Last Saturday's decision to allow congregations to appoint gay men and women in civil partnerships followed a protracted and often bitter dispute with traditionalists, which has seen ministers and congregations quit the Church in protest.
Related: Ireland's gay marriage referendum – the Guardian briefing The liberalisation of Church policy is described as allowing individual congregations to opt out of traditional church teaching – by appointing gay ministers – rather than requiring all churches to follow the same policy.
The 1960s may have borne witness to a hardening of Protestant working-class attitudes, but this bitterness became further calcified when the Troubles erupted and school attendances declined, church congregations disappeared and inner-city communities became "sink estates" controlled by the new loyalist paramilitaries of the UVF and UDA.
We are drawn less to congregations of all kinds and more to the at-home intimacies of social media.
Population movements due to violence and intimidation in the early 1970s also affected the vitality of Protestant church congregations.
She was hugely encouraged, for instance, when one of her congregations gained four new members, taking its total weekly membership to 12.
However, few of those are teenagers, he says, and if that is echoed in urban congregations, that may be a problem in future, "because they will be the incomers to here 10 years from now".
So in spite of the grumbles about "convenience Catholics" and "phoney Protestants", it seems that congregations would be even thinner were it not for church schools.
Part of the success is due to clever marketing: Central America's feel-good evangelical mega-churches have growing television audiences as well as packed weekly congregations.
Since 1996, when churches were allowed to apply for public money for social work as part of welfare reform, only 3% of congregations have actually done so.The best kind of carrotsDiscovering which incentives do most to encourage work is also tricky.
Implicitly recognising that religion is at least in part a private good, Jewish congregations have introduced pricing mechanisms, such as charging higher fees in wealthy parts of London and making occasional visitors pay for their seats.
