The Kendal Project
	patterns of the sacred in contemporary society
	www.kendalproject.org.uk
	Department of Religious Studies and Institute for Environment,
	Philosophy and Public Policy, Lancaster University.

	March 2003.

Welcome to  our final Kendal Project newsletter.

Publication plans

As you may know, the project ‘proper’ ended last summer, since when we have been working on publishing some of our findings.  Our current plans are to complete a slim volume summarising the main findings of the project this summer, and we are working hard on this at the moment.  This will be a fairly academic volume, aimed at specialists and students in the field, and concerned with the major theoretical contributions of the project. 

The book  is provisionally titled; Religious Decline and Spiritual Growth.  Its authors will be listed as Paul Heelas, Linda Woodhead, Karin Tusting, Ben Seel, Bronislaw Szerszynski. We are hoping that it will be published early in 2004. 

The book begins with the claim made by some commentators that traditional forms of religion appear to be declining, whilst new forms of alternative spirituality are growing. Drawing on our evidence from Kendal, we set out to test this claim. In a nutshell, we argue that whilst there is a good deal of evidence to support it, involvement in church and chapel still outweighs that in alternative spirituality – but the latter is catching up fast. 

The explanation we offered for this ‘spiritual revolution’ is that the forms of religion or spirituality that are doing best are those that help resource individuals in the living of their unique lives. These can be Christian or alternative. In either case, what people are seeking are forms of religiosity that make sense to them, rather than those which 

demand that they subordinate their personal truth to some higher authority. In other words, we are witnessing a ‘subjectivisation’ or ‘democratisation’ of the sacred. 

Once this first book has been completed, Linda and Karin may work on a more descriptive volume which will focus on the ‘church and chapel’ element of the project. Linda also plans to incorporate Kendal findings into a more general book on contemporary Christianity. Over the twenty-one months of data collection, we generated a vast amount of fascinating descriptive data about church life in Kendal, and we feel it is important to produce publications that draw on this data. We hope that these will give people an insight into the wide variety that is church life in Kendal at the turn of the twenty-first century. 

As a starting-point for these publications on Christianity  we decided to use this final newsletter to feed back a summary of the work that we did with the churches and chapels of Kendal throughout the data collection stage of the project.

First round observations

The overall aim of the first stage of the project was to get as detailed an understanding as possible of the broad profiles of church life in Kendal.  We decided that the best way to do this would be to try and attend at least one  service at as many churches in the town as possible.  So over the first six months of the project, Karin attended a Sunday service at almost every church in the town, taking detailed notes about the service, collecting newsletters, magazines and other textual artefacts, and talking to people informally before and after the service about their church life.  This proved a very rich source of information, and attendance at different types of church in different weeks was invaluable in sensitising us to the significant differences between them. We concluded that there wasn’t a single ‘Christianity’ in Kendal, but several very different ‘Christianities’. 

The church attendance count

While this initial round of observations was going on, we also organised a church attendance count, which took place on a rainy Sunday in November 2000.  this was necessary to give us an indication of the numerical strength of different churches in the town, and to see whether Kendal appeared to be typical in terms of churchgoing numbers by comparing it to the national rates.  After obtaining permission from the ministers involved, we recruited 25 undergraduate students in religious studies as counters, and placed them outside each Sunday service with a tally sheet.  In case the attendance count day was an atypical Sunday, we also sent brief questionnaires to the leaders of each church regarding their attendance levels, and were very grateful to have received a 100% response rate to these.  Combining these two sources of data, it appears that the church attendance rate in Kendal is similar to the national average. In Kendal the figure was 7.9% of the population, compared with 7.5% for the UK as a whole. 

The hard-soft typology

As the first round observations were continuing, Linda and Karin got together at regular intervals to discuss the patterns that were emerging from this.  We realised early on that traditional ways of categorising churches, such as the conservative / liberal split, did not seem particularly helpful in characterising the significant patterns that the observations were generating.  It appeared to us that the churches fell into four broad groupings according to their principal characteristics.  Drawing on work done by  Kajsa Ahlstrand in Sweden on the ‘softening’ of the churches, we used this metaphor of relative ‘hardness’ or ‘softness’ to characterise our four groupings.  

