Vision for the Church’s Future. Beyond the confusions.

The Church of England is in a muddle. It has managed to confuse many of its members and, indeed, some of its leaders about its vision for the future. Many people, including myself, have thought that the Church was about to embark on a new initiative to transform, or even replace, the entire parish system. Superficially, this was what two recent initiatives appeared to be saying to the Church. Helpfully, an article in Anglicans Ink has probed below the surface to discover that part of the current muddle is caused by unfortunate timing. Two distinct initiatives have been announced at approximately the same time.  In most people’s minds they have been understood to be the same.  It is small wonder that this has caused confusion.

Few people will have heard of the Church Planting initiative known as Myriad. It is operated by the Gregory Centre for Church Multiplication under its director John McGinley. John McGinley has the title of Development Enabler for the Archbishops College of Evangelists.  It was at a recent conference for Myriad that the famous, even notorious, comment about ‘key limiting factors’ was made in connection with its vision for church planting being undertaken by lay people. To quote: ‘lay-led churches release the church from key limiting factors. When you don’t need a building and a stipend and long costly college-based training for every leader of a church… then actually we can release new people to lead and new churches to form…… in church planting there are no passengers.’

It was this comment from John McGinley that caused a huge storm in the Church of England in the week leading up to General Synod. On this blog I discussed how the vision of 10,000 lay led congregations were going to face obvious problems in providing adequate safeguarding. There were many other objections to the ‘key limiting factors’ idea.  Many certainly resisted the idea that the professional status of the clergy was no longer required.  These arguments and objections have been fully aired elsewhere. To say that people were angry at this Myriad proposal is perhaps an understatement.

Most of us have never heard of the Gregory Centre and we are left wondering about this initiative called Myriad. It transpires that the Gregory Centre is an independent (meaning privately funded) organisation outside the Church of England.  Nevertheless, the Church does own and identify with many of the ideas that are put forward. It was founded and led by the Bishop of Islington, Rick Thorpe, who is the Church of England’s lead for Church Planting. Apparently, at the conference when Myriad was founded, there was an array of speakers and seminar leaders present from the Church of England.  These included the Archbishop of Canterbury and the then Archbishop of York. Leading seminars were the bishops of Lancaster, Horsham, Burnley Kensington and Dunwich. David Male, who is now the Director of Discipleship and Evangelism for the Church of England, based at Lambeth, was also a seminar leader at this conference.

Institutionally and ideologically, it is not surprising that some of the thinking and ideas emerging from the Gregory Centre have had an influence on the General Synod Paper 2223.  This was shared at Synod last weekend, and it outlined the Church’s vision and strategy for the future. But, to repeat, the two papers, Myriad and GS2223, were separately conceived initiatives.   Unfortunately for the Archbishop of York, who delivered the introduction to GS2223, it was hard to get Synod members to react to what he was introducing.  They were responding much of the time to the Myriad proposals which they had encountered for the first time in the Church Times.  The Archbishop’s words were taken up with trying to undo the misunderstandings caused by conflating both papers together. It is unfortunate that the number 10,000 also appeared twice in the GS document.  This made the possibility of confusing the listener highly likely.  The Archbishop was, in fact, speaking about a revitalised parish system within which new and inherited worshipping communities would flourish together. The paper noted that dioceses have already planned for 3500 new worshipping communities across the Church. The paper also looks for up to 3000 new churches across England to provide worshipping hubs for children and young people coming into being. The chief message was that old and new must be allowed to coexist with a degree of flexibility. Church planting initiatives are not prominent in GS2223 but it is easy to see how listeners thought they were listening to identical ideas in both papers.

