Archbishop's Jerusalem 2000 Appeal tops £1m

Jerusalem 2000, the Archbishop of Canterbury's appeal for the work of the Church in the Holy Land, has now raised over £1 million for development projects in the Holy Land.

The appeal, which has a target of raising £1.5 million and calls upon every member of the Anglican Church to contribute £1, aims to enable the Church to provide long-term capital development projects to alleviate the plight of Christians, Muslims and Jews caught up in the current violence in the Holy Land.

Over £230,000 has been received since Christmas 2001, sent by schools, parishes, cathedral congregations and individual church members keen to support building projects, such as the recently-completed community centre at Shefr Amre, on the outskirts of Nazareth. It provides much needed accommodation, particularly for families. Future projects include a new secondary school building at the Evangelical Episcopal School, Ramallah and a new home for seriously disabled children at St Luke's, Beirut.

Dr Carey said the money showed that the Church could make a practical difference and change peoples' lives in devastated areas.   "I am pleased that the fund is now two-thirds of the way to its target. In this land of bombings, road-blocks and devastating poverty, the projects supported by Jerusalem 2000 are visible signs of our compassion, care and commitment to the poorest people of the Holy Land."

Nearly three million Christmas worshippers in new benchmark statistics

The first set of national Church of England attendance and membership figures to come out of the new, more rigorous data collection introduced in 2000 provide further proof that the Church has been under-counting its worshippers. As these are the first year's results, there are no previous
statistics with which direct comparison can be made; but the figures will form part of a new benchmark against which the Church can, in future, measure itself.

Average Weekly Attendance and Average Sunday Attendance are more accurate methods of counting people of all ages coming to church over a four week period, usually during October. The introduction of minimum and maximum figures for both weekly and Sunday attendance provides, for the first time, a measure of the varying frequency of attendance among worshippers.

The new statistics include total attendance figures for Christmas (2.85million) and Easter (1.63million) for the first time. They also provide an accurate picture of the occasional offices administered by clergy in the parishes that has not been available before. These include not only baptisms and weddings but also funerals, marriage blessings and thanksgivings for the birth of a child.

The figures put Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) at 1.06million worshippers of all ages, in a range (over a typical four week period) between a minimum of 780,000 and maximum of 1.45million. This compares with the old measure of Usual Sunday Attendance (uSa) in 1999 of 0.97million. Average Weekly Attendance (AWA) figures of approximately 1.3million, in a range from 860,000 to 1.86million, suggest the old uSa figures undercounted the numbers in church each week by almost a third. They also highlight a distinct shift in patterns of attendance.

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