IMMIGRANT Christians entering Britain are transforming the traditional Churches and could become the transfusion needed to save them from extinction, a senior church leader says.

Latest figures show a surge in churchgoing among the non-white population of Britain, with many of the new Christians being first-generation immigrants.

By 2005, if current trends continue, the African-Caribbean churches will have doubled in size in 15 years, claiming nearly 120,000 members.

The increase is reflected across the ethnic minority Christian communities and, although not yet great enough to offset the continuing decline in churchgoing overall, it could be only a matter of years before it does so and churchgoing begins to climb again. Black churchgoers already outnumber white ones in some parts of Britain’s biggest cities and urban areas, according to figures published by Christian Research.

One black Pentecostal church, the Cherubim and Seraphim Church, had 1,300 members across nine congregations in 1990. By last year it had 6,000 members across 26 congregations and by 2005 is expected to have 7,500 members in 30 churches.

Others have shown similar growth from small beginnings.The Progressive National Baptist Convention has grown ten-fold from 95 members in three congregations to 1,900 in 15 in a decade.

By contrast, figures to be published this week will disclose that the weekly adult attendance in the Church of England, which has 13,000 parishes, had dropped back below one million.

Other mainstream Churches are showing similar decline, except for pockets where they happen to be in areas favoured by immigrant communities. Then they, too, are flourishing, benefiting from the commitment of African and Asian Christians to weekly worship.

Where this has happened, such as in one north London United Reformed church which has seen numbers grow from six people to 275 in ten years, it is not just membership that has been transformed. Vigorous and enthusiastic gospel styles of worship are also being imported, with lengthy sermons and hymn-singing sessions with dancing and clapping.

Generous giving is another characteristic, with congregations taking just a few weeks to raise hundreds of thousands of pounds for extensions and new buildings to house their rapidly-growing numbers.

The extent to which the influence and potential of these new congregations and churches are being taken seriously by the hierarchies of all the mainstream Churches has been shown in the response to the African and Asian objections to liberal Christian innovations such as the ordination of gay bishops and same-sex blessings.

The Rev David Cornick, General Secretary of the United Reformed Church, has described in an article for a missionary magazine how the Churches in Europe which are haemorrhaging members could be in the process of receiving a life-saving transfusion from the developing world.

The trend represents a reversal of the pattern two centuries ago when white Western missionaries set out for Africa. Now Africans and other ethnic groups coming to Britain are bringing Christianity back with them. Mr Cornick, writing in Inside Out, the journal of the Council for World Mission, says: “Western Europeans do not belong to institutions and one of the institutions to which they do not belong is the church.”

According to the Third Wave of the European Values study by Tilburg University in the Netherlands, Britain has become one of the least religious countries in Europe. Nearly one third of those polled in Britain said religion was not at all important to them and 70 per cent said they never went to a church, mosque or synagogue.

However, the recent government census showed that more than 70 per cent of people in Britain counted themselves as Christian.

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