WHEN the Archbishops’ Council first proposed a funding shake-up as part of plans to reverse the Church’s numerical decline, among the ques­tions asked was: “Does the Church know enough about the causes of church growth to ensure that any significant investment in funding is well-spent?” (News, 16 January 2015).

The Council argued that there was “a growing amount of information about what is likely to support growth — or likely to maintain decline”, and set up the Strategic Development Fund (SDF), with £24 million to give away each year. Dio­ceses would have to compete for it, demonstrating that their project would result in “a significant differ­ence to their mission and financial health”.

Including grants made in 2014, the Church Commissioners have now allocated £136 million across 66 projects, from city-centre resource churches to radical diocesan-wide restructuring, to a gospel choir. Only five dioceses — Chester, Europe, Gloucester, and Oxford — are still to receive any funding.

At July’s meeting of the General Synod, John Spence, who chairs the Strategic Investment Board (SIB) as well as the Archbishops’ Council’s fin­­ance committee, suggested that there would be enough evidence by next year for an “objective, thor­ough, and independent review”. The grant programme is due to run until 2026.

In the meantime, the SIB — created by the Commissioners to decide on grant applications — has published an annual report, which states that existing projects “hope for growth of over 50,000 disciples as a direct result of their work”, plus 52,000 as “spillover effects”. By February this year, it said, dioceses had reported that “8500 people have, in God’s grace, become disciples.”

It is worth pausing here to define terms. Wary of defining growth simply in numerical terms — more bums on pews — the Archbishops’ Council has also talked about spir­itual growth. The term “making disciples” can thus mean either con­verting unchurched people into Christians, or firing up existing church­goers to be more serious about their faith.

In this instance, the 8500 is an estimate of “people who are now disciples — and part of a worship­ping community — who were previously not”, and is understood to relate to people “new to the Church”, not Christians who have enhanced their discipleship.
But different dioceses choose to define this differently, based on the nature of their projects. Indicators might be someone joining a Chris­tian community when they hadn’t been part of one before, identifying themselves as a disciple of Jesus when they hadn’t previously, or being baptised and/or confirmed.


NUMBERS have always been an integral part of the SDF programme. Summaries of diocesan bids dating back to 2014 reveal the extent of the ambition. The diocese of Southwell & Nottingham alone plans to establish 75 resource churches by 2025, each with Usual Sunday Attend­ance of 150. In turn, they will be given the task of establishing 75 new worshipping communities, about half of which are expected to be grafts or plants into existing parish churches. In total, the £4-million project envisages 7000 “new disciples” by 2023. Usual Sunday Attendance in the diocese is currently 11,600, drawn from a total worshipping community of 18,400.

The ambition shown in the bids varies considerably. The diocese of Chichester, which has also embarked on a church-planting programme, aims to grow “church membership” by 7000 by 2024. Chelmsford dio­cese, planning new worshipping com­­mun­ities in four new housing areas, envisages congregations of about 120 people in each by 2022.

The bids also use a variety of terms. Some use established mea­sures such as weekly all-age attend­ance; but others refer to “new disciples”, “new people growing in faith in Jesus Christ”, or set targets for reaching a set number of “un­­churched people with the gospel”, or students “coming to Christ”.

The SIB annual report, published in July, explains that most projects are still at an early stage: “It is too soon to start to look for significant progress towards their overall out­comes.” But it also includes the seemingly contradictory statements that 88 per cent of projects are said to be “currently on track”, while both the national Church and the dioceses are “learning how best to measure the impact of SDF”.

The head of funding at the Church Commissioners and the Arch­bishops’ Council, David Jennings, says: “We are learning a lot about delivery of big projects in a church context. We haven’t done grant funding for that long. We are learning how to measure, learning what’s appropriate in a church context. . .

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“It’s things like the follow-up, and going back a year later and asking: ‘What are you doing differently? Are you praying more? Are you more confident in talking about your faith?’”

The guidance on SDF evaluation suggests that there should be an independent evaluation of each project, but Mr Jennings acknow­ledges that these have not yet been made public.

“We want them to be able to learn it within the project,” he says. “We don’t want to humiliate people. And the Church can be very critical; so we need to make sure that it’s done in a way that protects the people who are involved, who are working very hard on these projects, at the same time as capturing the learning. . . . We have to be careful what we put in the public domain. . .

DIOCESE OF ROCHESTERLynn and Claire at Medway Oaks, in the diocese of Rochester

“We must allow good failure. Not everything we try will work, and we need to learn why, and be very clear about whether it’s the methodology not working or the delivery. One of my concerns is the risk of calling something a failure too soon. A lot of projects could turn that around. . . That journey is actually quite im­­portant.”

