Modern churches are driving up numbers among the young, but critics say their direct and emotional style of worship risks alienating mainstream Christians

Towards the end of the 100-minute service at St Luke’s in Birmingham on a sunny Sunday morning, Taryn Nabi began to shake uncontrollably. Near her, a man fell to his knees with head bowed and arms outstretched. Several people wept; some embraced.

“I can’t explain it. It starts here,” said Nabi after the service, pointing at her diaphragm. “It’s the Holy Spirit, it takes over. I just surrender.”

Nabi was among about 200 people who had come to sing, sway and pray at St Luke’s, a beautifully renovated warehouse in Gas Street, which opened its doors as a church in February. Now, according to priest-in-charge Tim Hughes, it regularly attracts a total of 500 people to its two Sunday services, which are characterised by loud rock music, chatty homilies rather than formal sermons, group prayer, and manifestations of God in the form of shaking or speaking in tongues.

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Before moving to Birmingham, Hughes, 39, and his wife Rachel spent 10 years at Holy Trinity Brompton, an ultra-evangelical church in west London known almost universally as HTB, which pioneered the famed Alpha courses and where Hughes was director of worship. The Hughes and their four children were joined by two dozen other members in relocating to Birmingham to establish St Luke’s as a “church plant”. Members of the congregation are encouraged to commit to regular attendance and financial support by standing order.

St Luke’s is not unique. In July, Rich and Louise Grant and their two sons moved from Sheffield to “plant” a new church at St George’s in Gateshead in partnership with HTB. Twenty other members – all younger than the thirtysomething Grants – are relocating to Gateshead ahead of the 25 September opening of the church, which aims to attract the city’s student population.

Alex and Liz Wood moved this summer from an HTB outpost in Brighton to Portsmouth to “plant” a church in a former department store in the city centre, assisted by part of a Church of England grant. Of £929,000, £179,000 is for the Harbour church and £750,000 for other evangelism projects.

The Harbour church’s mission statement is: “To play our part in the evangelisation of the nation, the revitalisation of the church and the transformation of society.”

St Matthias in Plymouth, led by Olly and Ali Ryder, formerly of HTB, will launch in September, with its first Alpha course kicking off three days after the church opens. Evangelical churches have also been “planted” in Norwich, Lincoln and Bournemouth. All have strong links with HTB, all are led by husband-and-wife teams, and all are aimed principally at students and young families. “We want to connect with 18-30s,” said Hughes.

If we only present the gospel in one particular way to one particular generation, people will vote with their feet Ric Thorpe, bishop of Islington

Ric Thorpe, another former HTB man who was appointed as bishop of Islington with special responsibility for “church planting” last September, aims to have 100 new worshipping communities in London by 2020. “There is a need to plant churches in new places to reach new people in new ways,” he said.

That the Church of England needs to reach new people is beyond question. The scale of its institutional atrophy was graphically illustrated by data earlier this year showing that church attendance was set to continue falling for another 30 years. Today’s figure of 18 people per 1,000 regularly attending church would drop to 10 per 1,000, with an 81-year-old eight times more likely to go to church than a 21-year-old.

In an attempt to stem this apparently inexorable decline, Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, has launched the church’s biggest evangelism drive in a generation, with the goal of a religious revival among young people who are less likely than any other age group to identify themselves as Christians.

Welby, himself a former HTB man who was prepared for ordination by Sandy Millar, HTB’s vicar until 2005, is optimistic that his drive will succeed. “I think the tide is turning in this country. We are seeing many churches growing,” he told Michael Gove in an interview in the Spectator last December. In March, he told an evangelical gathering: “I believe from the bottom of my heart that the long years of winter in the church, especially in the Church of England, are changing. The ice is thawing, the spring is coming.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby. Photograph: Luke Macgregor/Reuters

Church insiders say that, of those in contention to succeed Rowan Williams as archbishop of Canterbury in 2013, Welby alone grasped the scale of the church’s decline and the need for decisive action if it was not to wither away. Since his appointment he has focused the church’s energy and resources on an ambitious Renewal and Reform programme to refashion it as an outward-facing evangelistic “mission” rather than an institution sliding gently into its dotage.

A third of the way through his expected 10-year term at the church’s helm, Welby faces a critical few years. “We have a golden window to change the church,” one evangelical bishop told the Observer. “If we can’t turn it round in that time, it’s over.”

