Prayer, Perhaps

You might have thought it was a simple matter to get Christians together to pray. Our Church Development Plan envisages doing that - deliberately and consciously to seek the will of God for Swanvale Halt church rather than launching initiatives which might be costly in time, money and human resources, yet not what the Lord was really after at all. Yet it hasn't proved easy at all. Giselle the Lay Reader was the one tasked with this but when she gathered a group of likely souls to see what they thought found them more willing to revive something we used to have, an ecumenical prayer group to concentrate on the needs of our local community - a worthwhile thing in its own right, but not what I had in mind. We thought, well, perhaps this is also a movement of the Spirit, so Giselle set up a session - but nobody could make it. OK, I concluded, I will just pick a couple of times, half an hour before Morning Prayer one day and before Evening Prayer another, get Jesus out of the aumbry (in the form of a consecrated Host in the monstrance) and onto the Lady Chapel altar, and sit there and see who comes. And last Monday there were five of us which I consider not bad. 

I asked whether people had any impressions they might want to share with me. Matthew had a reflection on open and closed doors, Giselle asked 'what is the congregation hungry for?' and seems to have developed an unexpected interest in the iconography of dragons, and Estelle was 'just thankful to be there' as she usually is. Fr Donald the retired hospital chaplain mused on the salutary effect of encountering Christ in the Sacrament and thereby accustoming ourselves to listen to one another as well as to Him, and how our society might be improved if its leaders did more of it, like Harold MacMillan popping into the Westminster house of the Society of St John the Evangelist to pray when he got the chance. He may well have a point.

Unbuttoning the Church

How do you read Caravaggio's The Calling of St Matthew? Which figure is the evangelist - the bearded man in the black hat, or the younger fellow keeping his gaze fixed on his cash rather than Christ on the right of the picture? Is the bearded man gesturing to himself, or to the other figure? I think the latter, while Canon Chris Russell, the Archbishop of Canterbury's Advisor on Evangelism and Witness, argues that it's the former, which radically changes your interpretation of the painting.

This is just one and not the most important point I disagree with in the online CofE 'Leadership for Evangelism' material I'm working through at the moment with a view to fulfilling the bit of our development plan which deals with 'faith sharing' (the overall significance of the painting is that it's an illustration of the way the encounter with Christ can take place in the midst of our everyday lives, which is fair enough). A more notable example is the episode in another passage where two commentators discuss what holds ordinary Christians back from sharing their faith. 'We've done extensive work across years in 18 countries,' says one, 'and what comes back consistently is that they're worried about rejection.' Hm. My mind goes back many years to a different context, to a Liberal Democrat meeting in Oxford where my late and lovely friend Sam was asked by the future MP for Oxford West why he didn't invite any of his friends to our meetings: 'Because I want to keep them, Evan', Sam answered reasonably, and I have always believed the situation is the same in matters religious. Nobody wants to think that their friendship is instrumental, that the relationship is actually about recruitment into an organisation, and what Christians are afraid of is not their friends or relatives saying No as such, but being thought to be fake, to be engaging in a relationship for the sake of something else. I'm not sure the Church's officials really want to think about that.

But there is a lot of useful material there, too, and it makes me reflect differently about some of our activities at Swanvale Halt. The things we’re doing at the moment to try to widen our diet of worship in ways that might provide different routes into faith for those on the edges of it – Forest Church, Compline online, and Sunday Space – are not on their own drawing in a single soul beyond the ones I could have predicted all along would take part in such things. I now doubt they will. What they might do is get some of the congregation acclimatised to the habit of being more than passive consumers of religion, but being more open and articulate about it, a little less controlled and buttoned-down. It’s not easy for me, frankly, because I rather prefer controlled and buttoned-down, but it’s absolutely necessary. So I carry on lowering my sights until they are almost level with the ground!

What Is The Lord Trying To Tell Us?

Among the tasks we've set ourselves in our Church Development Plan is the aim 'To establish a group to regularly, deliberately and expectantly for the work of the church'. The idea behind this simple concept is that rather than going off in pursuit of grand schemes that sound good, from employing a musical director to installing a new audiovisual system, we ought first to try and pay attention to what God might have in mind. 'Absolutely right', the Archdeacon endorsed. I spoke to Gizel the lay reader who said she'd had exactly the same idea and she would be happy to run with it. Good, I thought, I wanted this to be something that drew on the spiritual life of the laypeople and got them listening to the voice of the Spirit in some sort of concerted way. We discussed some individuals we reckoned would be likely candidates, souls we could rely on to be thoughtful and reflective.

