UK church no longer declining?

Usually it's bad form to just rip another blog post. But this one has exciting enough info that it is worth reading the slightly edited version below. Thanks europeanmission and Christian Research! Christian Research reverses predictions of numerical decline for UK churches europeanmission http://europeanmission.wordpress.com/2010/09/03/christian-research-reverses-predictions-of-numerical-decline-for-uk-churches/

New data released by Christian Research today suggests that the decline in churchgoing has stabilised and that attendance figures have actually been more or less static for the last five years. This reverses a series of predictions made during the 1990s and into the early 2000s by the former Director of Christian Research, Dr. Peter Brierley. The current Director, Benita Hewitt, points to data from the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Baptist Union of Great Britain which shows a broad stabilisation of church attendance. 

The charts show that monthly attendance within the Anglican church has remained steady at around 1.7 million since 2001, whilst weekly attendance has declined in the same period from 1.2 million to a little over 1.16 million, a loss of 40,000 although since 2002 the figure has dipped and peaked around the 1.17 million mark.
Hewitt confidently predicts the end of the decline and hopes that it 'may even motivate Christians and churches to think that there is a chance of growth, if only they believed in it.' Whilst Christian Research has yet to release the trends for the Baptist Union, Hewitt insists that there is no evidence of decline from their statistics. In response to a question posed, She argues that 'it’s a trend we’re seeing generally from a number of different sources.'
Writing as Christian Research's Director, Hewitt states definitively that despite what earlier editions of Religious Trends had predicted, 'Christian Research's current view is that it does NOT forecast decline for the future.'