THE Church Army Research Unit (CARU) is to shut, after almost three many years of providing churches with independent studies in mission, church-planting and fresh expressions.
In recent years, it has been certainly one of the important providers of evaluations of the Church of England’s multi-million-pound Strategic Development Fund projects.
The decision follows an announcement in February that the Church Army can be undertaking extensive restructuring, including the closure of serious projects, to deal with rapidly declining financial reserves (News, 7 March).
An announcement last week said that, since then, the CARU had “explored other ways of continuous its work, including the potential of launching a latest independent charity. However, despite our greatest efforts, this has not proven viable.”
Formerly often called the Sheffield Centre for Developing Church Planting and Evangelism, the unit was established in 1997. For the primary 20 years it was led by Canon George Lings, with a temporary to “explore, evaluate and disseminate what is occurring in mission today”. Between 1999 and 2012, it published quarterly booklets, Encounters on the Edge, tracking the event of Anglican fresh expressions (News, 12 July 2019).
The Mission-Shaped Church report of 2004 was shaped by this initiative, with Canon Lings a member of the working group that produced it. In subsequent years, the Research Unit and Church House Fresh Expressions Team worked closely to support the implementation of the vision. In 2016, the unit published The Day of Small Things, a study of greater than 1100 fresh expressions across 21 dioceses (News, 11 November 2016). In 2017, when Canon Lings retired, the Archbishop of York, the Most Revd Stephen Cottrell, said that, when it got here to fresh expressions, “none has done more . . . His ministry as theologian, researcher, and church-planter has provided the impetus and inspiration for the Church to try latest things.”
Since the launch of the Strategic Development Fund grants by the Archbishops’ Council, the CARU has been certainly one of the few organisations that has published evaluations of the projects funded, highlighting successes, failures, and lessons learned (Features, 8 November 2024). These include a study of pioneering and planting within the diocese of Portsmouth (News, 5 January 2024), and a report on fresh expressions within the diocese of Leicester that explored changing definitions (News, 4 October 2019).
It has studied Messy Church (News, 22 February 2019), online worship (News, 18 March 2022), and the diocese of Sheffield’s SDF-backed project with children and young people (News, 2 May 2025). It has also produced reports on HTB church-planting, from an early report in 2002 (Features, 21 April 2017) to a newer study within the diocese of Bristol that studied what quantity of members of the congregations at resource churches were “unchurched” (Features, 9 August 2024).
Last week, the Church Army’s chief executive, Matt Barlow, said: “Over the past 28 years, Church Army’s Research Unit has served as a robust, provocative, and — importantly — prophetic voice in evangelism on the margins and in the event of fresh expressions of Church. We thank God for its lasting legacy and the various lives, churches, and ministries it has impacted over these past three many years.”
Two of the team’s members will remain at Church Army but in latest posts, while others — including Dr Andy Wier (Research Team Leader), Elspeth McGann (Research Lead — Impact), and Dan Ortiz (Qualitative Researcher) — will “proceed to serve the Christian research sector in freelance or latest organisational roles”.
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