In Depth:  Peter Brierley

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Coronavirus, the church and the statistics so far

Coronavirus, the church and the statistics so far

Peter Brierley

Like every other part of Europe, and indeed most other countries, the UK has seen almost a complete lockdown, except for essential workers such as the many medical teams.

Church services are now being transmitted via YouTube or other social media. These services usually contain a song, a hymn or two, a brief sermon of about ten minutes, a few prayers and a Bible reading. They last about 45 minutes on average, about half the length of a normal Sunday church service. The BBC is also transmitting a pre-recorded Sunday morning service, as do a number of local radio stations.

Gen Z: what now… and where do we go from here?

Gen Z: what now… and where do we go from here?

Peter Brierley

If there was a prize for the number of key people you’ve influenced before you are 18, Greta Thunberg would probably be a strong contender. She has had an extraordinary time in the last year, speaking at major conferences, going to key places, and meeting so many important world leaders. It’s sometimes hard to remember she will only be 18 later on in 2020. She is part of the Gen Z generation.

The large numbers of people born after the end of the Second World War, especially in the US and the UK, caused the phrase ‘baby boomer’ to be popular for a while, quickly shortened to just ‘boomer,’ and usually taken for simplicity as those born between 1945 and 1963. Those coming afterwards were far fewer in number; they ‘stopped the boom’, or ‘busted’ it, and so for a while were called the ‘baby busters’. This is a disparaging title, however, and when Douglas Coupland published his book Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture in 1991 his phrase instantly stuck and they became ‘Gen X’ (born 1964 to 1982) from then on.

Letter

The Evangelical triangle

Peter Brierley
Date posted: 1 Apr 2020

Dear Editor,

Thank you for another excellent issue of en (March 2020). I especially appreciated the article by Euan Dodds, of Holyrood Evangelical Church in Edinburgh, as his breakdown of the Evangelical ‘tribe’ is exactly how it has been measured over the last 30 years. As he says, there are three broad groups – the Charismatic/Pentecostal, the Conservative (or mainstream) and the Broad who tend to be part of the Liberal grouping.

THE EVANGELICALS:  WHO WERE THEY?...

THE EVANGELICALS: WHO WERE THEY?...

Peter Brierley

There’s a misprint! The headline’s wrong! It should be, ‘The evangelicals: who are they?’ Well, actually, perhaps it shouldn’t, as the number of evangelicals attending church on a Sunday in England is rapidly diminishing.

In 1990 there were 1.4 million evangelicals in church, but by 2030, data extrapolated from a 2005 census suggests, there will only be 1.2 million, a large exodus over just 40 years.

The preaching pop charts

The preaching pop charts

Peter Brierley

Which books in the Bible are the most popular for preachers? A website called CrossPreach has taken some 127,000 sermons recorded and available on MP3s from over 600 churches, and counted how many times from which book of the Bible the basic text was taken.

The sample

The participating churches were assessed by a researcher in the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches (FIEC) and were judged to be ‘mostly evangelical’. The sermons were preached by a total of 9,500 different preachers, so this is a very fair sample of sermons, with an average of 13 sermons per preacher. However, one feature was immediately noticeable – over two-fifths of sermons, 43%, had no specific text which was being explained, so were presumably talks on particular topics rather than expositions. It would have been very interesting to have had an analysis of the 55,000 topics preached upon, but the website doesn’t give this. However, that still leaves 72,000 sermons taken at random, which is a good sample.