Some see parallels with Tony Blair’s mission in the 1990s to drag the Labour party into the modern age. Except, say critics, rather than taking the church into the mainstream, as Blair did with Labour, the focus on evangelism risks placing the church firmly on the fringe, in the hands of zealots. Many among the clergy and in congregations are uncomfortable and distrustful of charismatic practices such as speaking in tongues. There is also a belief that the established church of the country should be broad and inclusive – even if that means a little fuzzy – rather than narrow and uncompromising.

“Actually, the more apt comparison is with Corbyn and Momentum,” said one critic. “The diehards become more and more frenzied, while everyone else looks on in total incomprehension – and in many cases are repulsed.”

With regard to church planting, advocates point to astonishing numbers. St Peter’s Brighton, which started five years ago with 30 people, now claims to be 800-strong. St Thomas Norwich holds five services on Sundays, and has grown from 50 to 450 attendees in two years. KXC, a church launched in 2010 in King’s Cross, London, has 500 regular worshippers, nearly all in their 20s, says Thorpe.

He drew a rough graph, showing the downward trajectory of the traditional congregation and the upward trajectory of the “growing church”. “The evidence suggests that the institutional church is in decline. But you have these two things happening at the same time: an ageing way of doing church is becoming less popular, but there’s a new movement of young people particularly in situations of growth. If you draw those curves together, there will be a bottoming out,” he said. Critics say attendance figures at new churches rarely represent genuine new growth, but are largely due to “sheep stealing” – poaching existing members of other congregations – and attracting students looking for a new place to worship after leaving their “home church”. They also claim that the congregations of church plants do not reflect the demographics of their inner-city locations, but are overwhelmingly white, middle-class young professionals.

The ways in which [evangelicals] talk about God are fundamentally offputting. More people are turned off than turned on Martyn Percy, dean of Christ Church, Oxford

Although it may appear to be a grassroots phenomenon, church planting is a key part of Welby’s strategy – and gets generous support. The allocation of church funds is a crucial way of effecting change in an institution whose running costs are about £1bn a year (much of it going to cover its vast pensions liability). According to a senior source, “money used to be handed over on a formulaic basis, and the dioceses could spend it how they liked. And the formula was perverse – if [church] attendances fell, you got more money. It was the wrong incentive structure.”

From January next year, funding will be allocated to two streams. One will go to poor areas, mostly deprived inner cities; the other for “strategic development”, with church planting taking centre stage.

Ric Thorpe said: “What’s changed is that [the church] is now saying, we want this money to go towards growth – which, when it’s in decline, is a wise investment. In this new thinking, you’ve got to demonstrate that you’ve got a plan, that you’re putting [funding] to good use, that it’s not going to something that’s dying. There’s an urgency about this.”

He says small rural churches have a higher number of clergy per capita than dense, urban parishes. “Where the population is denser, there are fewer clergy around to reach those people. If we are an outward-facing church we need to position people where they’re most needed: 83% of people live in urban areas, but 83% of [church] finance doesn’t go there. But it should.”

The church, he said, needed to help some rural parishes “face reality”. Some of those parishes, historically the backbone of the Anglican church, are wincing in pain. Another key plank of the Renewal and Reform programme is the goal of recruiting 6,000 priests over the next 15 years, to be “the leadership of the church in the 2030s, 40s and 50s”, says the church’s secretary general, William Nye.

About 70% of those selected for ordination are reported to be evangelicals, a figure likely to increase. Some study at St Mellitus College, an HTB-inspired ordinand training centre based in London with outposts elsewhere in the UK, which is the fastest-growing ordinand college in England. St Mellitus had nine students in its first year, 2007. Last year the number was 215.

“St Mellitus is training in a new way, with a new ethos,” said Graham Tomlin, its president and the bishop of Kensington. Ordinands are attracted by its “lively, energetic, can-do, positive atmosphere”, he added. Not all students were from an HTB background, but HTB’s missional approach was central to college life. “Fifty or 100 years ago, it didn’t matter what you did as a priest, people came to church anyway,” said Tomlin. “Now we need the kind of people who can build an outward-looking church with energy and vision.”

Tomlin and Thorpe are part of a cohort of bishops and key officials driving the church in an evangelical direction. They include Chris Russell, Welby’s adviser on “evangelism and witness”. Evangelism and evangelicalism were different, he pointed out; people from any tradition in the church could evangelise; but evangelicals insist on the Bible as the sole authority. Nevertheless, the church’s most ardent evangelists appear to be evangelicals.

