Church of England dropping word ‘church’ to be more ‘modern’
Aug 17, 2024 18:05:26 GMT -5
Post by schwartzie on Aug 17, 2024 18:05:26 GMT -5
New churches are dropping the word ‘church’, report finds
DIOCESES have jettisoned the use of the word “church” in describing the “new things” being establish...
DIOCESES have jettisoned the use of the word “church” in describing the “new things” being established in their parishes, raising questions about what theology is being applied in the Church of England, an independent report says.
New Things: A theological investigation into the work of starting new churches across 11 dioceses in the Church of England reports that, in the past ten years, about 900 “new things” have been started. None of the 11 dioceses used the term “church” as its main description of such developments.
The report is published by the Centre for Church Planting Theology and Research, at Cranmer Hall, Durham, and draws on research carried out between November 2022 and June 2023, including interviews with representatives of each of the 11 dioceses. The author of the report, which was published earlier this year, is the Revd Will Foulger, Vicar of St Nicholas’s, Durham, a resource church in the diocese, and a former director of mission and evangelism at Cranmer Hall.
A key finding of the research is that each of the 11 dioceses was “working with a unique ecclesiology”. Six used the language of “worship” in their main descriptor of “new things”, two used “congregation”, and seven used “community”. Some of the differences across dioceses were “stark”, the report says, “especially when it comes to the issue of traditional ecclesial forms (worship, sacraments, etc.), with some dioceses recognising these as central, and others less so.” Only one diocese was working with a designator that was “rooted explicitly in Anglican sources”.
Among the questions posed is: “Whether it is possible to hold together the Church if the local churches differ in their fundamental self-understanding.” There are, it says, “immediate questions to be asked about the fragility of some of this language, and the looseness of some of the definitions”.
The emergence of this “new ecclesial language” has happened “very quickly”, the report says, and is “affecting an operant theology within the Church of England . . . the new language is shaping dioceses’ mission and ministry.” Among the questions raised is whether the emergence of these new forms is “forcing us to redefine what we think (a) church is in the Church of England?”
Setting the context for the research, the report notes that one of the three priorities of the national Vision and Strategy for the current decade is: “To be a church where mixed ecology is the norm — where every person in England has access to an enriching and compelling community of faith by adding new churches and new forms of Church to our parishes, cathedrals, schools and chaplaincies.” In 2021, plans to establish more than 10,000 new worshipping communities over the next decade were announced (News, 2 July 2021). At least £82.7 million in Strategic Development Funding (SDF) was invested in starting new churches.
The report suggests that the conversation about starting new churches has “tended to be marked by a polarity: between those who are doing deep ecclesial reflection, and those who are seeking substantive impact”. The divide has, it says, “left certain parts of the Church — for whom fidelity to ecclesial forms and practices is central — feeling outside of the planting conversation”.
The aim of the report, which identifies several gaps in the theological work underpinning national and diocesan strategies, is to help the Church “better understand on its own terms why it is doing what it is doing, and how it might proceed with even greater faithfulness”.
Another finding was that just five of the 900 “new things” reported by dioceses could be said to exist in the Catholic tradition. This was “unsurprising to those of us who have been observing this movement for some time”, the report says. “This has been, and remains, essentially an evangelically-driven project.”
It continues: “It will be very hard for those from a more Catholic tradition to engage in a movement that has an inherently loose definition of church, and church form. . . Put simply, if a church is the gathering of those around the word, and sacraments as administered by a priest and according to the authorised forms, then ‘new worshipping community’ or ‘new Christian community’ will always be inherently weak as a descriptor.”
In a section on its limitations, the report acknowledges that it is based on information gathered from dioceses and their representatives. This may raise questions among readers whether Catholic “new things” were registered at diocesan level. All but one of the 11 dioceses referred to the SDF process when asked about “starting new things”.
Of the 900 “new things”, 89 per cent were “integrated within the existing parish system” rather than existing as stand-alone “new” churches (for example, BMOs). The total includes 40 new resource churches: the majority of dioceses had started or were about to start at least one.
Most were “revitalisations and grafts, or new congregations within existing churches”, and a “significant number” had been started intentionally in areas deemed to be areas of deprivation. The “vast majority” were not city-centre resource churches, or larger (100-plus) churches, and did not originate from Holy Trinity, Brompton.
While describing this activity as “extensive”, the report observes that, in some of the dioceses, the number of new things was “very small” in comparison to the number of parishes. Dioceses reported that these new things were “growing in perceived contrast to most inherited churches”.
Only one diocese used “fresh expressions” or “pioneering” to describe what was happening, and the report explores in some detail the significance of this apparent shift in the past decade, “from a focus on fresh expressions of church, towards starting new churches”. This is described as a shift towards a “worship-first model of starting new churches”.
The Fresh Expressions movement, it notes, was “keen to keep ‘church’ as a qualifier”. By contrast, dioceses now used language allowing for “maximum breadth. ‘Church’ feels immediately restrictive and limiting. But it is worth asking why this might be the case. Is it because ‘church’ feels too unachievable for the majority of things that are started?”
The report records that a “good number” of the new things established no longer exist. The pandemic is given as one reason. Some had “struggled to get going at all in relation to SDF plans”, with appointing leaders listed among the difficulties. Establishing congregations on housing estates is highlighted in the report as particularly challenging.
Across the dioceses, the report says, the language of “mixed ecology” was “ubiquitous”. This allowed for the possibility of holding together pioneering and planting under one banner. But, it argues, “If the essence of pioneering is developing new forms, for new people, through experimentation and risk, and seeing church emerge, then it is clear that the overwhelming majority of things started in ten of the dioceses are not this.”
There is a suggestion that critics of the Mission Shaped Church report of 2004 (subtitled “Church planting and fresh expressions of church in a changing context”), who argued that it represented a shift away from the received C of E ecclesiology, may have seen their arguments win the day: “The C of E has not normalised pioneering but has rather directed its energies at forms that are additions to and adaptations of the existing structures.”
Noting that the language of Vision and Strategy was “ubiquitous” across the 11 dioceses, the report concludes that this is an “underdeveloped area in the Church of England’s theology”, and observes that “loosed from theological roots, the conceptual framework inevitably looks for other sources for its guidance, namely business and management theory.”
The Church needs to ask, it says, what the “ends” of starting new churches are, and how these are different from the “ends of our
contemporary world and, most notably, from the free-market capitalist context within which vision-strategy-culture language and conceptual frameworks has emerged”.link
To date, there has been, it concludes, “really very little theological rationale behind the starting of new things. . . We are thus left with something of a gap between some of our theological claims (namely, ‘God is the primary agent in mission’) and our praxis (namely, ‘if we fail to do x, then we risk y’). We need therefore to investigate what we think is going on here so that our activity might have theological integrity.”
Read more on this story in this week’s Leader comment here, and read the second part of Madeleine Davies’s report on resource churches here.
