Amen To Churches

Over the last decade, apparently 3,500 Churches have closed their doors for good due to poor attendant congregations and the decreasing prevalence of Christianity in this country and speaking to members of the clergy, they say that people are not attending church with the same frequency or devotion that they did in previous generations.
As an Atheist, i couldn't give a hoot  if I am being honest and have long considered religion as a whole to be thankfully on a downward trajectory but as my fellow Blog Owner regularly pulls on the dog collar and the black smock i should show some sympathy that he may soon be out of work and there isn't much call for someone who can recite Numbers 6:24-26 while tipping water over a babies head, it's a very niche role.
More pressing is the fact that there are 3,500 large empty buildings knocking around and I have seen some turned into Restaurants which admittedly looks very nice while you are having the Full English Breakfast or Vegetable Lasagna but otherwise, not sure what else you can do with them.
Some are very old, the oldest goes back to 600AD which is even before there was an England and the Angles and Saxons were carving up the land so historical importance and admittedly some are very impressive buildings indeed but it doesn't mean we can't keep the shell and do something else which doesn't include passing around a plate to collect money to fix the permanently leaky roof.
The Faith Survey found that UK Church membership has declined from 10.6 million in 1930 to 630,000 today with the biggest falls coming within the Catholic, Anglican, Baptist and Methodist flavours of Christianity and a separate Pew Survey of 65 countries revealed the UK to be one of the world's most irreligious countries, with only 30% of those surveyed identifying as 'religious'.
The consolation for the clergy is that there are still approximately 40,300 church buildings in the UK so at a rate of 350 a year, that's 115 years until the last one closes it's doors for the last time which gives them plenty of time to look for new work where you can dress in black and tell people how to live their lives.