Two separate presentations about the future of the church and the number 10,000 mentioned in both of them. It is not surprising that many people feel uncertain and unsettled by what the Church appears to have in store for them in the future. Even when it is explained to us that these are separate initiatives, we still have a sense of unease.  The same people seem to appear in both of these attempts to think about the future. Among them is David Male, the full-time paid employee of the Church of England and working from Lambeth. The new Bishop of Lambeth, Emma Ineson was a co-leader of the seminar on church planting when the 10,000 lay led churches idea was presented. What is her current role in the future planning vision for the Church of England?  We don’t know the answer to that question. But we do know that church planting ideas are being floated by the centre.  This will make many parochial clergy feel unsettled and insecure in their existing responsibilities. The question that many of them have is this:  how would they as a congregation cope if a well-funded HTB type church plant suddenly appeared their parish?  Are they supposed to celebrate the fact that a congregation overnight might cease to be financially viable because all the younger people have left to join this new initiative?

Against the background of these unfortunate confusions at the centre over recent initiatives, one dark area in the history of the church is being revisited in a Times story today (Thursday).  Some of the victims of the 9 o’clock Service (NOS) in Sheffield are bringing a claim against the Church for their abuse.  This compensation that has been promised by the Archbishop of Canterbury comes through a national redress scheme.  The Church at the centre is now being reminded, not only of the harm caused by a single maverick leader, but it faces serious questions about the appalling failures of oversight at the time.   Even during the less enlightened days of the 1990s, it was possible to see that the style of leadership exercised by Chris Brain was risky at best and catastrophic at worst. Since those days we have come to understand much more about narcissistic and toxic charismatic leadership styles.  Church leadership, and this is exemplified by Brain, is not always conducted benignly. In blog posts at various times, I have suggested that there is sometimes in churches a circle of narcissistic need between leaders and led which is toxic. To put it at its most simple, there are styles of leadership which allow a leader to be fed and nurtured narcissistically. He (normally a he) sets himself up with a vision, a grandiose plan which excites followers and makes him the centre of attention.  The adulation that is evoked in these followers taps into,and brings them into touch with a different set of needs, needs around being cared for and protected.  That the leader provides, often in a formulaic way. The psychoanalytic textbooks suggest that the narcissistic leader may be suffering from a deficit of parental attention, one to be assuaged by receiving adulation from others.  One can describe this dynamic exchange as the ideal narcissistic circle. The leader pays as much attention to the followers as is needed to keep them on board. Typically the leader will not get close to any but a chosen few. He needs distance or aloofness to give an aura of mystery to his persona. The followers, grateful for scraps of attention, will express their devotion and gratitude even for the smallest attention. It is a dynamic which appears to indicate vitality, enthusiasm and health in a church, but these churches are, in reality, far from flourishing.  Over a period, the narcissistic dynamics end up in breakdown.  The direction they are going in does not, in fact, resolve anything of the needs existing in leaders or led that need healing.  Narcissistic hunger for adulation is insatiable. Dependent people do not resolve their dependency needs when they are not encouraged to grow up.  In general, far too many churches keep their congregations in a permanent state of enforced infantilism.  They can grow up only when they leave.  The Church must recognise that it is often not helping people to find any sort of path to maturity; it is rather, the means to holding people in the place of immaturity.

The Church is in a muddle in more than one direction at present. It has allowed one institution on the fringe of its work to confuse General Synod with its talk of 10,000 lay led communities. It has also opened itself to further misunderstandings by its historic failure to understand the terrifying consequences of the NOS.  We have not learned  in the way that the damage, the fallout from that disaster has never been successfully assimilated in the understanding of the Church. The good ideas that are contained in the Archbishop of York’s vision and strategy paper need to be understood on their own merits and not in the context of a church planting proposal.  We also need to take a further calm look at the discussion on church planting by the Myriad organisation. My only criticism of church planting is not in the idea itself. My criticism is that we are still not good at knowing when it is dangerous to leave new initiatives unsupervised.  We still lack the proper tools of evaluation to know when such ideas are wholesome and when they are dangerous and unsafe.   NOS was a church plant but also without doubt a cult. No cult experts have ever, as far as  I know been brought in to produce a proper ‘lessons learned review’ of this dangerous frontier between church and cult   If we have not learned the lessons of NOS, such things will happen again,   Will we be ready to move forward with a new generation of church planting in the name of the Church, when we seem to have learned so little from what went disastrously wrong a generation ago?

