Fifteen reasons people give up

These are definitely worth pondering, and I have a certain sympathy with a number of them. Church Times - Fifteen reasons people give up: "One in three said that their loss of faith was a key reason for leaving. Other reasons given were:

• Excluded by cliques (about half)
• Churchgoing was part of growing up (two out of five)
• Moving to a new area and family commitments (main reason for one in three)
• Tensions with work (one in four)
• Church was too feminine for some men, and too difficult for those sexually active outside marriage
• Inadequate return for time and money (two out of five)
• Disillusionment
• Hurt by pastoral failure (14 per cent)
• Church irrelevant (high proportion)
• Disliked change, e.g. of hymns (one in five)
• Worship too formal/informal and teaching too high/low (one third)
• Church leader was too authoritarian (RCs) or too unclear (Anglicans) (one in four)
• Church was too conservative (one fifth to one third)
• Lack of boundaries between the Church and the world (one in four)"

Now we should note that explicitly or implicitly, a number of these are mutually incompatible: irrelevance may well be contradictory to lack of boundaries, for example, or dislike of change would be a different set of people to those who find the church too authoritarian or unclear -since those have been characteristic for a while of the churches concerned. And the worship style point indicates that there really ought to be a move around of people but instead of transfer clearly a lot of people simply stop attending at all, so there must be other reasons involved too -I'll have to read Gone for Good to see the detail.

It does indicate the need for a variety of church 'styles'; because cleary one size is not able to fit all. This is something that the apparently 'successful' churches need to take cognisence of too because these figures would indicate that their growth masks the fact that there are sections of the population that they will never really reach because, as a general rule, they are too informal, too conservative, too authoritarian and so forth.