IF YOU had 12 eggs, and needed to allocate them to 4 baskets, entitled “Prayer”, “Presence”, “Proclamation”, and “Persuasion”, in line with the period of time that your church devotes to every activity, what would the distribution appear like?
Those gathered for the conference Leading your Church Into Growth (LyCIG), in Holy Trinity, Boar Lane, in Leeds, last week, tended to report an identical pattern: loads of prayer and presence, but reasonably less of the latter two. If you wanted your church to grow, the Revd Harry Steele, the Bishop of Sheffield’s chaplain, observed, “Somebody goes to need to discuss Jesus.”
Reports that Church of England people may be hesitant about evangelism are nothing recent. The former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Williams once described the Decade of Evangelism as “essential idiocy”, suggesting that “much of Western Christianity has gone to sleep on the job.” Yet for peculiar congregations searching for to grow, there was encouragement to remove from LyCIG, now almost 30 years old, concerning the effect of easy acts of invitation.
The Rector of Ribbleton, the Revd Linda Tomkinson, arrived on the conference the morning after baptising Dawn, a mother who had first come to church for a school-leavers’ service. She took up an invite to go to the church for prayer, after which to attend a church bingo session, at which Mrs Tomkinson all the time takes three minutes to talk about Jesus. It was evidence, Mrs Tomkinson suggested, that the 4 “P” stages of LyCIG constituted “a programme that works”.
CANON Mike Booker, a former director of mission at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, once admitted that the stories of evangelism told by “gifted thrusting church leaders” left him feeling “as much defeated as inspired” (Features, 16 January 2004). In Leeds last week, speakers kept the emphasis on horizons that didn’t seem out of the peculiar: what one described because the “bread and butter” of parish ministry.
Canon Robin Gamble, who founded the organisation within the mid-Nineties when he was the diocese of Bradford’s adviser in evangelism, suggested that the parable of the fig tree, by which an apparently barren tree is given one other 12 months to bear fruit, was one which Jesus had told, “anticipating the Church of England in 2024”.
People had gathered in Leeds to “think and pray and plan, about digging trenches, shovelling out manure”, he said. The aim was to not work out a “great five-year [plan]”, but to ask what one’s church, project, or recent congregation might appear like at the tip of next June.
A thread running through his remarks was optimism: “Wherever you’re, you’re surrounded — yes, by a lot of indifference, but in addition by significant numbers of people that would like to think, and to search out help from, and be touched by, and would actually like to sit down on the bench with, the living God.”
WHILE LyCIG has traditionally worked with existing churches, running courses and training each nationally and at diocesan level, the event in Leeds — organised in partnership with the Archbishop’s Mission Enabler for the North, the Revd Dr Mark Powley — had a specific focus: “Leading your recent congregation into growth”.
The word “congregation” had an asterisk against it, footnoted with “or your church plant, church graft, fresh expression or the rest you care to call it!” — a note in tune with the recent report on “recent things” from Cranmer Hall, Durham, which found that dioceses were using a mess of terms to explain the “recent things” being established of their parishes (News, 16 August).
The findings of the report were further reflected within the content of the day. In line with its conclusion that 89 per cent of the brand new things were “integrated inside the present parish system”, each of the speakers was a parish priest who had begun a recent congregation, each in an area of deprivation.
Research had shown that “starting a recent thing does open a door to growth”, Mr Steele observed. When it got here to discerning exactly what to begin, vision often began with “holy discontent”, from concern about lonely, socially isolated older people, to a dearth of younger people.
Implementing change entailed “exposing dysfunction”, which could entail asking a congregation why, if the present approach was working, no one had joined in five years. Throughout the day, speakers were honest concerning the challenges of culture change: the primary of six steps on the LyCIG roadmap to growth.
AMONG the parish priests speaking was the Revd Paul Pavlou, who was appointed as “church revitalisation plant leader” at St Mary Magdalene with the Risen Christ, in Wyken, Coventry (a graft from St Mark’s, Coventry, a church within the Holy Trinity, Brompton, network), in 2021. The church, in an urban deprived area, had been in decline for an extended time frame, with a congregation of about 25 people. The graft had financial backing from the diocese (paying the salaries of staff members) in addition to a number of people from the sending church.