Gizel held a meeting of herself and the three people we'd identified. One said she prayed the Office daily as part of her obligations as a member of a dispersed religious community, so she didn't think she would have the time to take on anything new. Another stated that his hearing problems made it difficult for him to be involved. The third really wanted to take part in an ecumenical group that prayed for issues relating to the community at large, like the one that used to be run by Marion our curate. 'That really wasn't the point of the exercise', I told Gizel. 'I know', she replied, 'I was somewhat disappointed as well. We could begin with just you and me and take it from there'. We could, but part of the reasoning was to get me out of the way and let God speak to the creativity and thoughtfulness of the laypeople. Perhaps there are others he wants to speak to. Perhaps he doesn't want to speak at all. Surely not.

Should That Really Be Here?

It was my fault that I and the churchwardens had to drag ourselves all the way to All Saints’ Fleet this week for the Archdeacon’s Visitation service (confusingly we use the same name for this event, when the Archdeacon admits churchwardens to their office for the year ahead, as we do for their inspection visits of individual churches). Last Thursday we’d all turned up at a completely different church, only to realise that when I told everyone the date and venue, I’d been looking at a memo from 2022.

All Saints is a church I’d never been into. It burned down in 2015 and has now been meticulously rebuilt, and was only reconsecrated in April; I find its red brick fabric rather brutal, unrelieved by any of the usual bits and pieces a church accumulates, because those have all been reduced to ash. The old high altar is still there, though, blackened and strikingly odd, and that’s a nice touch. The arched tomb of the founder Charles Lefroy and his wife also survives, movingly battered and beaten about. The new church has a fancy audiovisual system, but we were all given the poshest orders of service I’ve ever seen for any religious event, full-colour and heavy-gauge, glossy paper and card covers.

One of the troughs of the Triennial Conference last week came when we were all called on to sing a hymn framed around the diocesan slogan ‘Transforming Church, Transforming Lives’. There’s an earnest well-meaningness behind the attempt to shoehorn in the Bishop’s ‘three transformation goals’, but the question is whether it should be done at all. When we stumbled our way through the hymn in Derbyshire – the whole thing was obviously designed to be sung to the familiar tune ‘Woodlands’, but that wasn’t good enough for the Conference’s imported worship leader who felt the need to muck about with the melody of every other verse – I had a horrible feeling that it would henceforth make an appearance at every diocesan event. And so with grim inevitability it popped up at Fleet this week, along with an amendment to the usual ‘Collect for Churchwardens’ that God will ‘hold before them the vision of Transforming Church, Transforming Lives’.

It isn’t just taste that makes me cringe at this. It’s the importation into liturgy of what amounts to a corporate management slogan, the pretence that it’s something else: dressing a completely human idea as a divine one. It’s not quite ‘the abomination that causes desolation standing where it does not belong’, but it’s a step in its direction. What makes it more awkward is that the thing has been written by the Archdeacon, who I like and who has been supportive and helpful to me in the past, so what I’m left with is probably less anger than depressed resignation.

Laying Groundwork

The last time Swanvale Halt church did a round of Mission Planning was several years ago. We loyally got everyone involved in it, and took the PCC to a nearby church to talk through it all and narrow our mass of ideas down to a few achievable, measurable examples. I suspected at the time that we'd gone for the ones that were slightly too easy to achieve, and as a result had ended up with not a lot to show for all our efforts. We were beginning another round when the pandemic intervened and put a stop to everything apart from keeping going. Now we are off again! 

I, Grant the churchwarden and Ceri from the congregation (a relatively new member, who volunteered) met with the lady from the Mission Enabling section at the Diocese a few weeks ago, an encounter which genuinely helped (sometimes I think despite itself) to clarify the way forward in my mind: previous meetings had left me somewhat bewildered as to how exactly the process was supposed to work. Now I had a clear steer, to focus on putting in place some of the conditions for moving forward rather than picking on grand schemes, and to keep it small-scale but open-ended, as opposed to the very 'closed' tasks that emerged the last time we went through this exercise: so, for instance, rather than trying to find the money to pay a musical director (an ambitious scheme which may not work), setting up a group to pray for the mission of the church (which may bring some insight as to whether that's what God would have us do). 

The PCC liked the single-page document I came up with. Not surprisingly, as my initials are next to most of the action points. But those action points are, initially, to find laypeople to do the actual work. They don't get off that easily!

