Widely-circulated figures which appeared to show a significant decline in church attendance for a major Australian evangelical group are now known to be an example of internet ‘fake news’.
A table of attendance figures now circulating on the web claims to show that Anglican churches in Sydney lost 10,000 regular attenders in the year the Sydney Anglican diocese gave money to the ‘No’ side in a national same-sex marriage postal vote.
The figures show an average Sunday attendance of 53,345 in 2017 and 46,608 in 2018, with lower figures still for the two subsequent years. Evangelicals Now understands that the source is the actual records from the Diocese of Sydney – but whoever compiled the table made a serious error.
