Integrated household survey reveals how religious your area is

Simon Rogers in The Guardian has just published a report from the Office for National Statistics

With typical timing, the report has come out the week after the Pope's visit to the UK. But nevertheless, it's an enormous survey: some 450,000 respondents asked questions about their beliefs, sexual identity and health. Besides the findings which show that 1.5% of the population is gay, it includes lots of other details:

• 71% their religion is Christianity
• 4% say their religion is Muslim
• 21% have no religious affiliation
• Slough has the highest level of religious belief in England - 93% - whilst Brighton and Hove has the lowest at 58%
• Inverclyde has the highest level of religious affiliation in Scotland at 92%
• Flintshire has the highest level of religious affiliation in Wales at 81%

It also provides an interesting breakdown of ethnicity and health. Are there any links between any of the datasets - between good health and religious belief, or high ethnicity and high religious belief? Here are some completely unscientific findings:

• 33% of Blaenau Gwent is in poor health, the highest percentage of people in the UK. Only 67% have a religious affiliation, one of the lowest rates in the country
• Slough, besides having the highest religious percentage in the country also has a very high number of people in good health - 81%

Do those two figures tell us anything meaningful?
Although the report is published as a PDF (of course), the ONS has given us the spreadsheet of results and you can download them below. What can you do with the data?

DATA: download the full spreadsheet

It was interesting that one of the early comments on The Guardian page says...

Given that the question asked by the ONS was "What is your religion, even if you are not currently practising?", it's not really possible to work out how religious an area is - just that loads of people still lazily tick the 'Christian' box without thinking about it. It's a shame that the ONS couldn't have chosen a question that actually asked about religious belief.

I look forward to seeing what people can do with this data and whether it can be used to identify needs in a community.

BBC should have a religion editor, says Church of England

John Plunkett in The Guardian has reported that Bishop Nigel McCulloch, Bishop of Manchester and the Church of England's senior spokesman on communications has come out supporting Roger Bolton's suggestion to appoint a religion editor to act as a "trusted guide" for people with faith as well as those without.

Bishop Nigel McCulloch made the comments in the Church of England's response to the BBC Trust's review on BBC Radio 3, Radio 4 and digital station Radio 7, which is to be rebranded as Radio 4 Extra.

It [The Church of England] said Radio 4 broadcast more than the required number of hours of religious programming, and said the three BBC stations, along with Radio 3 and Radio 7, "broadcast an unparalleled range and depth of religious programming which deserves grateful acknowledgement by all those concerned with increasing mutual understanding between people of all faiths and none".


The BBC came under attack for "marginalising" its coverage of religious and ethical issues at a Church of England national assembly debate in February this year. But senior members of the church's general synod rejected a motion attacking broadcasters over the lack of religious programmes. It was replaced with a more anodyne statement expressing appreciation of broadcasters' religious output, and voicing more general concern at the reduction in religious broadcasting. The Church of England said today that its submission to the BBC Trust reflected a tone of "critical friendship" towards mainstream broadcasters.

 We shall see what The BBC Trust gas to say in due course....

How do we as Christians relate to our communities?

I went to an excellent day of seminars led by Rev Dr Phil Meadows from Cliff College on Shaping Up for Mission. Phil is part of a new project called Inspire and they are re-imagining John Wesley's spirituality in a 21st Century context. It is amazing to see how much of Wesley's strategies still apply today.

To learn more about Inspire go to the web site. There is a national conference on July 3rd that I will be going to.

Jonny Baker has also blogged about a 'gathering' he attended with other folk from various emerging churches and communities this weekend, and in his post he shared some of the prayers they used as part of one of worship times and is based on a well known prayer but with some added explanations....

For God so loved the world - may we naturally follow suit,
That he gave his only son - may we learn the wonder of sacrifice,
That all who believe - may our love for one another be the crucial evidence,
May not perish - may we work to halt the collapse of lives, of communities and of creation,
But have eternal life - may we point to the hope you bring now and for the future.

Jonny also links Mark Berry's site which has more of the prayers they used - all very thought provoking stuff.

