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Good Morning It may come as no surprise that Sunday attendances in the Church of England have fallen again but the same figures also underline greater numbers attending midweek services and special occasion such as Christmas when attendance has been increasing. Of course, there is no doubt that we are more of a secular society these days but statistics only tell part of the story - assessing the impact of a church in a local community has never just been about bums on pews but about something much more, which statistics are not able easily to capture . For the past 7 years I’ve been doing what’s called ‘interim ministry’ – which has involved working in two very different parishes with particular challenges where questions have been asked about the value of churches in Britain today. And in that role I’m constantly struck by the amount of goodwill still to be found for the church. Not always, of course, but often. And a lot of people use or visit a local church during the week for a whole spectrum of social interaction – nursery care, lunch clubs for the elderly, children’s groups and exercise classes, to name but a few, just in my own patch. This, for me, is what church is really all about. Being there. Expecting nothing in return. And it’s not just the social aspect of the church which people want to talk about: a lot of them who would never come to church on a Sunday often unexpectedly want to talk to me about faith or about God. Of course the Church, like all faith communities, has to move with the times. They cannot ignore a digital generation whose priorities, perception of time, place and spiritual awareness are radically different even from a few years ago. I remember Rowan Williams, when Archbishop of Canterbury, at a launch of a new initiative recognising people gathering to share their faith in different places such as pubs, sports halls or apartment blocks as being just as legitimately the church as those gathering in ancient stone buildings. Bishop Rowan urged his church to cast the net wide into the deep - as Jesus commanded his first disciples. In other words, the church is for everyone and not just signed up members as reflected in these week’s statistics. For the churches and cathedrals of today, it’s about being there – at the heart of their communities – offering a model of service which provides an antidote to many of the stresses of contemporary life.