The ‘hard’ churches had distinct boundaries between members and non-members, a transcendent and authoritative vision of God, and located authority externally to the person, principally in sacred texts understood to be the word of God.  The ‘medium-hard’ churches were similar, but had a dual location of authority, both in the sacred texts and in personal experience, by way of prophecy and other more ‘charismatic’ manifestations.  The ‘medium-soft’ churches, the most varied group, tended to have less clear boundaries between members and non-members, drew on transcendent and immanent images of God, and allowed more freedom for the individual to interpret the sacred texts in terms of their own ideas and experiences.  Finally, the ‘soft’ churches did not make a clear distinction between members and non-members, drew on a principally immanent vision of god, and located the source of truth primarily in individuals’ experiences, with external texts being assessed by each person as to whether or not they were meaningful in terms of their own spiritual experiences.

We also noted differences between the four types in terms of their relation to community. To sum this up, even at the risk of oversimplification: (a) hard and medium hard:  emphasise the importance of their own ‘community’ for their members and tend to separate themselves from wider society (b) soft and medium soft: have less clear boundaries with wider society, and seek to serve and represent that society at local and national level. 

Case study work

These four groupings were then used to select churches for case study work, which formed the second main activity of the project.  The aim of this part was to develop a detailed understanding of the life of a small number of churches which represented in some way the range we had discovered in the town.  We therefore selected one church from each of these groupings.  Parr Street Evangelical Church represented the ‘hard’ category, New Life Community Church the ‘medium-hard’, Kendal Parish Church the ‘medium-soft’, and the Unitarian Chapel the ‘soft’ group.  Karin went to services and other activities regularly at each of these four churches and interviewed many church members at each, to develop a detailed understanding of the different life of each of these churches.  We also made some visits to the roman catholic church and interviewed some church members there, to reflect the historical significance of the Protestant / Catholic groupings in British Christianity.  

We would not claim that these churches are ‘typical’ of the group from which they are drawn, since each church is unique in its own way.  This is the nature of qualitative research and there is always a pay-off between the breadth and the depth of research.  However, by taking this ethnographic approach we have been able to develop an understanding of the range of different types of church life which would not have been possible in any other way, and which is not represented as yet in most Religious Studies literature, most of which focuses either on one congregation or one denomination, or aims at a broad sweep over ‘church life’ as a whole.  In the eventual publications on church life in Kendal we will focus on the insights generated from this mid-level case study work, and thereby sensitise scholars and others to some of the significant similarities and differences between types of churches which are often simply assumed to be ‘the same’ in the literature.

The churches questionnaire 

Finally, towards the end of the project we distributed questionnaires to each of the case study churches and to the Roman Catholic Church.  These had two principal purposes: to test out in a more systematic way some of the understandings we had developed about the different churches through the case study work, and to provide some comparisons with the parallel work going on in the area of non-church forms of spirituality.

The questionnaires were not designed to give a portrait of Christianity in Kendal as a whole, but to check differences between the four types of church and chapel. They proved very illuminating of significant differences as well as overlaps. Overleaf you will find three examples of findings. All the results will soon be available on our web page. 

Growth and Decline

The focus of the Christian part of the Kendal Project  was on the meanings and patterns associated with different forms of Christianity, rather than on numerical growth and decline.  However we have since done some work examining the evidence available about historical membership trends of the dfiferent types of churches in the town. Abby Day Peters, a doctoral student, assisted us greatly in this work by collecting longitudinal date on the case study churches and chapels in Kendal. 

The task proved a difficult one, not least because some churches have no records at all, and even those that do tend to count different things (membership, attendance, baptisms etc.), making it hard to draw comparisons. We made a decision to look only at attendance figures. 

Our finding was that none of the four types of Christianity in Kendal have experienced sustained growth since the 1970s, There are a handful of congregations that have grown over a short period within this time frame, though this has not been significant enough to affect the overall picture of Christian decline of over 30% in the last thirty years. This is in line with the national picture.  In Kendal, however, decline has sometimes been ‘hidden’ because the total number of congregations, and the numbers within many of these congregations, have remained relatively static.  Decline is relative to the unusually  high rate of growth of the population of Kendal – from 18,599 in 1961 to 27,500 in 2001. 

And finally…

A very big thank you

We would like to close by saying that we are very grateful for the welcome and help that Karin received from all of the churches throughout the life of the project, which was invaluable to our work.  We hope that you will find the eventual publications interesting and perhaps illuminating.  We will post up-to-date information on the progress of the various Kendal project publications and outcomes on the website: www.kendalproject.org.uk 

Abby Day Peters
Karin Tusting
Linda Woodhead

for the Kendal Project  team

PS We are sending this newsletter only to clergy and church leaders, so we would be very grateful if you could pass on the information – and our thanks – to interested members of your congregations.