FOR the first time in four years churchgoing in the Established Church has increased, with 12,000 more people going to Anglican services across England in 2003 than in 2002.

The Church of England’s annual tables, published yesterday, showed London to be the most religious place in the country if growing weekly attendance at an Anglican church is a guide. Close behind were the dioceses of Chichester, Lichfield and Truro.

The increase in 19 dioceses — large gains were also recorded in Bristol, Chelmsford and Canterbury — were partly outweighed by falling attendance in dioceses such as Oxford, Gloucester, Durham, Exeter and Bradford, but overall there is an upwards trend.

The provisional figures for 2003 show changes in church attendance across the 44 dioceses, including the Anglican Diocese of Europe, which also recorded a small increase. The overall picture of Anglican churchgoing remains in some confusion, however, as it has since civil servants at Church House in Westminster changed the method of gathering statistics at a time when numbers nationwide threatened to drop below one million.

The traditional figure for “usual Sunday attendance”, the one deemed by statisticians to be unreliable because it is gathered differently across dioceses, continued to fall, but the figure for “average Sunday attendance”, based on a count over four Sunday services in October, showed an increase for the first time since the new method of counting worshippers was introduced four years ago, going up by 1 per cent from 1,005,000 in 2002 to 1,017,000 in 2003.

The biggest rise in average Sunday attendance was in London, which covers the capital north of the Thames and where worshippers rose by 3,500 to 60,400. South of the River the Southwark Diocese recorded a fall of 300.

Lichfield, in the Midlands, put up an equally impressive proportional increase as London, with worshippers up 1,800 to 32,700. Bristol was up 1,100 to 16,700, Chelmsford up 1,100 to 39,400 and Winchester up 1,000 to 30,900.

Nationwide, churchgoing over Christmas and Easter increased by 2 per cent to 2.65 million and 1.5 million respectively, and eight dioceses even found an increase in young people and children going to church.

The start of the increase in churchgoing coincides with Dr Rowan Williams becoming Archbishop of Canterbury.

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