London, England - The Church of England has launched a renewed effort to increase attendance in England and Wales, with clergymen using podcasts and planes to promote the campaign. Around 2,000 churches have signed up for Back to Church Sunday, making it one of the largest ever coordinated mission activities. Congregation members in England and Wales were asked to invite a friend who had stopped going to come back and churches are expecting an extra 20,000 people this Sunday.
In anticipation some clergymen and key officers have attended customer service courses, run by department store John Lewis, to learn how to be more welcoming and create an experience worth returning for. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has backed the initiative, describing it as a chance for people to "see what they've been missing".
Dr Williams said: "Millions of people remember and love church, but perhaps they've just drifted away for a while. Back to Church Sunday is a chance to help them reconnect with God."
To publicise the event the Bishop of Sherwood, the Rt Rev Tony Porter, took off in a light aircraft trailing a banner behind him, while the Rt Rev John Pritchard, the Bishop of Oxford, will record a podcast reflecting on his appeal to lapsed churchgoers.
The latest figures suggest that around 1.7 million people attend church and cathedral worship each month, while around 1.2 million attend services each week - on Sunday or during the week. The figure is just under one million each Sunday.
A spokesman for the Church of England said it was "quite unprecedented" for so many dioceses to take part in such an event but added that Back to Church Sunday was not intended as a "miracle cure" for falling numbers. He said: "It's one way of showing people who are on the edges of the church that they are welcome and we want them back."
Jonathan Bartley, of religious think-tank Ekklesia, applauded the efforts to persuade people to come back to the pews but said a root and branch reform was needed.
Mr Bartley, an Anglican and regular churchgoer, said: "A church that appears at worst bigoted and at best unable to agree on issues of private morality is not going to hold on to new communicants for long.
"There is growing resentment that church schools, although funded by the taxpayer, give priority in admissions to Christians. At the national level the fundamentally undemocratic arrangement with 26 unelected, exclusively male, bishops sitting in parliament by right, undermines any stands for justice the Church may seek to make.
"The ongoing rows over homosexuality confirm that the Church must get its own house in order before it can seriously invite visitors who have previously walked away - often with good reason - to return."