About Stephen Parsons

Stephen is a retired Anglican priest living at present in Cumbria. He has taken a special interest in the issues around health and healing in the Church but also when the Church is a place of harm and abuse. He has published books on both these issues and is at present particularly interested in understanding how power works at every level in the Church. He is always interested in making contact with others who are concerned with these issues.

15 thoughts on “Vision for the Church’s Future. Beyond the confusions.

  1. The Church Plant in the parish I was in flourished so long as there was a (part time) stipendiary priest. After that, the Team Rector neglected it, and it’s now gone.

  2. “In general, far too many churches keep their congregations in a permanent state of enforced infantilism. They can grow up only when they leave.”

    Many thanks for that observation. Some people on TA (I think of Perry Butler for example), have expressed regret that confirmation candidates – and there are now so few of these – are not taught the catechism as was once the case.

    In my experience, it is possible for spend a lifetime attending church services regularly, and of listening (or dozing through) countless sermons without being much wiser about even the most elementary rudiments of the faith.

    For instance, I am reminded of James Obelkevich’s classic ‘Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey 1825-1875’ (1976), which noted that even when the Church of England was stupor mundi for the quality of its clergy and, following the banishment of the ‘old corruption’, was energetically propagating its mission, its laity were often tremendously ignorant of the faith and frequently practiced a folk religion in mid-Lincolnshire that was essentially pagan, dressed up in the thinnest Christian garb.

    The few sermons that I have remembered were those where I was taught something, in addition to being given the chance to reflect upon the numinous. I can listen to hundreds of sermons before getting anything like that, and I reflect with displeasure on the 15 years I spent at my last regular church (before I became a peripatetic), during which I scarcely advanced in my knowledge other than through private reading which had nothing to do with my participation in the life of that church.

    1. “In general, far too many churches keep their congregations in a permanent state of enforced infantilism. They can grow up only when they leave.”

      I’d go further. The congregations are infantilised because the clergy are infantilised. Brainwashed. How many clergy now have the courage of a Harry Williams, for example, to push at boundaries of the Divine nature? How many clergy, “educated” increasingly on short part-time nonresidential courses, have ever been encouraged to ask awkward pastoral questions that test orthodox theology? They know no Greek, and precious little pastoralia other than liking coffee, cakes and chocolate, and being kind to animals (OK, I exaggerate but only slightly). At clergy meetings attempts to raise edgy ideas are met with “we can’t say things like that, it would upset the faithful”. Ye Gods! What they mean is that it would fuse their own little grey cell (singular). A test I use, based on personal experience, is “what does the priest have to say about the love of God to the father of a man who died in his prime?”

      1. Harry Williams lived at a time of war heroes. In what did his courage consist?

        1. Harry Williams (1919-2006) in his books opened up the idea of conflictual feelings such as love and hate, dependence and independence, faith and doubt, knowing and not knowing. Williams’ premise, founded on his personal experiences, is that conflict is life, and holding the tension of opposing thoughts and feelings is part of an authentic spirituality. His autobiography, ‘Some Day I’ll Find You’ published in 1982, is still extraordinary for the account of his mental breakdown, the demolition of his false religious persona, acceptance of his homosexuality and his struggle to understand his psyche and his true God during a fourteen-year therapeutic analysis.
          It was personal experiences that led him to the belief that ‘everyone should try to find the real God through finding the real self’ which for him included acceptance and integration of the negative including ‘scepticism, anxiety, sexuality and worldliness’. His books all offer so much and in 2021 are a breath of fresh air …

          1. Thank you Fiona. You beat me to it. I could have mentioned other writers that were/are courageous in my view but who would fall foul of those who won’t or can’t think for themselves and take their theology prepackaged by others.

