Survey Articles

Comments from Debbie Thrower

How denominations /churches can combat pressures and causes for disconnection What churches can do to reintegrate those reconnecting. It is tempting to think that older people have made up their minds about God. If they profess a belief, that they have their faith life more or less “sewn up”- once a church goer always a…
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Preventing Disconnection: Reflections from a Methodist Perspective

Although based on a small sample of respondents, the Connect4Life research provides a helpful stimulus for thinking about how churches can best reach the ‘disconnected’, those who once belonged to the church but who do so no longer. The ‘disconnected’ correlate to the ‘de-churched’ category, estimated in Tearfund’s 2007 research as a staggering 33% of…
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Comments by George Fisher

George Fisher is Director of Mission at Lichfield Diocese. One of the things I am acutely conscious of is the lack of pastoral care in churches. Our pastoral care systems are based on a model of society and church life which was true 40 years ago but is not true today, and they are therefore…
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Comments by Jim Currin

Olaf Fogwill and his colleagues are to be commended for approaching a difficult subject with some enthusiasm – namely how to learn from people who have been disconnected from church and then reconnected again. When I was first asked to comment on the Connect4Life series of booklets for The Good Bookstall website, the booklet which…
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Journeys from Disconnection to Reconnection

I look at these findings from a distinctive perspective, because, although I am deeply committed to enabling the disconnected to reconnect to church, my primary calling is to help the church connect with a larger group still (in England at least), the unconnected, those who have never had a connection to church in the first…
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What can be done to win back those who have disconnected?

Back to Church Sunday has prompted hundreds of thousands of invitations over the past decade, resulting in thousands of people being re-connected with their local church. My findings after conducting over 500 focus groups containing church leaders and lay people concur with a finding from Journey’s research that fear is the major obstacle facing the…
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Chris Justice

Chris Justice is Senior Pastor at Beaconsfield Baptist Church I have been a pastor for over 30 years – in different churches – and have met people in all three categories that this survey investigated; ie. unconnected, disconnected and reconnected. I would like to confine my comments to those who have disconnected and those who have…
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Andy Peck

Andy Peck is a tutor at CWR and co-author of Closing the Back Door of the Church. The issue of disconnecting and reconnecting is one that continues to challenge the church scene in the UK and it is good that attempts have been made to find some hard data for the UK. The charity I…
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