It seems strangely appropriate that Bible Society should remove their report, The Quiet Revival, the day after the Church of England completed its transition from Justin Welby to Sarah Mullally as Archbishop of Canterbury. Justin Welby announced his resignation on 12 November 2024, while the fieldwork was in progress for the YouGov survey underlying The Quiet Revival, and Sarah Mullally was installed as Welby’s successor on 25 March 2026, the day before Bible Society issued their statement.
Justin Welby, former oil executive, could be seen to embody a statistical and strategic approach to church growth. Soon after his installation as Archbishop, the Church of England published a report about church growth, From Anecdote to Evidence. The title isn’t explained in the report, but the implication seems to be that anecdotes don’t count as real evidence. Instead, what is needed is hard statistics.
In contrast, Sarah Mullally, former nurse, could be seen to embody a more ‘anecdotal’ approach. While strategy and statistics no doubt have their place, nursing, at its core, is about caring for the person in front of you.
The Quiet Revival made claims that many considered to be implausible, and turns out to have been built on unreliable statistical evidence. But it has led people to pay much more attention to anecdotal evidence. Time and again, you hear people saying that, although they are definitely not seeing growth on the scale described in the report (unsurprisingly, we can now say), something is definitely happening, they are noticing an increased spiritual interest, especially among younger people, they have had a few young adults and especially young men show up out of nowhere having read much of the Bible or learned a lot about Christianity online, and so on. Statistical evidence gives way to anecdotal evidence.
Statistical evidence has its place, but anecdotal evidence is much more valuable for most purposes. Anecdotal evidence tells you what is possible, while statistical evidence tells you what is probable. Statistical evidence is useful if you are investing money or making strategic decisions. It might help you decide where to invest resources, in terms of buildings, training, staffing, and the like. But that is not what most churches spend most of their time doing. Anecdotal evidence can give you ideas of things to try. If you hear that another church has tried something and it worked really well, you don’t need a large and expensive survey to tell you that it might be worth trying in your church. If you hear stories of particular people coming to faith elsewhere, that might encourage you to be open to the possibility of something similar happening in your own community. There is really no need for statistical evidence in these cases. It is even possible to spot trends without recourse to statistics. For example, you don’t need hard statistics in order to notice that many young people seem to be interested in Christianity.
Statistical evidence is also a blunt tool. Individual stories are rich and unique, but they are reduced to a single number in a statistical analysis. And then numerous overlapping trends are merged together into one. So if, on the one hand, you have young adults becoming Christians having previously had nothing to do with the church, while, on the other hand, you have a much smaller number of children and young people growing up in the church and staying in the church as young adults, then you could have two opposite trends that balance out and show up as just one apparently constant number in the statistics. It is much more valuable to hear lots of individual stories, rather than reducing everything to just one number.
Where statistics have an advantage, however, is in generating headlines. We would have never heard of The Quiet Revival if it was just a collection of anecdotes (however valuable that might have been). It simply isn’t national news that lots of individuals have become Christians in lots of different situations. But when a reputable company carries out a large survey leading to a report identifying an unexpected trend in society, then that is something that makes the headlines. (The same issues are at stake in scientific research, for example, when the most important findings often emerge gradually, while only the dramatic ‘discoveries’ have a chance of featuring on the news.) Sometimes the features are more interesting than the news.
Much more could be said, I’m sure. But I’ll simply conclude with this: I hope that Sarah Mullally’s installation as Archbishop of Canterbury, and the removal of The Quiet Revival, will help us to turn away from an obsession with national statistics and big strategies, and instead to focus on what God is doing in the lives of the people in front of us.