      2. Stanley, re your final sentence, I know whereof you speak and had a similar experience, a nephew. In that instance, it was a Baptist Chapel which behaved appallingly.
        I agree with the comments about infantilism. Look no further than the shiny new Citizen Church in the diocese of Llandaff, recently planted by the Harbour Church, from Portsmouth. Both are Anglican and yet perish the thought that they should be dedicated to a saint or even All Saints. On the Citizen Church website there is a photo of worship in action. A man in tracksuit and trainers leading goodness knows what worship.
        According to the Ancient Briton blog 21 March 2019
        ‘The parish church of SS Andrew and Teilo [is] being sacrificed by bishop June Osborne. Her latest strategy, presumably for growth, is to give away their church. Parishioners are far from pleased…the members of St Teilo’s church have been informed that a decision has been made by the Bishop of Llandaff, June Osborne, to give their church away to an evangelical church called Holy Trinity Brompton. The decision was made with no consultation with the clergy or members of the congregation and wider community and she says the decision is final.’
        Ancient Briton blog 3 June 2020 ‘Not much has been coming out of the Church in Wales during the Covid-19 lock down but there is news of the diocese of Portsmouth moving in…Inspire Magazine reported on 1 June: a “team will be commissioned for its new role at a digital service on Sunday 24 May. The Bishop of Portsmouth, the Rt Rev Christopher Foster, has recorded a video message to be played as part of the service, expressing his joy at the move.”
        There is no mention of the bishop of Llandaff…According to a statement from the diocese of Portsmouth, their Harbour Church began in September 2016 with just 20 people, and now welcomes 700 worshippers every Sunday to three different locations. It now plans to send a team of 40 people to Cardiff to set up a brand new church there from September. [That will learn those primitive Welsh savages. Did you say Disestablishment?]
        It will be called Citizen Church and will be based at St Teilo’s Church in the Cathays area of Cardiff. The 40-strong team includes 10 worshippers who already live there, a family moving from Brazil, some moving from London, and 17 worshippers who will relocate from Harbour Church in Portsmouth. It will be led by the Rev Ryan Forey, currently curate at Harbour Church.”

        And so it has come to pass.
        From the Citizen Church website
        In 2019 the Bishop of Llandaff the Rt Rev June Osborne invited Ryan, Ellie and the team to plant a City Centre Resource Church in the heart of Cardiff..In Autumn 2020 we launched Citizen Church.
        [Disestablishment is a long word, so not for infant minds]

        1. Many thanks for this. My understanding is that in Wales bishops can simply close ancient churches peremptorily more or less at will. There is no legal requirement for the consultation process that goes on in England (though that is often a mere formality as the procedure is stacked against those who would oppose closure or disposal schemes).

          Much of the Church in Wales is being closed discretely, and by stealth, as congregations fade away. I often find out about closures only after the event by looking at the ‘for sale’ page of the website of the Representative Body, but that is often only the tip of the iceberg.

          I am still bewildered by the appointment of June Osborne to Llandaff, having been educated in England and having spent her entire career there (her husband is a very distinguished QC at Blackstone Chambers, an ultra-high powered set in Middle Temple). It savoured of the bad old days when English clergy were put into Llandaff as a ‘starter’ see. Of course, she has been followed by Cherry Vann at Monmouth, who had also spent heir youth and career in England: so much has been shuttered in the Usk valley lately, that I do wonder why that diocese – which is in its centenary year – still exists.

        2. ‘An evangelical church called Holy Trinity Brompton’ is a snobbish or possibly too-uninformed way of putting things. They have been very well known for 30 or 40 years.

          It is also dismissive, but the smaller and less successful is not in a position to be dismissive about the larger and more successful. So, inappropriately dismissive.

          They are not a church but more of a network of 34 churches, sociologically. That involves a great deal of effort, and a great many lives touched, given that the churches tend to be large in attendance. So – not just dismissive of an organasation, but also dismissive of a large number of individuals.

