Stark Realities Leading to Strategies

In my Anglican ordinand group at Ridley Melbourne this week we talked about what strategies would be necessary to see our diocese grow. We got into it by thinking about the current state of our local churches and their recent growth history. Here are the questions we asked and our answers. (While we were mostly talking about Melbourne, I would be surprised if the answers were markedly different for any diocese.)

1.

How many Melbourne Anglican churches have experienced significant growth in our lifetime?

We could list off around 15. There are probably also a bunch we don't know about so this should be counted as a minimum. Still, even if it were double, that's only 30 local churches out of around 220 in the diocese.

2.

How many Melbourne Anglican churches have experienced significant growth in the past five years?

Here we struggled more and could only count a couple with confidence. Maybe there could be five? Again, out of about 220.

3.

How many Melbourne Anglican churches have experienced significant growth under two consecutive leaders?

For this we thought zero - although again, this might be due to our ignorance. If there are any, it's unlikely to be many.

After this, we moved on to consider what we could learn from these observations that would help our thinking about building the diocese in the future. A few of our thoughts were -

1.

It's important to think about a local church's future potential far more than its existing reputation (although there may be an interplay here).

2.

Under God, growth is at least partially, if not largely, a function of leadership.

3.

Material resources (ie. church buildings, vicarages, income streams, etc.) are not enough.

Of course we discussed the role of circumstance and setting - different types of churches flourish in different places at different times depending on all sorts of social phenomena - and it's absolutely critical to acknowledge the faithful, hard work that's been going on with sowing and watering around the diocese for years, even where lots of fruit hasn't (yet) resulted. But just as it would be wrong to exclude circumstance from our equations, so too would it be wrong to make it the sole factor in our considerations of why different local churches do or don't grow.

In terms of a future plan, our best conclusion was that, as far as anyone could predict (and of course no one can), the most likely strategy to achieve diocesan growth is sending new leaders to non-flagship churches that have potential and then for those leaders to commit to the hard work of building them up over many years. Perhaps the most plausible positive vision for the future won't focus on those few churches in the 500+ club growing larger, but on seeing more smaller churches growing to that size.

So, God's strength to the young leaders who have taken on leadership of smaller parishes in the past few years!

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One factor that I'd love to be able to measure in local churches is prayerfulness. It was put to me a while ago that revivals are always preceded by prayer - proper, persistent, humble, long-suffering prayer. While I suspect few, if any, local Anglican churches could be accused of being completely prayerless, it could be very interesting to explore the different patterns of prayer in different churches. I reckon we'd learn a lot from that too.

Archbishop of Canterbury Stepping Down

The BBC is reporting that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, will step down from his position in December. He is only 61 and isn't retiring but moving on to an academic post at Cambridge. So, one question is, Why now?

But perhaps the bigger one is, Who next?

Given the current issues within the Anglican Communion, the appointment of the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury will be very significant. The Communion's fabric has already begun to tear - will the next appointment slow that down or speed it up? And what does the Anglican world want anyway?

Lots of thoughts to think and things to watch over the months ahead...

Future Leaders - Appreciation and Issues

This semester I'm helping out at Ridley Melbourne by meeting weekly with a group of Anglican ordinands. To kick our group off, I asked them three questions. Here they are with the group's responses -

1. Why are you putting yourself forward for Anglican service?

• The 39 Articles make a good confession.
• The episcopal and parochial structure of the Anglican Church provides a good mix of support and autonomy.
• It's a good ministry platform - there's investment in leaders and church-planting opportunities.
• Its unique mission opportunity - the parish system covers the world.
• A personal history in the Anglican Church.
• It accommodates different personal styles of ministry.
• It has solid foundations.
• It accommodates some breadth.
• There is theological balance and tolerance.
• Great cross-cultural potential.
• Commitment to global fellowship and service.
• Strong stream of scholarship and solid theologians.
• Equivalence of ordination.
• Liturgy - its order and comprehensiveness.
• Training and succession planning.
• Its beauty - in theology and structure.
• Concern for social justice.