Post CMC conference mussings

 #CMN10 #cmn11 Having read @digitalfprint very good notes from the conference and adding to the discussion from folk commenting on the need to stop whingeing and to start engaging like @georgeluke and re-tweeted by @drbexl @gavindrake and @annamdrew and also mine and others suggestions to have digital literacy workshops at the next CMN conference, it has started to strike me that in the light of the comment that everything is moving very quickly except the Christian response should we not starting to would out what we can do to start to engage now rather than wait till next year?

There is of course the excellent MediaLit course but I suppose what I thinking of is starting to experiment and strategise a valid response to bring the Christian response up to speed.

I have just listened to the most recent edition of the Guardian's Tech Weekly podcast that was talking about government IT development in the climate of a 'new government' and saying that no IT company would be expected to roll out a fully developed system that everyone can use reliably from day one. It should be try out a small scale test, iterate, iterate and then scale up. So can we start the process?

If these conversations are already taking place lets link them up, if not lets get them going. Surely an excellent role for the Network?

Discuss.....

Thoughts from the CMN conference

I have just got back from the Church and Media Conference "Voices From The Cloud" and thought it would be good to start with a post about my thoughts.

Monday
It was good to hear but I wasn't surprised by the opening keynote address from Roger Bolton as he repeated his comments from those he made at the Sandford St Martin Trust awards.

Next was the first opportunity to take part in the Strands. I have to say I was disappointed at the range of strands but decided to go to the 'online' strand and we had an interesting debate on social media and how organisations might use it as well as a discussion on appropriate media for various audiences.

After tea we heard from various 'catholic voices' and it was during this session I explored the Twitter feed using the hash tag #cmc10. I had to download an app for my iPhone but I was soon enjoying the comments from my fellow delegates on the debate.  This has been the first time I have felt the desire to follow an event on Twitter.

I have to say the entertainment for the first night left me fairly cold, sorry Jo Enright but it didn't work for me. Both Tony Campolo and Tony Jordan were much funnier.


Tuesday
Tony Campolo was stunning, definitely the high point of the conference so far, and perhaps without realising it, gave an excellent justification for retaining quality public service broadcasting, he talked about advertising and the desire to acquire stuff. Do go and download the talk from the CMN web site when they are posted in a couple of days and listen or even listen again to his passionate presentation.

After coffee I was interested to hear about Local Media for Local People and was especially interested in what Duncan Williams had to say about funding news online as part of the mobile phone charges because he wanted to have quality journalism on his titles and advertising on line wouldn't provide enough revenue in his opinion. I firmly believe we need to find business models and funding streams to make quality content available on line and to be able to make a living at it.

In the afternoon we had the second of the Strand sessions and we started by looking at a Child Wise report on children's media usage including things like mobile phone usage and spend.

Following on from that was an excellent session on Social Media and this session together with the two strand sessions have left me reviewing my on line presence and personnas.

After the evening meal we had an excellent session where Tony Jordan, who writes for Eastenders and Life on Mars shared with us how he came to write the script for a new BBC production of The Nativity story. He took us through the trials and tribulations of how he chose to handle the story, I can't wait to see it. It was wonderful to see how God has used him to produce a wonderful human perspective to birth of Jesus.

Wednesday
It was very interesting to hear what Aaqil Ahmed had to say about his first year as head of BBC Religion & Ethics as well as being the first dedicated Religion & Ethics commissioning editor. He shared how with the right ideas it is possible to pitch Religion and Ethics ideas and get them in main stream slots if you come up with ideas that work there.

Finally Andrew Graystone gave us the opportunity to consider in small groups what impact the conference had had on each of us as individuals and for me this blog and a new Twitter presence Sound_Mike to add to my specialised Pro Tools presence MikeProTools  are the start of this.

When it came to discuss broader thoughts about what the CMN could take on, I suggested that the Strand sessions could be used to provide a range of Digital Literacy training workshops and I offered to do a Podcasting course following my work with the media union BECTU and their Digital Tool Kit series.

So all in all an excellent 3 days with simulating presentations and discussions and great opportunities to meet old and new friends.