a day ago
Full-fat faith: the young Christian converts filling our churches
S queezing through the thronging and startlingly youthful crowd in search of a decent place to sit at the 11am service at St Bartholomew the Great, next to Smithfield meat market in central London, you wouldn't guess that the Anglican Church had spent the past few decades apologetically imploding in an unregarded corner of our national life. The congregation is more than 200 on this unexceptional Sunday. A decade ago, I'm told, it might have been 50 or 60.
St Barts owes its success and a measure of online fame (one congregant drily remarks that it is something of a 'meme church') to its embrace of beautiful and traditional worship. But the young crowd is not just here for a cultural Christianity of hymns and picturesque ritual. They are remarkably fervent: genuflecting, bowing and crossing themselves. Most pray on their knees with their hands clasped together and their eyes squeezed shut.
