Almost all church leaders (87 per cent) questioned in a poll said that they taught the Bible regularly in church, but only two-thirds of those in their congregations agreed, says a new survey from the Bible Society. The discrepancy is one of many statistics about Christian attitudes to the Bible that has emerged in the Society’s largest-ever study, Taking the Pulse: Is the Bible alive and well in the Church today?
The Bible Society commissioned the polling consultants ComRes to conduct a quantitative survey of 1700 church leaders and 1900 “non-leaders” from all the main Christian denominations. They then conducted qualitative interviews in six focus groups.
The society’s Bible and Church development officer, Michael Pfundner, summarised their investigation as: “Do Christians read the Bible? Do they know the Bible? Do they trust the Bible? Do they live it?”
Thirty-four per cent of the churchgoers questioned believed the Bible to be free from error, and 78 per cent believed it was divinely inspired. Among the church leaders polled, 47 per cent thought the Bible was free from error, and 98 per cent believed it was divinely inspired.
The work to discredit the Bible by Richard Dawkins and other enthusiastic secularists has changed the way 40 per cent of churchgoers feel about the canon. The “blood and killing in the Old Testament” also undermined confidence in the scriptures for 21 per cent of church leaders. They rated the Old Testament as the least important part of the Bible for Christians to know.
Mr Pfundner, however, rejected suggestions that Christians should be less concerned with the Old Testament: “On the contrary, we need to work harder to help church leaders make it relevant to modern lives.”
While 63 per cent of leaders said their church had grown in the past five years, only 48 per cent of those in the pews saw this.
Leaders must make their use of the Bible more explicit, said Mr Pfundner: “Church leaders need help putting the Bible in context.
“We found there is a reverence for the Bible, but often people find it difficult to translate that to making the Bible relevant to their lives — or their lives relevant to the Bible.”
The results of the survey will be presented at the Christian Resources Exhibition in Telford next week. It is available at www.biblesociety.org.uk.
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