What they show are three acts of worship performed in the East End of London within a few hundred yards of each other at the end of last month. When the church was built in the early 18th century, it was designed to seat 1,230. Numbers are similar at St Mary’s, opened in October 1849. Then, it could boast a congregation of 1,000. Today, as shown in the picture, the worshippers total just 20. While the two churches are nearly empty, the Brune Street Estate mosque has a different problem — overcrowding. The mosque itself is little more than a small room rented in a community centre, and it can hold only 100. However, on Fridays, those numbers swell to three to four times the room’s capacity, so the worshippers spill out onto the street, where they take up around the same amount of space as the size of the near-empty St Mary’s down the road. What these pictures suggest is that, on current trends, Christianity in this country is becoming a religion of the past, and Islam is one of the future. In the past ten years, there has been a decrease in people in England and Wales identifying as Christian, from 71.7 per cent to 59.3 per cent of the population. In the same period the number of Muslims in England and Wales has risen from 3 per cent of the population to 4.8 per cent — 2.7 million people. And Islam has age on its side. Whereas a half of British Muslims are under 25, almost a quarter of Christians are approaching their eighth decade. It is estimated that in just 20 years, there will be more active Muslims in this country than churchgoers — an idea which even half a century ago would have been utterly unthinkable. Many will conclude with a heavy heart that Christianity faces a permanent decline in Britain, its increasingly empty churches a monument to those centuries when the teachings of Christ governed the thoughts and deeds of the masses. Read more about this story on the following link. M.M
Posted on: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 05:13:35 +0000
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