What You Think You Need

It gradually turned colder in my sitting room as the talk between myself and the lady from the Mission Enabling Team at the Diocese wore on, not because there was anything frosty in our interaction, but because, I realised, I'd only switched the heating on for an hour. She didn't take her coat off, which was wise. We were having the first meeting in our Parish Needs Process, the title the Diocese gives to its efforts to accompany parishes as they work on their Development Plans. She kept reiterating that it was entirely up to me/us whether I/we wanted the Team involved in our planning at all. We discussed the nature of Swanvale Halt parish and the church's relationship with the local community, and the fact that, in common with virtually any church you might pick, there's a lot going on but not many people to do it. We will come up with some kind of a document that summarises where we are and lays out a couple of things we might try in the mission field over the next year or two, but I have a feeling that there will be no surprises. What the Mission Enablers are offering seems to be general consciousness-raising about the nature of parish mission in the 2020s, and I fear that what they will say will not be substantially different from what's been said for the last three decades or so, and which keen followers of this blog will have read before. What I would like is clever insights into our specific situation, but I doubt anything like that will emerge. Perhaps I should have offered her biscuits.

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.

An Age of Delusion, Yet Again

You might have thought, given what I’ve said in the past and my interest in the interior arrangements of church buildings, that I am a steadfast defender of the stone and brick steeple houses we Anglicans inhabit. I mainly am, but I also recognise that they are burdens as well. The Body of Christ needs somewhere to meet, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be so large, so old, or so expensive as it often is. While at theological college I remember writing about the notion of ‘cell church’ which had a vogue at one time – a form of Christian community in which small groups become not adjuncts to the church which allow greater discipleship, but the basic structure in which people live their Christian lives, only gathering together in larger numbers on special occasions. Some evangelical Anglican churches went for that, although I don’t know that any actually disposed of their old church buildings; they did, after all, still need them, and might not have been allowed simply to abandon them anyway. I heard a story of a church in Coventry diocese which, driven from their old building after a fire, found their new home in a school hall so congenial that they refused to return once the church was repaired. The diocese didn’t like that at all. But ‘selecting cell’ (as Mission-Shaped Church – remember that? put it) would shift the focus towards a different way of doing things in which the building becomes less important. I remember writing an essay on ecclesiology at Staggers and musing how historic parish churches might turn into ‘network cathedrals’ linking a variety of forms of Church life into the Apostolic structure. Certainly that might mean not needing as many of them.

I’ve long thought a reckoning was coming, driven by strain on resources; not even I think that decades of numerical and therefore financial reduction can go unrecognised indefinitely.  In our diocese the line is now that if a church can’t cover the costs of a stipendiary clergyperson, it won’t get one unless the diocese decides there are special circumstances, and had it not been for the unnecessarily punitive and capitalist language our bishop used when introducing the new policy (‘we must move away from a system that penalises success and rewards failure’) I wouldn’t have minded so much.

This is also the strategy adopted in Chelmsford, where Stephen Cottrell has been bishop for ten years. Becoming Bishop of Reading by accident in 2004 when the Oxford Diocese’s evangelical powerhouses played merry hell at the prospect of celebrity gay parson Jeffrey John taking up that post, +Stephen’s first episcopal task was coming to St Stephen’s House for our Founder’s Day. He comes from the Catholic tradition, but most of us don’t practice being bishops before the pointy hat drops on our head and it was most amusing to see him being pointed in the right direction by the House Sacristans who knew more about being a bishop than he did.

Now in the process of being translated to York, future Archbishop Cottrell is, we learned over the weekend, being charged with running a commission to restructure the Anglican Church. The Sunday Times had spoken to ‘a source familiar with Cottrell’s thinking’ and reported them as saying ‘The crisis is going to lead to a massive shrinkage in the number of cathedrals, dioceses and parish churches … [the COVID emergency] has vastly accelerated a dramatic change in the way the Church of England will do its stuff because of declining attendance and declining revenues.’ The photograph of +Stephen shows him looking unconscionably smug, which he never used to be, unless sixteen years of bishoping have made him so. It was a shame we had to find out this way, and shows yet again that the bishops really have very little idea how to manage the system of which they are in charge or the people who make it up. Bishop Philip North (him again) Tweeted that he didn’t recognise the report, and that discussing closing dioceses ‘would lead to years of pointless debate and introspection at a time when we need to be looking outwards, naming injustice and addressing a nation with a message of hope’. The cynic in me whispers that, this being the Church of England, ‘years of pointless debate and introspection’ is presumably just what we will opt for.

