Want to see renewal? Parents will have a unique role to play

By all means celebrate stories of a revival of spiritual interest among Gen Z. But if we don’t empower Christian parents to pass faith onto their children, we won’t move the needle on church growth, says Gareth Crispin

Do you have bugbears? Not large, hairy, goblin-like creatures, but the metaphorical type of bugbear, the continual source of irritation. I have a few, one is the way that research is presented in the press. Sometimes research is flat out mis-represented in a headline (I’ve written about that here). In other instances, it is presented as a new news story when, actually, it’s not really new at all, and therefore is not much of a story.

Last week, The Times published an article that managed to both mis-represent the underlying research and not really be much of a story at the same time. The headline: “Most of Britain’s non-believers were raised as Christians”, mis-represented data from the Pew Research Centre by confusing the retention rate with the leaving rate; so, it’s not actually ‘most’.

But the bugbear that really bugged me was that this is also not much of a story; it’s essentially saying that a country which used to be ‘Christian’ has become less ‘Christian’ - which most of us knew already.