Church and Community Involvement - Survey results November 2010 (1)

In November 2010, the Cinnamon Network was invited to ask Church Leader contacts to share via survey how Churches are currently involved in social action in their communities.

Several thousand Churches in the UK were contacted and 284 completed the survey. Please find a summary of results below. These not only inform the Church and Charities but also enable the Church to share positive news about Church social action and help influence government policy regarding the push towards 'Big Society'.

The Headlines

The  Churches in the sample estimated they delivered 439,000 hours of volunteer service in the last 12 months. That is an average of 1925 hours per Church.

In addition, the Churches contributed £1,234,000 to finance social action initiatives. That is an average of £7,568 per Church spent on an average of 3.3 initiatives.

Youthwork stands out as the top initiative for hours (31.5%) and money (40.2%).

Of the total funding, 88% of number of ‘grants’ come from the Church itself, 12% from Local or National Government.  Does this mean the Church is not well connected into local financing opportunities? There were comments made by Churches about hindrances to doing more concerning the bureaucracy, red tape, meeting criteria, etc of working with Local Government. Where grants are given by Government they are in many cases on average more than Church gives itself.

Unsurprisingly, the larger the church, the more hours and £ is spent on social initiatives. However, this goes up markedly for large churches of over 500 adults. Projecting the hours and finance against the England base of churches by size gives a figure for England of 55M hours of volunteering per annum and finances given of £224M. If you take out the smallest churches (under 10 adults), the figure reduces to 52M.

A 2008 study by Gweini, the Council of the Christian Voluntary Sector in Wales estimated that the church in Wales delivered 4M hours of volunteering per annum.

Projecting these statistics against population and church going for the UK gives an estimate of 72M hours per annum of volunteering for social initiatives by the Church in the UK. Please note this figure only covers Church initiatives. It does not include voluntary work by Christians in the community that is not initiated by a Church e.g. work by local charities.

If we were to fully cost volunteer time (some of which is quite specialist), proportion of paid staff time, building ‘hire’ and direct financial contribution, one can see that the contribution to social initiatives is well over £1Bn per annum and probably between £1.5Bn - £2Bn per annum.

68% of the Churches plan to increase social initiatives in the next 12 months. Only 3% plan to reduce.

81% of Churches think it Essential or Very Important that Churches can maintain their Christian distinctives in social initiatives.

Biggest Hindrances to doing more are; Manpower/time , Funding, Vision/Leadership, Red Tape/Laws, Info/Assessment, Buildings

Biggest Encouragements from social initiatives are; Appreciation/Trust built , Making diff./Impact, Changing us, Community cohesion, Meeting needs/serving, Churches working together             

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