The Commissioners are en­cour­ag­­ing people to communicate what they have learned with other dioceses, he says, mentioning several workshops. Work is under way to develop a tool that can be used to measure the impact of projects on discipleship.



IN THE diocese of Chelmsford, £850,000 was awarded in 2014 for a five-year £1.43-million strategy to achieve a “turn-around” in parishes struggling financially — “and pos­sibly in mission terms also”. This included appointing interim min­isters “with a proven track record in turning around parishes”.

A summary of SDF projects created by Church House notes that the hope was that the effect would be “big enough to swing the overall diocesan performance because of the focus on ‘big win’ parishes,” freeing up diocesan resources to be invested in growth in other areas. Parishes for the project were identified by two factors: attendance over the past four years and parish share.

The dean of mission and ministry in the diocese, Canon Roger Matthews, says that, at the end of three years, an evaluation suggested that “the parishes who were open to working with us saw a really good improvement on a number of meas­ures. But, most significantly for those who did not want to engage, things got worse. . . The sample size was not huge, but that was clear.” One of the lessons was that it was rare that a single intervention was enough to turn things around.

Although a report, including a statistical analysis of the parishes involved, has been given to the Com­­­­missioners, it has not been made public.

It is a “tricky” project to report on, Canon Matthews says. “I don’t think it’s fair to individual parishes to be making that public. One of the issues that we had quite long debates over was: how do you designate a parish that you think needs support? Psychologically, they probably real­ise they are struggling in some ways, but it’s decidedly unhelpful and demotivating to say, like a school might be, [you’ve been] put into Special Measures. . . Not all would have had any idea that we felt they were in need of turnaround.”

Nevertheless, where accepted, interim ministry has been “really trans­formative”, he says. “Univer­sally, the experience has been positive. We’ve learned a lot about how to do it better, but, in every case, there there were clear benefits.” The diocese continues to invest in the work, which has included two-day conferences on governance for PCC members, in addition to indi­vidual parish interventions, and the development of a book-keeping sup­port service now offered to 53 PCCs.


MANY SDF projects are taking place against a backdrop of acute financial challenge. Chelmsford, for example, is preparing for a significant reduc­tion in the number of stipendiary clergy by 2026.

At the General Synod in July, Keith Cawdron, a lay representative from the diocese of Liverpool, challenged the Archbishops’ Council about the discovery of a “magic money tree” (News, 12 July). He argued that “every penny that the Archbishops’ Council spends . . . could have been spent in other ways, could have been used to mitigate pressure on parish share.”

It was “no good having three new youth workers funded by SDF in a diocese”, he continued, “if three of their parishes have had to cut down and make redundant their own youth workers. That is not progress. We need an honest and fuller picture of what is happening in our dioceses and parishes.”

Mr Cawdron acknowledges the im­­­­­pressive performance of the Com­missioners’ investment team in sec­ur­ing the funds that were being made available. But, he argues, “The reason we have money at national level . . . is because of what has happened at diocesan and parish level, with year after year of above-inflation increases to help carry the cost of clergy pensions, which has freed up money at national level from the Church Commissioners.” Another factor was that “we have agreed to spend future generations’ money.”

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Having previously been involved in securing European funding for Merseyside, he is conscious of the impact of the bidding process on organisations, and the need to seek out “people who can write strategies that tick the right boxes”.

“You get a bit of a culture of ‘everything is wonderful,’ because it’s not in anyone’s interest to hear bad news,” he says. “I’m not saying there is [bad news]. I have no idea.” His concern is that, “When you have got a lot of what feels like free money, it can lead to too much uncritical acceptance of things.”


THE announcement of large grants to individual churches has also raised questions of justice.
The Team Rector of Heavitree and St Mary Steps, Canon Robin Eastoe, suggests: “If almost any priest was given a children’s worker, an evangelist, and an administrator, they would be able to make the church grow.” Parishes that are struggling financially “wonder why [that is], when the Church gives over a million to a parish down the road.

“I have 27,000 people in this parish, at least half of whom live on estates, where the Church of England has traditionally struggled. The response of the diocese is to cut the number of clergy here.”

The SIB has been keen to remind people that its funds — both SDF grants and Low-Income Com­munities Funding (LICF; News, 8 November) — represent just three per cent of the total economy of the Church.

While the numbers may make up a small part of the overall financial picture, a study of SDF grants does indicate something about the pursuit of culture change in the Church of England: an explicit, unapologetic focus on numerical growth, along­side references to depth of disciple­ship and social action.

