And So What Does This Tell Us?

We are in the middle of Mission Planning, or at least a small group of the congregation are meeting regularly to consider ideas towards a Mission Plan. The jargon is dreadful but the process is a worthwhile one - thinking deliberately, in very short terms, about what we want to do and how we might go about it, the sort of decision-making that most organisations are boringly familiar with but which churches have tended to shy away from (until now, as it seems that every church in the area is doing the same apart from the ones where the incumbent doesn't want to tell anyone else what his strategy is).

The process works best when the whole congregation has some involvement in and awareness of what's happening, rather than just producing a document that sits in a file. As part of the pump-priming I devised a little survey during Advent to try and gauge where the church was, and asked: What three things do you most value about this church? What would you most miss if it wasn't part of the church? What two things could the church do to help you in your spiritual life?

I didn't get many back, it's fair to say - fourteen forms of which mine was one (our Reader insisted I should do it like everyone else). As far as the things people said they liked most about the church, three themes emerged: the reverent atmosphere of the building, the way services were conducted, and the sense of fellowship in the congregation. There were no clear results from the question asking what people would miss most, and the answers to the query about what the church might do to help spiritual development tended to orbit around discipleship and teaching - but then they would, and it was a leading question. Several people commented that they couldn't think of anything and the church was fine as it was.

This, plus the low level of response to the survey, implies that people who are regulars in the church are very happy with it and can't really envisage ways in which it might be different, as well, perhaps, as suffering some inarticulacy about what it is they do like and value. Of course they know that everything isn't fine: that, most basically, we have a hard time paying our way and maintaining the things we do now, and if we were effectively carrying out our core purpose - to introduce souls to Jesus Christ - these things probably shouldn't be as much of a problem. The congregation wants that to change, but doesn't know how to do it.

Even more radically, the point about Mission Planning is to discover exactly what it is we do want to do and what we don't. Not far away from us is a big town-centre Evangelical Anglican church where they get hundreds of people at every service on a Sunday. Even if we could be that kind of church, would we want to be? One of the things members of this church say they value is a sense of 'family', and big churches struggle to provide that experience, mainly finding that it has to be experienced via a structure of smaller groups rather than in the church as a whole. Change means becoming different, and you have to work out which sort of 'different' you want to be.