‘We are at a crossroads,’ an unnamed bishop told the Sunday Times, ‘everything’s a blank sheet of paper. It is allowing us to get back to that question of first principle, what it means to be the church. People haven’t stopped gathering for worship. They’ve been doing it over Zoom or over YouTube’. I want to scream, This isn’t ‘gathering’! It’s a replacement for gathering, a weak, etiolated stopgap, a plug in the hole left by the shutting-down of genuine Christian community. People hate it, and they only do it because it’s the best they’ve got. Getting back to first principles is fine, but you wouldn’t have thought that one of the principles in question would be that of human beings actually physically being together.

What I think ‘the Church’ means is something like ‘the community called into existence by the saving work of Jesus Christ, organised around the sacraments and gathering to proclaim his coming Kingdom’. There is no 'new way of being church' which doesn't include those things. No, you don’t need lovely old buildings to do them, but I wonder what the Body of Christ here in Swanvale Halt might look like without the Steeple House. It’s worth thinking about, but, I suspect, far from a panacea. We would presumably meet in houses or pub rooms. Instead of the infants school and other institutions coming to us for their celebratory events, we would have to beg use of their facilities when they’re not using them, the same as Slimming World or a pilates class. We would instantly lose our visibility; and I’m far from convinced that a lot of reticent Anglicans are suddenly going to become the Durutti Column of guerrilla evangelists that the theory envisages. We know that even the most outgoing evangelical churches rarely bring any new souls to faith, but largely shuffle them around between each other, or breed them. I worry that I am deluded in thinking I can have much effect through my work to communicate the Gospel, but if I am I’m not alone. Bishops keep talking as though our current situation is something wonderful rather than a mutilation of what we are supposed to be: ‘Now’s our chance to reimagine church’ that article Bishop Graham Tomlin Tweeted the day the churches were locked to the communities in which they sit. I think the bishops are in for a rude awakening if they think that shutting that inconvenient Gothic building in the centre of the estate is going to revive the Faith in England any time soon.

In this mood I sat with my early-morning tea and read John 22. ‘It is the Lord!’ cries Peter, and leaps into the water of the Sea of Galilee to swim to the beach where he’s glimpsed Jesus. It is indeed, I found myself thinking, and that’s what matters. As Jesus speaks to Peter over breakfast, joking whether he loves him more than he does the fish – that’s my take on the text, anyway – I thought of Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, and other desperate atheist attempts to shut the experience of the apostles into a box they can understand, and to defuse its danger. Christ is risen and everything else is relative. I will carry on doing what I can do here to tell everyone that, to proclaim the Kingdom, to make sure Swanvale Halt Church makes its contribution to its parish and the wider Church as long as it can. Sometimes I weary of it; sometimes I think I’ve barely started. 

Two slogans for you:

Pooling Resources

'Thank you for your card', Fr Andris's email began. I was uncomfortably aware that we hadn't spoken about the Mission Planning process for at least 18 months and I thought I'd drop a line to say I hadn't forgotten him (or at least I had intermittently remembered him) but that our experiences didn't seem to require a meeting.

However he did say that in his Deanery they are thinking more about collaborative working between church communities; in Germany, where his sister-in-law works as a Roman Catholic Pastoral Assistant, the local diocese has amalgamated parishes quite radically and such things as confirmation classes and activities for teenagers are now operating on that broader scale, making life easier for clergy and more rewarding for them. Lessons we could learn, suggests Fr Andris.

While people identify with their own church and the community which uses it, it would be very beneficial to organise such things as confirmation, baptism and marriage preparation, or youth activities, at a higher level than the parish. There are also the environmental drawbacks of getting groups of people travelling to a central point rather than a series of local ones. But it occurred to me that the main obstacle to doing this in the Anglican context is the variety of churches. A group of Roman Catholic churches could be expected to have a degree of uniformity in teaching which you wouldn't necessarily expect between Anglican parishes. I would be most reluctant to hand any confirmands, for instance, that might come from Swanvale Halt (and there are occasionally some!) to conservative evangelical churches to be taught silly things about the Bible, and would want them to think about sacraments and spiritual life in a broadly Catholic way. So I would want to do it! Of the churches that are our most natural local theological and spiritual bedfellows, some are in our Deanery, some aren't. I like the idea of working across boundaries, but it's not completely straightforward.

It's That Time Again

When the next Archdeacon's Visitation takes place, I warned the PCC, we will be expected to have a new Mission Action Plan in place with all our aims and objectives related to the diocesan Twelve Transformation Goals, so we may as well begin. These days I am less convinced that the whole Mission Planning process is a way of galvanising the life of a church community, but it still makes sense to bring laypeople on board with what has to be done - if only so that the workload can be better shared. The resulting PCC meeting - where we were just trying to add definite ideas to the broad themes we'd already identified - went on a bit, but it was surprisingly positive and productive. Perhaps after five years of thinking intentionally about the future, people are actually getting a taste for it!

