ABSTRACT
This introduction chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines a great deal of data, much from local censuses and most previously uncollated. It reviews and updates the Northumberland case study first presented in 1989 in Competing Convictions. The book describes a case study from rural Wales first presented in 1993 in The Myth of the Empty Church. Throughout urban England and Wales, the evening seems to have generally overtaken the morning as the time of highest churchgoing. The accumulative effect of these studies has been to undermine the approach championed by Currie, Gilbert and Horsley's Churches and Churchgoers. Churches and Churchgoers relies primarily upon 'estimated Catholic populations'. The urban churchgoing statistics reviewed later suggest that national Methodist membership statistics at the Union of 1932 considerably exaggerated the strength of Methodism at the time.
