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'The Perfect Sunday' doesn't include church

by Cara Bentley

The 'Perfect Sunday' compiled by people's answers in a survery by Onepoll, involved: waking at 8:30am to the smell of breakfast cooking, a cuddle and three hours of television.

A quarter of Brits thought an ideal weekend morning starts with a full English breakfast in bed and a third wanted to start their Sunday morning with a cup of tea or coffee, before pottering around the house for an hour.

The perfect roast is said to be best served at 3:15pm with, ideally, four people. 

Other activities Brits enjoy doing on Sunday include reading a book, listening to music and doing some gardening.

Nearly one in 10 said they spend their Sunday afternoon at the pub, while one in seven think Sundays are made for doing the big food shop to keep the cupboards stocked for the rest of the week.

Attending church did not appear in the poll, Graham Nicholls from Affinity, a network of evangelical churches, told Premier: "I suppose I was sad that attending a gathering of God's people, in a church, wasn't kind of anywhere on the majority of people's lists.

"The sad thing for me is not just that it means that they're not hearing the gospel, they're not coming to an encounter with God, but it's also that churches are great places for taking our famililes, for making friendships and for learning who we are and why we're here,

"I'd love it if, included in the list of things we want to do on a Sunday, whether we're Christians or not, is find a place where we can hear God's word, where we can sing God's praises and where we can do stuff together in an atmosphere of trust and love."

When asked if this picture of what Brits like to do on a Sunday helps churches plan events Nicholls said: "I'm not sure it does...a lot of those activites are quite isolated, so people like safe places, so it's not as though if you put on watching netflix or having a roast dinner it would necessarily draw everyone in because they quite like doing it in their own homes.

"But maybe it helps us a little bit, you know, social things like eating ...big national events and walking can be ways to reach out to people but I think the way that we get people gathering with churches is by individuals befriending people, having roast with them, going for walks with them and then eventually having the opportunity to invite them along to stuff at church".

He added that the choices the average person made weren't necessarily bad: "We do want to affirm that there are lots of good things we can do in our leisure time and part of understanding of creation is to know that we can work and we can rest, so actually sitting around watching some television, eating a roast or spending some time in the pub with our friends are all good things". 

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