I intended to get the whiteboard for this brainstorming exercise but that was behind a screen in the hall, the hall being occupied by the prisoners of Slimming World, so I reverted to a lower-tech alternative. The chalk, though, was the stuff I'd blessed for Epiphany, so that must have added divine approval. 

Away Again with the PCC

It was two-and-a-bit years ago that the PCC of Swanvale Halt took an Away Day to consider the Mission Plan (we're not supposed to call them that now, apparently - they are Church Development Plans, not that it matters what you call them). Over that time my thinking about how to engage in this process has shifted, but it's still vital to bring the lay leadership of the church into the business of deciding its priorities, or it just won't work at all. We'd booked Peper Harow church, which is not far away from Swanvale Halt: a medieval church, decorated by the great Pugin, which dramatically caught fire on Christmas Eve 2007 and which underwent an incredibly expensive reconstruction resulting in an absolutely gorgeous fabric, like a medieval church but spanking new with pristine tiling and ceiling paintings. Half the pompous post-Reformation monuments were unsalvable, leaving only the odd bust and cherub, and a church which is strikingly clear of clutter. As the church is only occasionally used for services, it was always intended that it should be a 'diocesan resource' available for just such things as PCC Away Days.

One of the delights of Peper Harow's restoration, as well as its loo and kitchenette, is underfloor heating. I have felt this working, but it hasn't worked as reliably as one might hope. It wasn't working this Saturday; the churchwarden had helpfully put in heaters on Friday afternoon, but as I set out from my house the car thermometer dropped from 1 degree to freezing to minus-1. Oh dear.

In fact the chill outside made the environment within the building seem all the more palatable, and it's a beautiful setting, amid the Surrey fields. As the sun got going and the time came to 'break into small groups' various Swanvale Halt members decided they were more comfortable out in the churchyard in the increasingly warm late-winter sunshine than in the church itself.

Everyone expressed a great deal of satisfaction with the day. It was good that Rev Facilitator was able to be with us again as he was in 2015, guiding us with gentle encouragement (shame he's retiring). He thinks we've come quite a long way and seem more energised and forward-looking than in the past. I now have a sheaf of papers to batter into some kind of report so that we can take it forward. A job for tomorrow ...

Divine Discontent

Fr Andris came for a coffee this morning. I shared my experience of trying to kick-start a second round of Mission Planning by sharing the ideas that had arisen from various conversations over the months, and not getting a great deal of response as a result. I wondered whether I had presented the information in the wrong form, whether it was the wrong time of the year to expect people to think about things, or whether the whole approach was awry. We’d decided to seek another Away Day for the PCC facilitated by an outsider. I explained that I had in my mind an ideal that devising a Mission Plan will involve a series of expanding discussions among a church’s membership eventually leading to the whole church endorsing a document which is then worked through and reported back on, but was now wondering whether this was a flexible enough approach.

Andris said that he’d found exactly the same in his church and wondered whether part of the ‘problem’ (if we think of it as a problem) is that our congregations are, generally, happy and content. They’re not necessarily resistant to change (resistance tends to be generated by fear rather than contentment), but their contentment means they have little investment in the idea of change. A lot of our people, perhaps including ourselves, have been Christians for a long time and the inevitable tendency of decades of prayer and practice is to rub off the sharp edges of our religious experience and to induce an ever-greater sense of peace and acceptance. That isn’t a bad thing: in fact it’s the way our spiritual lives are supposed to develop. What it risks is eroding the awareness that the Kingdom is always beyond us, always something to achieve, always calling us to discontent with a world not as God wants it to be.

That doesn’t apply to everyone. Newer Christians are often more questioning of the way things are, and long-established believers may undergo disruptive experiences which result in a kind of reassessment of their faith which may feel like encountering it for the first time. Such people are very valuable to the Body of Christ as a whole.

We found ourselves considering whether the whole-church model of mission planning is realistic for our church communities, who are happy and perhaps even pleased to be presented with a programme and to have a feeling that someone else has the future of the church in hand, but who don’t necessarily want to shape the programme themselves. It may be that the shaping has to rely on a smaller group of individuals (which may well not be identical with the PCC) who can contribute discontent to the whole process. There are resonances, we realised, with leadership-development models pursued mainly by evangelical churches, or the discipleship-development group at one of the nearby moderate-middling churches one of our fellow incumbents described a few months ago. 'This is all great,' pondered Fr Andris, 'It's how we actually do it that's the problem.'