In addition to creating 595 new posts, lay and ordained, many of the projects are focused on establishing new worshipping communities, in­­cluding Fresh Expressions of Church, and church-plants. The 2019 report Resourcing the Future, which refers to both LICF and SDF, states that, to date, SDF projects are predicting outcomes in­­cluding more than 1600 church plants, Fresh Expressions, and new worshipping communities.

The annual SIB report states: “Projects which involve establishing new worshipping communities — be they new congregations within ex­­isting churches, fresh expressions of Church, or resource churches — are delivering numerical growth, and reaching dechurched and un­­churched people, more quickly than other approaches.

“There are likely to be many reasons for this, but the fact that they are by their nature mission-focused from the outset, and can easily be designed around the needs of those with no experience of Christianity, are likely to be relev­ant.”

In a blog published in April last year, based on a paper for the SIB, Mr Jennings wrote that it was “regularly reported that levels of intentional, external mission have fallen to low levels in much of the inherited Church”. As evidence, he remarked that many churches had not run a discipleship or enquirers’ course in many years.

The capacity of existing churches to grow was often related to their capacity to undertake mission “relev­­ant to families, children, and young people”, he wrote. Half the churches had a weekly adult at­­tendance of 31 or fewer, and a child attendance of three.

“The issue being reported is that, where congregations are small and/or increasingly elderly, although their witness may be very faithful, their ability to engage in effective mission — particularly to those not represented in their current congre­gation — is likely to be constrained. And even if they can engage, current service offerings, orientated to the existing congregation, may struggle to retain new people.”

In such situations, dioceses needed to develop new strategies, the most common approaches being the creation of new worshipping com­munities in the form of Fresh Expres­sions and resource churches and church-planting, he wrote.


THE Bishop of Monmouth-elect, the Ven. Cherry Vann, a member of the Archbishops’ Council, is supportive of the resource-church model. But she says that she is conscious of congregations that, while small, “have a huge impact on their com­munity”.

“I think it would be a sad day if all the focus on growth was just about numbers, because we know that, actually, Christianity is a lifelong discipleship journey with Jesus. . . I think there is something about Christian presence as well — that you are keeping the light of faith alive even if that is not necessarily having a huge impact; there is something about keeping the ru­­mour of God alive.”

The SIB is “well aware of crit­icisms” of an emphasis on nu­­mer­­ical growth, she says. “Never­theless, we can’t ignore the fact that church congregations, generally speaking, are either stable or declining. The statistics speak for themselves, and there are oppor­tunities to establish new churches either alongside exist­ing churches, or in contexts where churches are not reaching and have not reached for decades.”

The bids coming through now are “extraordinarily diverse”, she says. “We are working very hard to ensure that these projects are as diverse as possible, and come out of the range of traditions that make up the Church of England.”


SOME of the new money is going to support mission in existing parish churches, and the Church Commis­sioners estimate that about one third of the total has gone to deprived areas. In August, the diocese of Leeds announced that £490,000 would be shared among churches in Keighley, one of the most deprived parishes in the country (News, 9 August). There are also plans to plant new worshipping communities on the town’s outer estates, where there has been no church presence for decades.

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The diocese of Blackburn has invested in training lay and ordained leaders to serve its urban estates (News, 8 March); and, in 2016, the diocese of Rochester received £655,000 towards plans for renewal in Chatham Town Centre, including Medway Centre of Mission, which includes a Fresh Expression that grew out of a drop-in centre at­­tended regularly by about 30 homeless people.

A church-plant from St Philip and St James, Walderslade (“Pip and Jim’s”) has been meeting in a local nightclub — St John’s on Tap — while work on bringing St John’s back into use continues. Between this, a school plant, Messy Church, and Medway Oaks, a weekly Sunday drop-in, 110 people are counted as part of the worshipping community.

DIOCESE OF LONDONEden East Finchley, a new Christian community, born out of a partnership between church@five (part of St Barnabas church, Woodside Park), the Message Trust and local charity Hope North London, with the aim of supporting residents from local estates. The diocese of London received £1 million in 2015 towards establishing 100 new worshipping communities

Money has also been used to help parish churches to reach more children and young people. The SIB estimates that, in total, 42 per cent of funding has has been allocated to projects that focus on this demo­graphic.

In 2014, the diocese of Bir­mingham was awarded £1 million towards a £2.7-million “growing younger” project, which was ex­­tended in 2017 to run till 2022, and an extra £2.56 million was awarded. It included plans for at least 15 Children’s and Families’ Missioners (CFMs) to work in specific parishes, “Growing Younger Facilitators”, “Mission Apprentices” in deprived parishes, and the planting of a new resourcing church, St Luke’s, Gas Street. Among the targets was “1000-2000 new disciples over the next three to five years”, and 50 to 100 new disciples in every parish with a CFM.

