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.