Natural Church Development

Fr Andris, who is my ‘mission partner’, meaning he comes and has coffee with me every few months and we talk about how the mission development process is going, lent me Natural Church Development by Christian Schwarz. It wasn’t a work of great complexity and I was able to skim through its 130 large-printed pages in something over an hour. The book arises out of a research project carried out in the early 1990s among 1000 churches across 32 countries, so it represents a lot of data. The central contention is that it shouldn’t be hard for a church community to grow: growth should, and does, happen naturally when the right factors are in place, and those factors turn out not to be any particular form of worship, ideological assumptions, or even structures, but things such as whether people are enabled to develop and deploy their gifts, whether there are groups smaller than the church as a whole to let this happen, whether loving relationships within the church are facilitated. There are eight of these elements, Christian Schwarz avers, and none can be missing, drawing on the metaphor of a barrel which can only hold water to the top of its shortest strut. He then goes on to talk about ‘six biotic principles’, concluding from the way nature works that there are principles behind organisational development which reflect God’s will, and that bit of the book I find a bit harder to swallow; but the basic idea seems sound enough and reflects what I see looking around.

I sat down and tabulated Schwarz’s eight growth factors alongside our Twelve Church Principles, the diocese’s Twelve Transformation Goals and the Church of England’s Eight Signs of a Healthy Church (phew), and drew the connections between the statements, making a complicated, multi-coloured network: proper ‘messy church’, that is. The multifarious links make the point that these independently-derived systems are grasping at the same sort of ideas, which gives me some optimism.

I’ve already said to my lot, basically, you can’t choose to be a growing church, but you can choose to be a good church, and this research suggests that if you are a good church, you’re likely to grow. The caveat is that 1996, when the book was published, was a long time ago and much has happened since then. Many churches are much weaker, and the Church’s connection with society is much reduced, meaning that the pool of likely activists, likely well-wishers, and likely converts we have to draw on is that much shrunken. For many churches, growth may be beyond them, no matter what they do.

All Flesshe ys Grasse

On another day, Reg’s funeral would have dominated my thinking yesterday (as it did until the evening). It’s not every funeral service that begins with a preamble from the departed laying out his thinking behind how it’s put together and the spirit with which we should all approach it. His outline notes include the instruction ‘Eulogy (if deserved)’: I have no idea what one does to ‘deserve’ a eulogy, and it’s not my place to decide anyway. The love and honour in which Reg was held was palpable, as was his sense of gratitude and joyousness – though shot through with the extremity of the way he died. I spoke to one of my predecessors as Rector for whom Reg had served as churchwarden in the 1960s: his predecessor had told him how ‘this is such a good parish. You’ll love them into heaven.’

As an antidote, in the evening I went with our treasurer to a meeting about the new Parish Share system the diocese is proposing. Now, this is all a bit complex, but bear with me. The Diocese of Guildford derives more of its £11.7M income from its parishes than any other Church of England diocese, 94% (in Lincoln it’s just over 40%), because it lacks the historic endowments and landholdings the older dioceses have. This means that if churches are subsidised for any reason, the money basically has to come from all the other churches, essentially reallocating resources from a handful of larger evangelical churches to smaller ones. The distortions arising from this system have in recent years been mitigated by a complex arrangement of caps and floors on the annual changes in the sum the diocese demands from each parish. It all means that how the figure for any parish is arrived at is opaque to say the least. The diocese also reckons that the actual cost of each stipendiary clergyperson has been significantly underestimated. ‘It’s not fair!’ the Bishop outlined at the start of the meeting: the system should not ‘penalise growth or reward decline’.

So there is to be a new system. Each parish’s quota will be calculated on what it gets (a vicar, for instance, calculated as costing £55K per year), a share of the common costs of the diocese, and an adjustment based on the relative prosperity of the parish. There will continue to be cross-subsidies, but they will be apparent and transparent rather than covert, and seen explicitly as ‘an investment for growth’. In the future, if a parish in Guildford Diocese is subsidised, it’ll know it.