He described how the congregation had grown to 55 or 60, with a “wide span of ages” and greater community engagement through the restoration of “bread-and-butter” parish ministry that had once been under way, including children’s work, engagement with the three local primary schools, and an Alpha course.
Mr Pavlou, who has written a book, Journal of a Church Planter, about his experiences, recalled that it had initially been “quite lonely” arriving at a church where he didn’t have many existing relationships, and funding had include pressure to stick to a timeline. While the plan had stipulated running Alpha inside the first term, he had decided to attend 15 months, realising that it was vital to first construct relationships and trust.
“Strategy without relational discipleship is a waste of time,” he observed. “We must be interested by the person in front of us.” This included “embracing individual interruptions”, he said, telling the story of how, upon his return from a retreat, he had been called to the church to see a person who had needed to speak for 45 minutes concerning the traumas that he had endured. Mr Pavlou had ended up praying with him, and meeting him every week.
“It’s really easy for us to get sure up in plans, strategy, PCC, funds, that we are able to find yourself treating people as interruptions to our work, when actually to pastor those people is the work,” he said. “It’s no good planning to evangelise in front of hundreds if you happen to can’t minister to the one person in front of you.”
Another lesson was that preparation was “paramount”. Bishops and archdeacons proposing recent things needed to elucidate what had been spoken about “on the bottom”, he said, and the way much change had been agreed locally.
THE Revd Sarah Maughan became Rector of St Helen’s, Thurnscoe, in Barnsley, in 2022. The parish is numbered 250 out of the 12,239 parishes ranked within the Church Urban’s Fund deprivation scale. When she arrived, it had had no incumbent for greater than a decade, and had a congregation of around 13 people, mostly members of the family. There were no buses after 6 p.m. owing to anti-social behaviour; so all activity needed to happen in daylight.
She had begun, she said, by conducting extensive research on social media, learning from locals concerning the parish, and identifying key community leaders, who she had then met nose to nose. Having taken a call to “live and breathe” the place, she made sure that she shopped within the local Asda, transferred to the local doctors’ surgery, and carried invitations to church.
She had also made the choice to begin something recent in a short time (“I didn’t feel I had time to attend”), establishing a up to date service for unchurched people, and a “warm space” that included access to practical advice. Part of the challenge had been working to vary the “ark” mentality of the congregation to at least one that looked outward, overcoming the fear of talking about one’s faith in public. The church was now “bursting on the seams”, she reported.
BEFORE her appointment in Ribbleton, Mrs Tompkinson served on the Mereside estate on the outskirts of Blackpool, where the church, St Wilfrid’s, had closed. She was licensed for five years as a pioneer minister, with “freedom to fail” — one other theme of the day — and had no resources or team: just the home where she began meeting along with her husband and neighbour. There were just five people at her licensing. Among her first efforts had been sitting in the course of the estate in her cassock, offering to wish with people..
On a Sunday, most individuals were in bed, taking their children to football, or on the local car-boot sale; so she decided to ascertain a tent among the many stalls, where people could light candles (“We never had lower than 40 conversations on any morning”). She had established a community choir, which had also led to growth.
Her three-minute discuss Jesus throughout the church bingo evening was an example, she said, of turning a “presence” event right into a “proclamation” one.
Mr Steele went on to explain how, when asked to placed on an evangelistic event, churches often decided to “do a chaplaincy to the presence event”. There was “nothing mistaken with that”, he emphasised: it was “vitally vital, but it surely’s not proclamation”. There was a fear that no one would attend such an event, he recognised, but this was “not the worst thing on the earth”. He reminded the gathering of the invitation at holy communion: “Draw near with faith.”
IN JULY, it was announced that the Strategic Ministry and Mission Investment Board (SMMIB) had awarded LyCIG £755,100 to support 1000 parishes and to fund more courses in youth outreach, in partnership with Youthscape.
Two weeks ago, it was confirmed that the Vicar of St Thomas with St Stephen, Balham, in south London, the Revd Sue Cooke, had been appointed to steer this work, succeeding Canon Gamble.
Among those that have endorsed the approach is the Archbishop of York. “In a church culture which is just too easily besotted and beguiled by all that’s shiny and recent, [it] concentrates on the tried and tested, putting parish and other people, evangelism and repair front and centre,” he has said.
