Decline

The pews are hard in London's Westminster Chapel, but the facts faced there last week by 3,000 delegates to the Annual Assembly of the Congregational Union of England and Wales were even harder. Congregationalism, they were told, had declined by 100,000 members in the past 20 years--a third of the total membership. If church reports winnowed out inactive members more strictly, the official membership figure of 240,000 might be even lower.*

To the shocked flock before him, Assembly Chairman Dr. Lovell Cocks, 56-year-old principal of Bristol's Western College, delivered a sizzling fight talk: "Can faith as halting as ours outrun the fierce dynamism of the Marxist creed? Can we hope to beat the Communists until Christians know their stuff as well as the Communists know theirs? Till we do, the Communists need not be afraid of us."

Big, ill-attended churches, cried Cocks, are bonds of bricks and mortar, crippling to little fellowships. "These fellowships have come to believe that the cause of the kingdom means keeping these buildings going, and everything else is sacrificed . . . May it not be that what Christ really wants them to do is to sell out, to get rid of their buildings and hire a room over a shop--an upper room, and begin all over again in an apostolic way."

* U.S. Congregationalism has grown from 943,569 in 1930 to 1,184,661 in 1948.

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