The Fragile Rural Church Hypothesis Post-Pandemic

Francis, L.J. and Village, A. (2025) The Fragile Rural Church Hypothesis Post-Pandemic. Rural Theology. ISSN 1470-4994

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Abstract

Taking two marks of the fragile church as financial anxiety over maintaining the building and human resource anxiety over replacing key lay leaders, two surveys conducted during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 confirmed higher anxiety among lay people and clergy in rural areas compared with those in other areas. New data from the Church 2024 survey demonstrated that this difference still pertained. In 2024 25% of rural clergy and 17% of rural lay people concluded that their church building is no longer financially viable. In 2024 87% of rural clergy and 58% of rural lay people concluded that key lay people are proving difficult to replace. The vision for a rejuvenating lay-led future needs to be read against this statistical background.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Published by Taylor & Francis in 2025. This is an author accepted manuscript of a published open access article available at https://doi.org/10.1080/14704994.2025.2556585. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy.
Keywords:	fragile churches rural churches Anglican churches empirical theology Church 2024 survey lay leaders
Depositing User:	Ursula Mckenna
Date Deposited:	13 Oct 2025 13:53
Last Modified:	16 Oct 2025 10:21
URI:	https://lbro.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/1269

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