Between 2014 and 2018, accord­ing to parish figures reported in Statistics for Mission, the size of the worshipping community in the diocese has fallen by ten per cent, from 26,700 to 23,900. But the director of the project, Liz Dumain, reports that more than 1000 new disciples have been added to the worshipping community. The figure is based on both qualitative research, including reflective journals pro­duced by CFMs, and quantitative work, such as questionnaires sent to parishes and worshipping commun­ities.

The goal of CFMs was to act as “catalysts” for volunteers, raising the confidence of parishes in engaging with children and young people, and identifying connections, she says. She has been encouraged by the fact that most parishes that have received one have either continued to employ them from their own funds, or are seeking to replace them.

The Vicar of All Saints’, Kings Heath, Canon David Warbrick, says that the church already had a “very good, willing, and imaginative” chil­dren’s ministry run by volun­teers when he arrived, but that there was a desire to extend it beyond those already involved in the church. There was some “initial discomfort” in joining a competitive application process for a CFM worker, he says, and suggests that an important question is how the diocese supports those parishes that were unsuc­cessful.

The CFM who arrived, Emily, was a “perfect match” he says, encour­aging existing volunteers, helping children and their families to take a lead in shaping worship, and using social media to keep in touch with “several hundred people”.

When it comes to church growth, he believes that “the real puzzle is that we [the C of E] must have been expressing the gospel in such a way for so long that it looks dull.” He is conscious that it is “very easy” when diocesan initiatives are launched for long-serving clergy to be “sceptical or resentful. We say: ‘Resource us!’ and then the Bishop says: ‘Here is five million,’ and we say: ‘Not like that!’”

When it comes to numerical growth thanks to having a CFM, Canon Warbrick admits that he can’t point to “16 we didn’t have before”. But he observes that “The confidence of quite a few people that cautiously cross the threshold has grown; and there are some min­istries that Emily will leave behind that will continue, because they have introduced us to new people.” There is “no question” that the church is healthier, he says; the question is, how you measure this on a form.


THE Vicar of St Michael’s, Cofton Hackett, with Barnt Green, Canon Rob Fieldson, says that, when their CFM arrived, the number of chil­dren and young people at his church had “dwindled”: out of a Sunday-morning congregation of between 100 and 120, only about a dozen were under 16. Plans to plant a new congregation in a large new housing development in the parish were already in progress.

In the end, it took a full year to find a CFM. She was, nevertheless, “worth waiting for”. Besides putting children’s ministry “more prom­inently on the agenda”, Canon Fieldson reports, she deepened links with the church school, and ran various activities and clubs, resulting in an increase in the number of families with young chil­dren joining Sunday worship. There are now plans to continue when the three years of funding end.

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Speaking before his retirement this year, the Vicar of St Peter’s, Harborne, the Revd Graeme Richardson, described how the prox­imity to a good school meant that his congregation already included dozens of children. It was a parish­ioner who convinced him that “when money comes up, you bid for it.” Like St Michael’s, they had to wait some time for their CFM, but the right person was found.

“She kept our junior church, but, more importantly, she cemented it, so it was not as fragile as it had been,” he observes. She also did outreach work beyond the church school, and there are plans to recruit a replacement, partly out of recog­nition that it may now be necessary to pay people rather than rely on volunteers.

Mr Richardson is honest enough to admit that “we were doing all right, anyway,” and that, not having had a curate since 2005, it could be argued that, in securing an extra paid staff member, “we have just reinvented the wheel.”

He is highly critical of the diocese’s People and Places strategy, which has received £5 million in SDF funding and envisages radical changes in ministry patterns (News, 1 March). “The Church here is wanting to say two things at one and the same time,” he says. Despite evidence that congregations dwindle during interregnums, the Church is reducing stipendiary clergy because it cannot afford them. Simul­taneously, he points out, it sees the creation of new paid posts as the answer to growth.

An evaluation of Growing Younger is under way, with the financial support of St Peter’s Saltley Trust. It has not yet been pub­lished. It is important to think long-term, Ms Dumain says, par­ticularly when considering pioneer ministry: “If lots of worshipping communities take one tiny step, then, together, you are starting to take great leaps.”


WHILE £136 million of SDF money has been allocated, Mr Spence informed the General Synod in July that only £35 million had been spent, and referred to planning-permission delays and the need to recruit the right people. An ac­­cel­eration is forecast for 2020.

