So What Does Your Parish Need Exactly?

It’s been a long time coming for us, the Parish Needs Process, but on Saturday I, churchwarden Grant and his wife Sue who is our sole Deanery Synod rep (we are entitled to two but I’ve never found anyone else to do it) went to Tophill church to be told how it’s all going to work. Essentially this is an attempt to kickstart what we used to call Mission Planning, with the stress laid on the diocese helping parishes to identify what they want to do and working out how they can be supported to do it. There is nothing wrong with that, but my problem is that I’ve been around too long and remember the last time I went through this process seven years or so ago. I took on board all the injuctions to involve the whole church in settling its priorities for the next few years, getting people talking about ideas and plans, and we came up with a document that had my initials alongside action points suspiciously often. The number of people who actually wanted to use their limited free time to engage in the process was never very large and for the most part the congregation nodded and smiled and then went home. I have become entirely sceptical that this exercise as a process brings its supposed benefits to the church community, any more than constantly assessing what we do in the way we normally would. Attentive readers might remember, in the dim and distant past, the diocese’s Twelve Transformation Goals. Feedback indicated that nobody could remember what they were, so since the Pandemic they have been shrunk to three, stressing the priorities of discipleship, evangelism (what is called 'Growing Diversity' on the logo means outreach and evangelism), and community service. These, it seems to me, are more or less exactly the same as the three goals our former bishop set the diocese long before ‘Transforming Church, Transforming Life’ ever came along, and this is no coincidence because these three areas of activity are what the Church of Jesus Christ is for. Any plan for the future of any kind will always and I dare say has always included them, and so what the diocese has come up with is not only not new, it is exactly the same as anyone would.

All that said, in theory it helps to have something to guide your activity rather than flailing around randomly, and Mission Planning, or Church Development Planning or whatever you want to call it, is useful to that degree. After our conversations on Saturday I came away from the meeting less dreadfully negative than I started. In the new year a Mission Enabler from the diocese will have a conversation with me as the parish settles its ideas for the coming couple of years, and eventually we will have a Plan on a single side of A4 which the Archdeacon will look at when he makes his visitation in June. I’m not sure how much the diocese will really have had to do with it apart from kicking us all until it gets done.

Tophill has a nice new church Café which functions as a separate business and which serves coffee at least as posh as the café opposite Swanvale Halt church, the beans not exactly rolled on the thighs of dusky maidens but nearly. Everyone attending on Saturday got a discount voucher for their coffee, but we still had to pay for it. I was not alone in thinking this was a pretty poor show for laypeople giving up their free time to sit in a church and talk about toddler groups and the like, and I’m afraid I’ve said so on the feedback form so we’ll see whether I get feedback on my feedback.