          No mention, fourthly, of the numbers of churches that would have had to close, together with all their heritage, unless HTB had stepped in.

          Sometimes no other financially viable solution has been available. Thank God there has sometimes been one solution – which has made all the difference – rather than (as would otherwise have been the case) none.

          1. It’s hard to know what to say about your comment. But I think on the question of heritage, it seems clear from the church website that any heritage of St. Teilo’s church has been well and truly obliterated already. Yes, the church building remains open and presumably some history lurks in the corners, but there has been a complete cultural takeover by ‘Citizen Church’ (why am I so irresistibly reminded of the French Revolution?) complete with a ‘culture catalogue’ which makes really, well, interesting reading, and has no vestige of any truly Anglican culture that I can see. Maybe this is not important in the face of the ‘success’ of HTB church planting, but to me this whole approach raises some very troubling questions.

    2. “I can listen to hundreds of sermons before getting anything like that, and I reflect with displeasure on the 15 years I spent at my last regular church (before I became a peripatetic), during which I scarcely advanced in my knowledge other than through private reading which had nothing to do with my participation in the life of that church.”

      This is why I consider well-run midweek groups essential for the church – home groups, bible study groups, cell groups – call them what you will. A place to dig in, to learn, to grow, and to work out Christian life in the company of others.

      I don’t know what the purpose of Sunday services is any more. For uplifting music? For a spiritual encounter? Those are what I hope for. To come to love Jesus more? To learn more about him? To be part of a community?

      Or to tick off “Done as we were told to” and “Clergy efficiently delivered teaching to the congregation”? In the churches I’ve been part of people will talk to each other after the service (or during the eucharist…) about anything but the contents of the service. I find that so disheartening.

      Or is Sunday about reaching the “unchurched” so every Sunday is outreach and the task of maturer Christians is to bring them in and make sure they feel welcome? I’ve been to one of those.

      What you said resonated as I’ve sat through many a sermon where I know what’s going to be said from the opening 30 seconds, know more than will be said (and yet want to dig deeper), and know that without a miracle my heart won’t be touched and I’ll be counting down the minutes ’til I can leave.

      1. Your experience is so similar to mine. Growing up going to a typical Anglican church I would think ‘there must be more to it than this or the church would have petered out centuries ago’. Then in my 20’s I suddenly had the realisation that the words I had been saying for years, ‘for us, and our salvation’ actually referred to me personally, and then everything fell into place.
        I don’t know why that happened then, and I don’t know why you can’t explain it to other people so that they ‘get’ it too. It is such a mystery.
        I think back to the great Welsh revival of 1904-5 when thousands of people suddenly ‘got it’, and yet look at the situation in the Welsh chapels now.

  3. It’s one thing to plan church plants, whatever you think of them or HTB etc. But it’s a whole new thing to consider the scale at which the new congregations are to be rolled out.

    The risks highlighted by Stephen multiply with scaling up and probably exponentially. With NOS the apparent success, specifically in attracting young people, inoculated the central powers against scrutiny of what was happening. It’s a likely dynamic to be repeated at scale. “Successful?” Leave them alone.

    Incidentally, it’s not just young people populating new congregations. Many in older age groups are craving something new and inspiring. Not a bad thing in itself, but the risks are amplified.

    Another obvious risk, as stated before, is the exodus from old congregations to experience the new thing. You could end up losing both.

  4. I don’t Myriad and the Centre are quite as distinct from the C of E as you suggest, Stephen. Dave Male’s clarification statement included the following para:

    ‘Myriad is a self-funding initiative aiming to support the planting of 10,000 new, predominantly lay-led churches. It comes from the Gregory Centre for Church Multiplication which supports leaders, church teams and diocese across London, England and beyond as they multiply disciples, churches and networks. It is part of the CofE but works with many denominations and networks.‘

    I incline towards the cock up theory rather than conspiracy but it’s debateable.

  5. Sorry – there should be ‘think’ inserted as the third word in my comment.

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