A man on a mission
The Moral Maze’s Giles Fraser is investigating the state of Christian worship today
CAMERA PRESS/Andrew Crowley
- Catherine Pepinster
Church Going with Giles Fraser is on Monday at 11am on Radio 4
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If anyone should have the title of Radio 4 vicar, it’s the Rev Canon Dr Giles Fraser. Host of Beyond Belief, panellist on The Moral Maze, contributor to Thought for the Day, Fraser is now adding another arrow to his ecclesiastical broadcasting quiver: Church Going, a three-part series in which he sets out to discover whether or not Christian denominations, especially his own, the Church of England, are in decline. He clearly has skin in the game because when he’s not on the radio, he’s vicar of St Anne’s Church, Kew, in west London.
In 2025, the Bible Society published their Quiet Revival report, saying church attendance had gone up by 56 per cent, with a big spike among 18–24-year-olds. Polling experts challenged the findings, and earlier this year the Society announced that the report’s methodology was flawed. Yet Fraser has noticed that at the grassroots there are definite signs of more interest. “Something is going on,” he says, and plenty of other clerics say the same.
The morning I visit St Anne’s, there’s no sign of a dog collar or cassock. Instead, he’s in polo shirt and shorts. But his office is definitely that of a vicar: every chair filled with goods for a foodbank; flowers for the altar on a table; photos of recent weddings on the wall alongside a picture of the Dad’s Army verger.
“Come and look at these,” Fraser gestures towards his computer screen, filled with Sunday congregation counts: “I’m obsessed with figures.” Fraser has been at St Anne’s since 2022 and in that time he’s seen numbers steadily growing, up by a third over four years. Envious rectors say it’s because Fraser is a celebrity vicar in a middle-class neighbourhood where parents want to get their children into the local CofE primary.
Fraser counters that plenty of other parishes are like his. In fact, CofE official figures show that attendance across the board has risen every year for the past five years, although they have yet to recover to pre-lockdown levels.
He notices other undercurrents. “Parents are not necessarily passing on faith to their children. A lot of young people discover it for themselves.
If we’re just about dressing up, we would deserve to die off
“We used to think that there was a battle of hearts and minds. If the church was losing, something secular was winning. But people don’t buy into that Richard Dawkins stuff any more.”
Fraser, now 61, became a Christian in his last years at school. “When I was convinced I knew Christianity was true,” he says, “I thought about becoming a priest.” He needed to learn a lot, he adds, but he is incredulous when he revisits his old training college for Church Going and discovers that even some accepted for training don’t know there is only one God in Christianity. Young people, he says, “come to church with less knowledge, but less baggage, too”. Concepts like sin mean little.
Radio 4 commissioners thought the state of Christianity such a good issue they’ve given Fraser three 45-minute slots to investigate the issue. The programme title is taken from a 1954 poem by Philip Larkin, in which the poet muses what will happen to Christianity when churches close.
St Anne’s Church, Kew, where Fraser has been vicar since 2022. ALAMY
Church buildings, according to Fraser, are the main problem. A substantial number, especially in the countryside, attract just a handful of people each Sunday, who can’t afford to maintain them. “Something that’s changed is that church used to be rural. Now churches in the city are doing well. In the countryside it’s tough.”
Church Going also looks at how some people believe but don’t go to church and use hugely successful prayer apps instead. Then there’s the rise of Christian nationalism and the appeal Christianity now has for the far right. In one episode, Fraser attends an outdoor baptism by such a group. “For them, Christianity’s a code for ‘not Islam’,” he says.
If Christian nationalists went to a church like the one portrayed in the 2010 BBC sitcom Rev, they’d be in for a shock. Congregation stalwarts are often drawn from minority populations. Rev depicted the kind of inner-city parish that, says Fraser, is the Church of England at its best – welcoming of anyone and everyone. “If we’re just about dressing up, we would deserve to die off,” he says.
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So if pews are filling up in some places, to what does Fraser attribute it? “People want beauty, something numinous, beyond themselves yet rooted in their lives, too.” Catherine Pepinster
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Catherine Pepinster
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