2. What questions do you have for / about the Anglican Church?

• How do I participate in synod?
• What are the not-negotiables?
• How are bishops made?
• How are councils / committees / etc constituted?
• How does church planting / repotting work?
• What direction is the Anglican Church heading?
• What's the story with GAFCON, TEC, ACNA, etc?
• What is canon law?
• How does the Province of Australia work?
• What do Anglicans believe about 'reserved sacrament'?
• Will a woman get the same opportunities as a man to serve? What arrangements are in place for maternity leave, etc?

3. What concerns do you have about the Anglican Church?

• The confrontational nature of synod.
• Disagreement over the basics.
• Lack of discipline.
• Some limits on the possibilities for working in different cultural contexts.
• Bureaucracy.
• The need to submit to bishops.
• Dry traditionalism.
• Ineffectiveness of remote, top-down leadership.
• Capacity to manage resources.
• It's a boys' club.

I was encouraged by the great list of positive reasons for wanting to serve as an Anglican and by the honesty around the questions and issues raised.

The plan is to see how much of 2. and 3. we can nut through in our time together.

Sad but Inevitable...

So it's now been confirmed that Christchurch Cathedral will be demolished. I know it's only a building and I know that nothing like this was built for eternity and I don't believe in 'sacred space' in a superstitious way - but it really was a great landmark for the city and it's sad that its time is up. I've also spent a lot of time in Christchurch so feel some personal nostalgia.

Here's a couple of pics from 2005 when the British Lions were touring in New Zealand.

This has also got to be disheartening for the people of the city. Someone told me that Christchurch has lost one third of its residents since the quake last year and that the CBD is still in lock down and under military guard. That's gotta hurt the community vibe.

For those who pray for cities, remember this one.

A Well-Reformed Church

The thoroughness of the official reforms to the Church of England under Edward is impressive. Christopher Haigh - a revisionist historian who's not himself a fan of Protestantism and therefore has nothing much to gain by pointing all this out - says:

The Homilies taught justification by faith; the Injunctions forbade images; the Chantries Act denied the efficacy of prayers for the dead; the 1549 Prayer Book put the mass into ambiguous English; the 1550 Ordinal turned a sacramental priesthood into a preaching ministry, and for emphasis the altars were taken down; in 1552 the Church was given a Protestant liturgy, and in 1553 a Protestant theology – as Edward lay dying, the old vestments and service equipment were being confiscated from parish churches.

Sure, there's more to the story; Elizabeth's program was somewhat different to Edward's and lots has happened since the Tudors. But let's be clear, we still have essentially the same Prayer Book, the same Ordinal and the same Articles - we're very much the product of the Edwardian reforms.

Praise God for his Reformed Anglican Church!

Who Does What - Corrections

AJ offered a helpful corrective in a comment on my post on Parish Councils / Vestries. Therefore I've gone back and corrected it and also fixed my post on some of the other formal roles in local Anglican churches.

Hopefully these are more correct and more useful now.

The Whole Counsel of God

I've been preparing some material about preaching systematically through the Scriptures for an upcoming seminar. This has been my practice in congregational ministry but it's been really good for me to step back and break down the factors that need to be considered and the challenges and implications of working this way.

It strikes me that while lots of evangelical Anglican churches are committed to biblical preaching, they're not always as practically committed to preaching their way through whole books of the Bible, nor to preaching a good balance of all the parts of the Bible. (How many churches can I think of that have preached through all of Ezekiel lately... ? To be honest, how many churches can I think of that have preached through all of John's Gospel lately!) But if we're meant to feed the flock with every word then we've got to tackle this.

Of course, traditionally, Anglicans have followed a lectionary - and many still do. And while it can be very easy to criticise set lectionaries (because they usually skip lots of texts), I do wonder if they actually do a better overall job of systematically bringing the whole Bible to congregations than we often do if we don't use them.

I would be very keen to see a lectionary that gave the whole Scripture divided into sensible blocks and mapped out in some sensible sort of way to account for the seasons of the year and so on. Anybody know of such a thing?