Redundant church

A redundant church is a church building that is no longer required for regular public worship. The phrase is particularly used to refer to former Anglican buildings in the United Kingdom, but may refer to any disused church building around the world. Reasons for redundancy include population movements, changing social patterns, merging of parishes, decline in church attendance (especially Christian decline in the Global North) or other factors. Although once simply demolished or left to ruin, today many redundant churches find new uses as community centres, museums, or homes.

Although some church buildings fall into disuse around the world, in England, the term "redundancy" was particularly used by the Church of England which had a Redundant Churches Division. In 2008, the Church changed the terminology surrounding church closure and as such "redundancy" is now known as "closure for regular public worship". The Redundant Churches Division became the Closed Churches Division.

There are a number of reasons for a church building being declared redundant, although it is primarily due to a reduction in the number of regular Sunday worshippers, which fell since the late 1980s to about 1.7m in 2008. Other reasons include the amalgamation of parishes, or a preference for another building where two churches exist in close proximity, for example at Swaffham Prior, Cambridgeshire. Population shift is another factor; for example, many redundant churches were formerly maintained in parishes situated in deserted or shrunken medieval villages (such as Wharram Percy in Yorkshire) and there are many disused churches in the now-sparsely-populated square mile of the City of London.

Around 30 Church of England churches are declared closed for regular public worship each year. The buildings are only demolished as a last resort; according to The Economist magazine, from 1969 to 2002, 1,600 Church of England buildings had been declared redundant, and of those, 357 have been demolished and 327 preserved by the Churches Conservation Trust.

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