Well. It struck me that this shift marks another stage in a huge process of centralisation which has gone on for decades. Once upon a time each parish in the Church of England was a virtually independent unit, financially and administratively; occasionally a bishop would turn up to confirm people or to discipline a naughty Anglo-Catholic clergyman but that was basically it. Then in the 1960s clerical incomes were standardised as the parishes handed their historic endowments over to the dioceses to be put into a central pool, possibly the greatest single act of Christian charity in this country’s history and one that nobody really talks about. Gradually clergy also began sending their fees for marriages and funerals into the diocesan pot as well. This financial centralisation should be seen alongside the long effort by the bishops to get more control over the patronage process, that is, who has the right to present a candidate to be incumbent of a parish; and the abolition of the Parson’s Freehold, the incumbent’s absolute security of tenure which is now (except for those who, like me, were already in place) replaced by licences for a term of years. Freehold gave clergy the freedom to innovate without worrying about being slapped over the wrist, but it also gave them the freedom to be alcoholics, depressives, oddballs, or plain idle buggers. Put all this together and the picture that emerges is of a massive and decades-long process in which the parish ceases to be the strategic unit for the mission of the Church of England, and is replaced by the diocese. The diocese’s hand may still be relatively light and respectful of the traditions of each parish, and bishops certainly tend not to behave with the brutal high-handedness that some once did, but the striking thing is that it has a hand at all. This is a shift from a situation in which parishes are given a priest and then left essentially to get on with it, to one in which strategic direction is set centrally and then implemented locally.

I said this, and the chaps from the diocesan offices didn’t like it at all, which suggests to me that I’m on to something. I didn’t at the time take the further step of summarising the proposed change, which I characterise – possibly caricature – as a shift from saying ‘every parish needs a priest and we will provide one’ to saying ‘every parish will have a priest if it earns one, and, if it can’t pay, we will decide what “earning” means’.

The change probably won’t cripple Swanvale Halt church. I and the treasurer guess that, when the new system comes in, we’ll have to find another £5-10K per annum, a challenging but not impossible amount. But far worse and more depressing than the shift in balance from parish to diocese, which is perhaps an inevitable process, is the managerialist and results-driven ideas behind the bishop’s statement about ‘penalising growth and rewarding decline’. What morally pejorative terms those are. The assumption is that a church can grow if only it tries, and therefore if it’s not growing it must be complacent and idle. This new model is very much ‘salvation by works’ rather than ‘salvation by grace’ – payment by results, rather than needs. It works entirely against everything we tell people about their essential value, about God valuing the lowly and weak. Whether centrally-directed strategy and incentivisation will ‘work’ better than hands-off universal provision, or will just accelerate decline, is an open question.

And it’s on God that I try to focus. Ultimately my value comes from him, from what I am in his eyes, not in the eyes of the Church of England. It doesn’t make me feel that good, though.

Transforming Something

It wasn't me who was present at the Cathedral on Wednesday for the presentation about our Bishop's new diocesan initiative, but Marion our curate, who came back with a bag of gubbins including posters, bookmarks for our congregations, and a memory stick with a variety of publicity materials, ready to be handed over to me. Swanvale Halt was supposed to introduce 'Transforming Church, Transforming Lives' today, as were all the other churches in the diocese.

I watched the video that came on the memory stick, illustrating how various churches around the diocese were doing things to fulfil the development goals which the Bishop would like us to concentrate on, with unobjectionable but determinedly upbeat music in the background and some swirly but simple graphics. As is the manner of all these corporate promotional efforts, it has something of North Korea about it, a world in which everyone grins and everything is wonderful. The video lasts 15 minutes, and I counted that 6 minutes 30 seconds of it concerns alternative forms of worship of varying degrees of wackiness. Fifteen minutes later I was entirely demoralised and, with my usual sense of extremity, wondered whether I shouldn't just chuck it all in. Whatever I have to offer it isn't what the Diocese of Guildford seems to want, and it may not be anything the Church as a whole wants, either. I watched it again with Ms Formerly Aldgate: what was her response? 'Everyone's very keen', she said. 'Is this what people mean by evangelical? How is it relevant to Swanvale Halt?' The intention from the powers-that-be was that everyone should be shown the film, but I was little inclined to do so even though this might amount to mild disobedience.

The following morning I sat reading Nehemiah's account of the unreliable prophets trying to intimidate him into abandoning the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem, and also St Dorotheos warning that an emotional person shouldn't be surprised by discouragement and should resist it. Enough of this, I thought. There was no point demoralising the good people of Swanvale Halt by confronting them with a whole set of initiatives that other churches had tried and they couldn't do: I would butcher the diocesan video, extract the bits that seemed most appropriate to us, and reframe them in a presentation which actually explained what the Bishop was trying to achieve. So this morning at the 10am mass I did so, and it worked quite well. At least the congregation now knows that there is a diocesan strategy to replace our former Bishop's less-than-fully-engaging one, why it's there, and how it might fit in with what we're doing here. People even felt enthused enough to take away the promotional bookmarks, thoughtfully provided in different colours so you can pick your own. 

