Ten Thousand Churches?

It is the infelicitous description of trained, paid clergy as ‘limiting factors’ on church growth in a recent report on church planting which General Synod is set to debate that has many people I know fulminating on social media. This is not surprising: nobody likes to be told that they are worthless, in fact retarding the very thing they want to facilitate, and I find myself as aggrieved as anyone. (Predictably, the report is written by a trained, paid clergyman in the form of Canon John McGinley of Leicester, who I very much doubt sees himself as a limiting factor on growth).

For myself, I would be delighted to see my parish speckled with little lay-organised church cells that I could pastor and plug into the historic ministry and tradition of a sacramental Church, but I see precious few of the laypeople I interact with (no – this is historian’s caution – I see none) who really want or are able to do anything of the kind. Even the most active and committed of them have extra-Church lives to lead which take up quite a lot of time. ‘Many of the 10,000 [planned] churches would start small’, says the article, ‘and some would remain as 20 or 30 people meeting in a home’. They’re not going to be led by the poor, then, who are unlikely to have homes that 20 or 30 people could meet in.

There is so very, very much one could object to in this ‘vision’ but I will rest content with pointing out the fantasy at the heart of it. It’s another project, destined, I fear, to join the abject failure of every other such vision: Archbishop George Carey’s ‘Decade for Evangelism’; ‘Mission-Shaped Church’ ten years later; even Reinhard Bonnke’s mid-1990s mission which the German evangelist was insistent was going to result in a million converts (‘we know God is calling us to do this’) and which our rector in Chatham tried to get us interested in. Perhaps we might eventually face the idea that God might actually not want these vainglorious initiatives which are more about us and our ideas of success and self-validation than about him. Studies of small-scale successes in local churches, which are perfectly real, miss out the bigger picture that only becomes clear when you draw back. We know that, in the late-capitalist West, the great bulk of church growth is not driven by conversion, but by people moving between congregations. Zoom out even further than that, and you can see how Christian growth across the world is largely determined by non-religious factors: church membership is, mainly, an index of something else which the individuals concerned actually care about more. In the USA church allegiance is a cultural and political statement, and no church is growing faster than the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation at all. In China to be a Christian is to have an internal life which is not under the day-to-day control of the Communist Party, but not in open opposition to it, and therefore safe. In Africa to be a Christian is not to be a Muslim, the religious division mapped onto cultural, economic and national or tribal ones. In Eastern Europe, to be Orthodox is to subscribe to nostalgic nationalism, rebuilding a sense of social identity after the collapse of Communist hegemony. In Western Europe, though – I say, ironically but sincerely, ‘thank God’ – religion is mainly decoupled from anything like this. It exists on its own, in the chilly waters of secular societies, swimming without political water-wings to hold it up. Though I have my gripes against him, to his great credit Archbishop Stephen Cottrell does seem to hint at understanding this: ‘it would be foolish to ignore the huge shift in the tectonic plates of European and world culture that have shaped the world in which we serve and witness’, he is quoted as saying.

We can find our clerical amour-propre outraged and our Anglo-Catholic convictions about sacraments and tradition provoked by all this stuff. But the real blood-chilling statement in this report comes at the end of Canon McGinley’s statement to the Church Times: ‘in church planting’, he says, ‘there are no passengers’. You, worshipper, will not be allowed simply to turn up. You will be expected to get on board with the project. There is no sense here that a layperson could be pursuing their vocation in some other way than in church: that they could be a carer, or a young mum, or a harassed worker, or a weary elderly person who has striven all their life and needs a rest, who needs to bathe in the presence of God just in order to get through the rest of their week, to put one foot spiritually in front of another. I am taken spinning back a couple of years to our bishop, denouncing a diocesan finance system that ‘punishes success and rewards failure’. When I see clergy described as ‘leaders’ (I have never seen myself as a ‘leader’, just as someone called sometimes to exercise leadership. People who see themselves as leaders shouldn't be allowed to lead anything), I know that this comes from somewhere other than the Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth, who came not to be served but to serve.

Good evangelical that I am, I sat as ever with my Bible this morning and – simply following through sequentially as I always do – I read 1Thessalonians 2 and 3. I had never properly registered Paul commiserating with the Thessalonians in their ‘persecutions’; ‘you suffered from your own compatriots the same thing those churches [in Judaea] suffered from the Jews’, he sympathises. We live in a time when God’s Church is penetrated by the understandings of the flesh – I suppose it ever is! – by the standards and the expectations of the world, and yet does not know it. Those of us who disagree suffer nothing worse than marginalisation and insults, not fire and rack. But, remember, the Apostle writes ‘so that no one will be unsettled by these persecutions’, and unsettlement should be alien to the faithful. We keep going, not in our own strength but in the Lord’s.