At the end of last year (2022) the number of Christmas services advertised on the Church of England’s church-finding website were up by more than a quarter on pre-pandemic levels.
The A Church Near You website was advertising just over 23,850 services and other gatherings, and search engines saw a surge in people searching for phrases such as ‘midnight mass’. All in all, an estimated 682,000 people visited AChurchNearYou.com in December, and around 80 per cent of these visitors were on the site for the first time.