But don't tell anyone that this was what I did.

Speak Up!

We met after the main Mass on Sunday to discuss the final, final draft of the church mission plan. It's taken about two years to get to this point, beginning with me thinking about the state the church was in after my fifth year as incumbent, through the working-group which drafted a document for the consideration of the PCC, the Away Day in November and the further working groups established to batter our pious intentions into things like actions and lay out the resources required, and finally the PCC talking about it a few days ago. As always people take a bit of coaxing to say anything (apart from the church members who never miss an opportunity to argue that the services should be 'simplified' to attract all the mythical hordes who are champing at the bit to get into the church, and only put off by what we currently do in it) but we managed to have some discussion, at least, about the ideas and the situation we're in. The document we've adopted is a collection of bits and pieces, really: small, comprehensible little actions which nevertheless will take us all the time we've allotted ourselves, and perhaps more, to do. Even then I've tried to stress that considering things like 'communication inside and outside the church' and 'welcoming newcomers' are really just laying down the groundworks for the far more challenging business of re-engaging with the community of Swanvale Halt in new ways which will have to come later. I was tired out by the end of it, surprisingly.

Having Another Go

You may have read mentions here of St John’s church in Chatham, where I used to live and worship. A correspondent points me towards this report from Archbishop Cranmer’s blog, not a place where I often go (at least not without a spiritual gas mask), in turn quoting thisone about the Diocese of Rochester, known in some quarters as The Troubled Diocese of Rochester, being given a central CofE grant of £665K to ‘re-establish mission in Chatham Town Centre’, a project which includes ‘planting a new worshipping community alongside missional outreach’. David Jennings from the Archbishops’ Council replied to His Grace’s blog post by referring to ‘a new town centre church’. There are already, of course, two churches available there: one called Emmaus, led at the moment by an Anglican priest and based in the former United Reformed Church building, spectacularly ugly but in the right sort of place; and secondly the lovely old St John the Divine which I knew over twenty years ago, an early-19th century church hopelessly islanded on the wrong side of the central ring road, which the diocese has fruitlessly been attempting to dispose of for years. The Emmaus website is a bit thin and there isn’t anything datable on it, so I wonder how well they’re doing: the Anglican churchwardens are names I recognise from when I worshipped there. As for old St John’s, it still sits there, looking rather sullen and resentful to me, as well it might, apparently wanted by nobody and yet not able to be destroyed thanks to its listed status. Is the Church actually planning to build yet a third building? Were it me, I would be tempted either to try and make old St John’s work (a romantic dream, I fear), or pull down half or more of the Clover Street building and put something nice in its place. But surely £665K isn’t enough for that – even in Chatham?

Away With the PCC

As we've said before, the process of 'Mission Planning' will not of and by itself save the church in Swanvale Halt, let alone the Church more generally. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing: if nothing else it encourages people to think about the life of their particular Christian community in a less passive and more deliberative and conscious way, less as something that merely happens around them and more as something they take part in and help to shape. 

So the Church Council and I found ourselves at a local school on Saturday being 'facilitated' by an affable chap from the Diocese and plied with nice sandwiches provided by the school caterers for a small consideration. We discussed the results of our church membership survey and a more focused one which tried to identify what we thought the strengths and weaknesses of the church were, and spent a while thinking about realistic ways of tackling the latter. There were no very radical surprises in any of this process, though Mr Facilitator told us there sometimes are when churches do this exercise. I was pleased at how enthusiastic and positive everyone was, and will wait to see how many tasks we set ourselves end up being a joint enterprise and how many have my initials put next to them ...

Toe in the Water

The PCC discussed the Mission Planning process properly for the first time on Tuesday, coming up with initial reactions to the draft paper produced by the Steering Group and deciding the next steps, which will be to organise a session away from the church to talk about this matter alone, and hopefully with assistance from someone from the diocese as I don't feel confident about leading it myself. It was striking, and predictable, how easily everyone slipped into talking about services - what services we might 'put on' or what changes we might make to existing services in order to 'get people in'. This is the classic response a church makes to awareness of its numerical decline, and all the evidence as well as a bit of thought suggests that it makes no difference whatever: it assumes that there are loads of people out there champing at the bit to be part of the church, but somehow prevented by its worship, and there's not the faintest reason to believe that's true. Lots of work to be done!