A RURAL benefice of 14 churches designated as a “mission hub” within the diocese of Salisbury as a part of a recent multi-million-pound programme will not be expecting to “massively grow” its Sunday congregations, one among its leaders said last week. Instead, the main target might be on “working higher alongside people where they’re” and demonstrating that the agricultural church is “still growing, thriving, and sustainable”.
Canon Jo Neary, a pioneer priest who has been a Team Vicar within the Beaminster Area Team Ministry for 13 years, said that the vision was “much less about attempting to get people to come back to us, and more about us meeting people where they’re. . . That won’t necessarily mean they arrive to church on a Sunday: it is likely to be they worship in a special place at a special time.”
Her comments are available in the wake of evaluations of projects in rural areas funded by the national Strategic Development Fund (SDF) and Strategic Mission and Ministry Investment Board (SMMIB) which warn against setting unrealistic goals. An evaluation of the “Rural Hope” project within the diocese, which received a grant of £1.27 million in 2017, warned that SDF numerical targets “don’t easily translate to parish level where relational growth and organic organic growth is so essential”.
What’s in our Hands? a rural mission-learning review for the Church House Vision and Strategy Team, carried out by the Revd Dr Richard Tiplady for Brendan Research, and exploring ten projects, concluded that a “key learning” might be present in a Winchester report: “Success in rural contexts is subtle. Growth in attendance is modest at best or is about maintaining numbers.” In rural areas, “the journey to faith is an extended slow one. Large numbers of contacts rarely translate into significant increases at existing worship services.” Demographics in deep rural areas meant that “maintaining Sunday attendance numbers is growth in disguise.”
The mission-hubs programme in Salisbury will receive nearly all of the £5.1- million SMMIB award announced in June. Thirteen “missionally healthy” parishes have been designated as hubs, expected to “establish creative partnerships with churches around them to supply resource, people and expertise”. Of the 13, just about all are Evangelical single-parish benefices. Six are in market towns, alongside parishes in Poole, Weymouth, and Salisbury.
The Chote review of the SDF programme (News, 11 March 2022) highlighted an “urgent have to discover sustainable models of rural ministry” across the Church. Ninety per cent of parishes in Salisbury are rural, most of them multi-parish benefices. Half of the population live in seven per cent of the parishes.
Last month, Canon Jonathan Triffitt, the diocesan director of mission and ministry, spoke of the hope that, “if we will get it right for our largest one [Beaminster], what might it appear to be in other multi-parish benefices? . . .
“Ultimately, it’s deeply relational. It’s not nearly how we nurture a healthy missional church in a rural context, but what does it appear to be to take a position in healthy rural communities, of which the church is an element?”
JO NEARYCanon Neary on the nativity festival in St Mary’s, Beaminster, in 2023, exploring the story with pre-school children
The expectations were that the work would take longer, he said. “It isn’t nearly pumping resources in around paid roles. But it’s exploring ‘How does this rural community enable effective discipleship? How will we raise leaders when now we have a forty five per cent emptiness rate for churchwardens?’” What might “recent patterns of leadership” appear to be, giving “permission to do various things in other ways”?
Most of the 600 buildings within the diocese of Salisbury were Grade I listed, and an “increasing number” were “vulnerable to closure in the approaching years due to the drop in worshipping communities”, he said. “For us, just closing the constructing will not be the reply. How will we create a mechanism where buildings will be entrusted into the care of others to permit local leaders to interact of their community?”
There needed to be “theological accompaniment” to this work, he suggested. “I’m more interested, to be honest, within the theological learning. What is the Holy Spirit saying? What are we discovering about who God is asking us to be in these particular contexts?”
In Beaminster, Canon Neary, who’s a tutor in rural ministry and mission at Sarum College within the diocese, serves together with one full-time stipendiary priest, the Team Rector, Canon David Baldwin. The parish church of Beaminster, a town of 3000, has a service once every week; the opposite 13 have a service every other week. When everyone seems to be in attendance, about 250 worship every Sunday. The village church congregations number between ten and 20.
The “mixed ecology” was also under way through a messy church (55 attending), a community outreach-café, and online church, Canon Neary said. The many occasional offices were taken “very seriously”, and collective worship was held within the 4 primary schools every week. The goals of the mission hub included encouraging vocations, working with children and young people, and sharing “expertise and experience” with other rural teams. Another was greater collaborative working, “to attempt to take into consideration the right way to sustain the buildings, and governance . . .
“We don’t really expect to massively grow our Sunday congregations, but we expect that that’s OK because we would like to actually put money into what it looks prefer to be a team of churches working across the entire community. . . Our primary goal is to make Jesus known in every single place.” As a tutor in rural ministry, she sought to convey the popularity that “there may be life and joy and innovation here.”
Among the findings of the Rural Hope evaluation was the challenge of communicating the programme across the diocese and gaining “buy-in”: almost two-thirds of those on the agricultural mailing list had little or no awareness of its goals.
The Team Rector within the Canford Magna Ministry, which incorporates the Lantern Church, Merley, in Wimborne (not a mission hub), the Revd Mike Tufnell, said that he was in favour of the mission hubs, but there have been “loads of questions, and a few concerns . . . mostly from smaller churches asking where their extra support is. It could be fair to say there was some scepticism that the injection of resources will really ‘trickle down’ to them or meet their felt ministry needs.”
He said: “Where there may be the desire to resource others, partnering relationally, with generosity, this model can work well — now we have some experience of that here — but there may be naturally the chance that it boosts existing ministry at larger churches for the subsequent few years, but without necessarily partnering effectively, ‘so that every one may flourish and grow’. I’m confident the diocesan leadership are well aware of those challenges and are committed to supporting every parish, not only these ‘hubs’. I’ll be praying for the fruitfulness of the vision.”
The Rector of the Wellsprings Benefice, the Revd Gerry Lynch, said that he had been “nonplussed once I saw how monochrome the churches are, but I appreciate the diocese has to leap through hoops set by national Church. I don’t get indignant or upset, I just ignore as much of it as I can.” He had received no details about how other parishes would profit from the project, he said.
Last month, Canon Triffitt acknowledged that resentment towards those churches in receipt of investment was “all the time a risk”. There was an expectation that the leaders of the hubs could be “actively engaging in conversations on the earliest possible moment. . . This isn’t about anybody church stepping in and saying ‘We’ve got all of the answers.’” They had made a commitment to investing £7 million of their very own resources to make sure the sustainability of the work.
The Brendan Research review of rural projects observed that rural areas “are likely to be more conservative and traditional, with change being slow and hard-won”. But there is also “radical liberalism” in rural areas, Canon Triffitt observed. “It depends who you consult with. Some of our most radical thinkers could be lay leaders in rural churches who will just say ‘You just have to get real. We can’t sustain ministry like this; we will’t sustain this variety of buildings. . . What it’s essential do is A, B, C, and D.”
In the diocese, three-quarters of worshipping-community congregations were older than 70, and plenty of were “not far off” single figures in size, he said. The latest annual report, which warns that the diocese is “running out of easily accessible reserves”, records an ongoing annual decline of about 1000 worshippers, particularly among the many under-50s. A growing variety of parishes are struggling to fulfill parish-share commitments, and the clergy emptiness rate stands at 25 per cent.
“For nearly 30 years, the diocese has kept going only by declining and selling,” the Bishop of Salisbury, the Rt Revd Stephen Lake, told the last diocesan synod. “Now, it’s time to receive help, and invest our own resources for growth.”