According to Ian Paul, a member of the Archbishops’ Council, the church’s central executive body, there is a “formidable representation of evangelicals” among bishops, “one without precedent in modern times”. Listing 18 (out of 42) dioceses with evangelical bishops, Paul wrote in the Church Times in February: “The large number of evangelical bishops is just the episcopal tip of an ecclesiastical iceberg.”

Not everyone was happy with this. “Liberals might worry about a threat to the ‘broad church’; conservative evangelicals will wonder why it remains so broad,” wrote Paul.

Some in the broad middle feel marooned and neglected by the scale and pace of reform. Martyn Percy, the dean of Christ Church Oxford, and one of the most outspoken critics of Renewal and Reform, said Welby had a “group of very loyal lieutenants around him, but a lot of people in the church feel we’ve become exiles in our own institution”. The church, he said, was in the grip of a “small group of elite organisationally minded evangelicals who think the church is a biddable, shapeable, governable body, and that’s not the case. The reality is complex, messy, knotty.”

Much of the talk of “being stronger and fitter for the 21st century is simply not believed by most people. All indices show there’s no growth, and a lot of the ways in which [evangelicals] talk about God is fundamentally offputting. More people are turned off than turned on.”

The church was “an institution, based on values and existing independently of the popularity of those values”, not an organisation that could be remodelled and relaunched. “We need to love and cherish the institution, and growth may come, or it may not,” he said.

Robert Cotton, rector of Holy Trinity Guildford and a member of the Archbishops’ Council until earlier this year, said there was “an increasing disconnect between the rhetoric of the overall [Renewal and Reform] programme, and the ministry we do in the parishes. I’m fully behind Justin wanting to do something about the health of the church, but I’m not sure the language, the rhetoric, of Renewal and Reform is connecting with the sort of experience I have as a parish priest.”

The emphasis on growth in membership left him uneasy, he said. “Membership is not the language that I and those that live in the soggy middle of the CofE often use. Of course we want more people to come to church, but I don’t think of the church essentially as a membership organisation.”

Evangelical churches expected a degree of commitment that many people felt unable to give, said Cotton. “The C of E for centuries has seen itself as a church serving the whole nation – the religious enthusiasts as well as those who are unable to demonstrate that sort of enthusiasm, but still take the moral life, the life of good character, the life of community service very seriously. And the church for years has wanted to value and nourish those people even if they can’t sign up to every article of the creed. The danger is that if we become too much a membership church, we’re actually shrinking our connection with the country.”

But, said Thorpe, the bishop for church planting, the status quo was not an option. “If you’re stuck in the past, you will decline because effectively you’re locking yourself into a certain way of doing things, and everyone else moves on … I want to see the traditions of the church continue and be honoured and celebrated – and for us to infuse some of the best things of those traditions into current worship practice.

“But I don’t want [tradition] to be a god in its own right, that we can’t change, because then the church will never change and adapt. One of the roles of the church is to present the message of the gospel to each generation. If we only present it in one particular way, to one particular generation, people will vote with their feet.”

BROAD CHURCH: THE MAIN ANGLICAN DIVISIONS

Anglo-Catholics

The sacraments are central. Services are characterised by the wearing of vestments, incense, bell ringing and silent prayer. Many opposed the ordination of women and the appointment of women bishops, and resist liberalisation of the stand on gay marriage. Some have left for the Roman Catholic church.

Traditionalists

Probably the largest (if least vocal) grouping. They believe in God, Queen and country – and a church presence in every town and village. They form the congregations of many traditional parish churches, and are the backbone of the Women’s Institute, Mothers’ Union and other Middle England institutions. Think Vicar of Dibley and the local church fete.

Liberals

Believe the church must be responsive to the world. The gospel can be – and has to be - reinterpreted for changing circumstances if the church is to be relevant to society. Women and gay clergy are embraced. Church of England liberals tend to be active in social action schemes and interfaith projects. God is green – and occasionally female.

Evangelicals

The authority of the bible is paramount and, for some, not open to reinterpretation. Evangelicals seek a direct and personal relationship with God. Worship is characterised by rock music, swaying and arm waving, hugging – and, for “charismatic evangelicals”, speaking in tongues or possession by the Holy Spirit. Conservative evangelicals are biblical fundamentalists, but many British evangelicals – represented by Holy Trinity Brompton and the popular Alpha courses – appear more inclusive, although they are still theologically conservative.

• This article was amended on 26 August 2016 to clarify the proportion of a Church of England grant allocated to the Harbour church in Portsmouth.

