A Time To Sow

Reading the Centre for Theology & Community's report about growing Anglo-Catholic churches in London, A Time to Sow, is a strange experience for me because one of the churches the CTC picked to study is St Benet's Kentish Town where my friend Fr Peter is vicar. It would be cheeky to suggest that the main thrust of Peter's missionary approach is to add more lace to everything, but it seems to be having some positive effect.

The study has caused a lot of interest in Anglican circles precisely because it examines, quantitatively and qualitatively, a phenomenon which everyone in the Church hierarchy claims does actually happen but which we know happens in far too few cases, which is that Anglican churches in the Catholic tradition are capable of growth. The book identifies some common features between the six churches it studies, all of which are in deprived areas and don't have the resources to do things like employ children's and families workers, but have to work with the talents of the people they have. There are, in a sense, no surprises: all these churches have grown by doing the ordinary, sensible things that growing evangelical churches do as well - making the best use of their resources, releasing the talents of laypeople, being welcoming to newcomers and so on. They haven't grown spectacularly, but definitely. Their priests tend to be relatively young and inexperienced, presumably not knowing that 'you can't do that' and therefore willing to try things their predecessors didn't. I wonder whether the chief effect of A Time to Sow will simply be to encourage parish priests in Catholic Anglican churches to think that they aren't simply wasting their time, as the actual experience of parish communities varies so hugely according to context that you can't simply transplant this or that trick and expect it to grow your own congregation.

One of the points the study makes is that much church growth among London's evangelical churches is in fact driven or at least facilitated by three big churches, Holy Trinity Brompton, All Souls Langham Place, and St Helen's Bishopsgate, each of which has its own outlook and personality. I also got hold of one of the CTC's other books, Love, Sweat and Tears, which tries to get behind the myths about evangelical church-planting in east London. It tells the story of St Paul's Shadwell (someone I knew from London Gothic used to go there) which was saved from oblivion by a hundred worshippers being 'planted' there from HTB, and a group of other churches which were 'planted' in turn by St Paul's after that congregation had established itself. The book reveals that, far from sucking the people, life and energy out of the churches around them as jealous clergy have long maintained, the main function of these church plants has actually been to stop middle-class east Londoners commuting into central London to worship at the big churches, and helping them to stay with their own local churches, engaging with the community and providing a focus for those areas. The plants' effect on other local congregations seems to have been very limited. 

However, although there are some biggish Catholic churches in the Diocese of London (none in the same league as those three huge evangelical ones, certainly, but still perhaps with a membership of a few hundred), the CTC points out that none of them plays the same pump-priming role, resourcing other churches of the same tradition. This suggests a defensiveness and insularity in the Catholic stable which is exactly the opposite to what we say we believe in. A time not just to sow, but to change, it seems.