AS RESOURCE churches expand across the Church of England, a recent report suggests that focus have to be paid to dynamics of power, which might sometimes be “masked” by the language of generosity.
Last 12 months’s Scolding Report into Soul Survivor (News, 27 September 2024) highlighted issues “relevant to the culture of resource churches”. These include what the report lists because the “asymmetry of power (on this case between churches, or when leaders operate in large churches and networks); the strong role played by founding leaders; the results of accelerated growth; give attention to younger leaders; and the challenges that include success”. The authors write: “Great care and a spotlight have to be given to this.”
The report — Resourcing the Church? — was prepared by the Gregory Centre for Church Multiplication, Faith within the North, and the Bede Centre for Church Planting Theology at Cranmer Hall, Durham. It records that there are currently 130 resource churches — defined as “a church called to repeated parish revitalisation through sending leaders and teams to plant or graft into other localities” — across 27 dioceses.
When it involves the impact of such churches, evidence is “modest”, the report acknowledges. But a study by the Church of England Vision and Strategy team found that in a sample of 25 resource churches, total attendance had increased by 238 per cent between 2016 and 2023, compared with a national decline of 25 per cent. Attendance amongst those under 16 had increased by 400 per cent, compared with a national decline of 30 per cent.
This growth “reflects a considerable investment of focus and financial resources in settings deliberately chosen for his or her strategic location”, the report acknowledges. “Other types of ministry haven’t received the identical treatment. . . On the opposite
hand, though, it may be argued that many declining parishes have received a subsidy through support for his or her ministry costs over a variety of years.”
A 2021 Strategic Development Funding learning summary recorded that 23 per cent of attendance at resource churches was “un- or de-churched people”, whilst 38 per cent represented transfer from an area church.
Transfer growth has been explored in other studies. A Church Army Research Unit (CARU) evaluation of resource churches in Bristol, for instance, raised questions on definitions, noting that the diocese didn’t include worshippers who had come from places beyond Bristol, including students, in its definition. “De-churched” was used to define anyone who has not attended church for a 12 months (Features, 9 August 2024). At Pattern Church in Swindon, a complete of 16 per cent of adults — 27 — were defined as “un-churched or de-churched”.
The recent report examines how the “virtues” of resource churches can “tip over into
excess” and calls for “vigilance and discernment”. It acknowledges, for instance, that the “language of generosity can mask dynamics of power . . . Gifts can bless and release but they may also bind and control.” Similar reflections are required for the opposite virtues, it suggests: “The attendant dangers of courage are unreflective arrogance and an unfair distribution of the prices of change.”
The report acknowledges that questions have been asked about whether the extent of investment in resource churches is “justified or fair”. It argues that, “to take a position in this manner is just not a lot a really perfect configuration of the Church’s resources as a dramatic intervention in response to prolonged and widespread decline.” But there’s also a have to “explore how financially sustainable resource churches are”. A 2021 CARU report on the resource church in Portsmouth concluded that city-centre examples may “proceed to be financially depending on the broader Church”.
The story of resource churches is “not one among unqualified success”, the brand new report says. “Not all planting strategies have been capable of show sufficient contextual sensitivity and the ‘soil’ of some contexts may be very difficult to plant into. At times, a ‘low’, informal style amongst church plants could be a flexible connection point, at others it could be perceived as an imposition or make only a shallow reference to local communities.”
The undeniable fact that resource churches are “overwhelmingly” within the Evangelical tradition can have theological causes, it suggests, noting “the revivalist concern for individual salvation and societal change”. Evangelical networks are “highly structured and well-resourced”, it says; and the rise of such networks has coincided with “a time of experimentation with local structures and . . . the pursuit of a more explicitly strategic focus by senior leaders within the Church of England”.
The report records that only around 13 per cent of resource churches are currently led by women, while an estimated one to 3 per cent of leaders are of minority-ethnic heritage. A “homogenous” approach to leadership “can have colonial undertones, where a selected group imposes its tradition on the remainder of the church,” it warns.
The Dean of Church-Planting at St Hild College, in Yorkshire, the Revd Dr Christian Selvaratnam, reported that the following cohort of Camino — a recent training pathway for future resource church leaders — was more likely to be 50-per-cent women.
The report, which incorporates a call for “generosity of interpretation” from critics of resource churches, concludes that the following decade “will likely be the making of the model, for good or otherwise”.
