What can the latest figures tell us about participation in our churches? New analysis of attendance in 2025 and at Easter 2026 highlights encouraging signs alongside areas for continued attention.
Attendance figures cannot tell us everything about the life, health or mission of our churches. They can, however, help us understand the size of our worshipping communities, identify changing patterns of attendance and inform how we approach mission in the future.
Christmas 2025
Christmas attendance was 5.2% higher in 2025 than in 2024. Christmas attendance can vary considerably according to factors such as the weather and the day of the week on which Christmas Eve falls, so this year-on-year increase should not in itself be read as evidence of a wider trend.
Churches nevertheless shared some striking examples of their experience at Christmas:
“In 2025 over 400 came to the four lunchtime carol services, the majority of whom had been invited through a flier handed to them on the street.”
“Our Carol Service… [had] an attendance of 110 – compared to 75 last year, and an average normal service attendance of 15.”
Easter 2026
Early returns show Easter Day attendance was 1.7% higher in 2026 than in 2025. Easter attendance can vary considerably from year to year, including because of where Easter falls in relation to the school holidays. In 2026, Easter fell in the middle of the holidays and, in the absence of any wider trend, attendance might have been expected to be lower than in 2025.
The picture varied across the diocese. Buckingham saw the largest increase, at 4.3%, with smaller increases in Berkshire and Dorchester. Oxford saw a 6.1% decrease, which may in part reflect students being away during the university holidays.
Churches also reported creative approaches to engaging people with the Easter story:
“The Easter Escape Room saw the church transformed and welcoming people to engage with the Easter story in a very different way.”
“Easter Sunday – packed church, water baptism and fantastic testimony.”
The Easter analysis is based on returns from 584 churches – 72% of churches across the diocese – rather than the final 2026 Statistics for Mission dataset. The final figures may therefore differ.
Young adults in our worshipping communities
For the first time in the 2025 Statistics for Mission return, churches were asked for their best estimate of how many people in their worshipping community were aged 18–34.
Across the diocese, 7.5% of the worshipping community was estimated to be in this age group, rising to 14.2% in Oxford Archdeaconry. This gives us a baseline against which we can monitor future numbers of young adults in our worshipping communities.
Weekly attendance
Average Weekly Attendance (AWA) across the diocese decreased slightly, by 0.6%, between October 2024 and October 2025. Adult attendance decreased by 0.8%, while attendance among children increased by 1%.
These figures measure attendance rather than individual people. A change could therefore reflect people attending more or less frequently, as well as a change in the number of people coming to church.
Child AWA in 2025 was 32.4% above the level projected from the pre-pandemic trend. However, child attendance had been falling relatively quickly before the pandemic, and in 2025 remained at 79% of its 2019 level.
Taken together, these figures do not provide a simple story of growth or decline. They offer a snapshot of changing patterns of participation across our churches, helping us identify where further questions need to be asked and where there may be opportunities to learn from churches seeing increased participation or trying new approaches to mission.