In March 2015, more than 40 key Christian leaders from across the spectrum of the English church gathered in the Lake District. For 24 hours they prayed and talked, sharing their heart for mission and their collective longing to see God move in this nation.
The Talking Jesus research was born out of these discussions, giving a unique and fascinating insight into how our friends and neighbours view us as Christians, what they think about Jesus and how they react when we share Jesus with them. It also told us how often practising Christians are sharing their faith, and how confident they feel when they talk about Jesus.
Since the research was released, Christians and church leaders across the country have been unpacking the findings together. We’ve heard stories of individuals and churches re-inspired in sharing Jesus after hearing about the research, and of unity movements across the nation responding to the challenge of making Jesus known in their village, town or city.
Since the 2015 research report, many follow-up tools and resources have been released as well as the follow-up 2022 research report which gives a fascinating comparison showing the changes in perception over the seven years since the previous research was done. The team aim to continue to do more research reports every five years to continue the insights.
Savanta ComRes conducted one 10-minute online survey among a total of about 4,000 UK adults. Fieldwork mainly took place between 28 January 2022 and 13 February 2022, with some supplementary fieldwork taking place between 28 March 2022 and 5 April 2022. Respondents were recruited into two samples. Sample one, the Nat Rep sample, was designed to be nationally representative of the UK, numbering 3,115 people. In addition to this, Savanta ComRes also recruited a Boost Sample of 917 practising Christians. Following fieldwork, these two samples were combined into a single dataset. Practising Christians were weighted so that the proportion of practising Christians in the dataset as a whole was equal to the proportion of practising Christians recruited by chance in the nationally representative sample. Then, the whole combined dataset was weighted by gender, age, and region, ensuring that the data would provide a representative picture of the whole UK population.
The data has a margin of error of 1.54%, meaning that actual percentages could be 1.54% higher or lower than those presented below.
