It was a favourite saying in the nineteenth century, and early twentieth, that the press had replaced the pulpit. As one young writer put it in the 1930s:

Journalism in fact fulfilled one of the func­tions of a church. Writers of the time frequently referred to this aspect of it, and according to their biographies several of the higher journalists had thought of taking orders… Journalism may have been “the Church of the nineteenth century,” but it had not the organization, and the possibility of tradition, which makes the most moribund church potentially alive.

So how did the pulpit explain and respond to the challenge of declining audiences? Here’s Doreen Rosman from The Evolution of the English Churches, 1500–2000 [my italics]:

As car ownership increased, family outings and visits to relations became regular rather than occasional features of Sunday life. Sunday school attendance got in the way of other family commitments and by the late 1970s was maintained by a mere 7 per cent of the child population…

Another important, if less obvious, change was the decline in the number of adult women involved in church organisations… From the 1960s…it became more common for married women to work and increasing numbers sought employment once their children started school.

As [church] attendance continued to go down, church leaders, nationally and locally, agonised over what they were doing wrong. Some assumed that if they made services more appealing and put more effort into evangelism more people would come to church. Part of the problem, however, was a change in social behaviour which affected voluntary organisations of every kind, not just churches.

The decline in church attendance was part of a wider social trend away from organised, corporate activity towards more privatised lifestyles focused on the home and television.