The latest Statistics for Mission records further numerical decline by traditional measures (News, 18 October). The head of the research unit, Dr Bev Botting, observes: “There may be other measures that become important as new initiatives — including those funded through the Renewal and Reform pro­gramme — take root and bear fruit.”

Synod members have begun to ask questions. In July, Mr Spence was interrogated about how mem­bers could tell whether funds were being deployed in the right way to turn around decline.

Mr Spence is adamant that robust evaluation lies at the heart of the SDF programme. “Quite apart from that legal and moral obligation, I do, of course, have the burning desire that the work is taken forward to best effect.” In the long term, “every project will have the full evaluation of: Did it provide the value for money or the value for Christ that we intend?” He also speaks of the “bilateral” work going on between dioceses.

“The Church is not alone in sometimes shying away from the word ‘failure’ and calling it ‘learning points’ instead,” he says. “But you would always expect us to be courteous to people who have done their best but, for whatever reason, it hasn’t come off. . . If we are not having some failures here, if some projects are not working, then we haven’t taken enough risks. This is all about doing new things. If we do new things, they will not all work.”

DIOCESE OF COVENTRYThe ‘Reaching 20s-30s’ conference in Coventry, November 2018

“Praise in public, coach in private” is a “great management maxim”, he suggests.

He insists that the SIB is “inde­pendent”, and emphasises that “each diocese is a charity in its own right, and, if they are doing their job properly, they will also have inde­pendent evaluation.” The SIB will not necessarily be publishing these, he says — though he believes that the individual dioceses should. He also remains convinced that the shifts of emphasis under Renewal and Reform were correct.

“When I took on this role in 2013, we had a Church that was used to reporting gentle decline year by year, albeit concentrating on the average weekly attendance figure, which I don’t think is the most accurate one, anyway. . .

“A change of direction of some­thing as enormous as the Church of England, and a flotilla known as the 40-odd dioceses, is never going to be easy or short term. It takes a long time to get there. But what is this about? This is about ensuring that the Church really is serving every community for generations to come.”


AMONG the projects explored in the SIB annual report is “Acceler8” in the diocese of Coventry, which, in 2015 was awarded £639,143 for a five-year ministry to people aged 20 to 30.

“When the [2011] census came out that showed how young the diocese was, it was a bit of a wake-up call that we are not reflecting this in our churches,” Kim Morgan-Jones, the diocese’s 20s-to-30s strategy team leader, says. The diocese was largely failing to engage with the “huge number” of students at both Coventry and Warwick Universities.

Among the Acceler8 goals was “an extra 1000 new disciples” by January 2021, at least 400 of whom would be in the target age-group. In 2017, it was decided that this would be combined with the target of a second SDF project, “Serving Christ”, which sought 1500 “addi­tional people”, including 200 in the 20-30 age range by 2022. It focused on creating “healthy churches” by drawing on resources developed by the Institute of Natural Church Devel­opment, a key part-funded elem­­­­ent of the project.

Much of the SDF Acceler8 grant has gone on salaries, funding ten 20s-to-30s “development leaders”, three of whom are ordained. They have been allocated across a spread of churches, by geography, size, ethnic diversity, and churchman­ship, all of which had large numbers of the target age-group within their parish, and were “open to trying new things”. Some had very few young adults in their congregation.

It was important for these workers to be based in a church rather than centralised and offering consultancy, so as to “cap­ture the learning” about what might work, Miss Morgan-Jones says. “When we started, there was con­cern that whatever we put on would suck all the young people into new churches and groups, and they would leave their churches, but this hasn’t been the case.”

To date, good progress has been made towards the Acceler8 targets, although the 2018 annual report, published in January, admitted that it was “difficult to acquire accurate statistics on new disciples from parishes overall”, noting “incon­sistencies in figures/parishes”. Tak­ing a conservative figure, the diocese estimated that 570 “additional people” had been added, including 270 in the 20-to-30 age range. A “much improved data system” is envisaged in place by January.

The “additional people” are a “real mixture”, Miss Morgan-Jones says. It’s a “fairly even spread” across those who are unchurched or de- churched. Some are getting con­nected through weddings or baptisms, or arriving at toddler groups, but others are students or young professionals. “There seems to be lots of searching. . . Quite often, people come along to these kinds of things we are doing, either because they are looking to get to know people in the area or because there is some kind of question around ‘Why am I doing this job? Living here? Having a family? Is there more?’”

A target for “four pioneer church-plants” with leaders aged 20 to 30 has yet to be achieved, but the first one began in August, with more in the pipeline. A target of 20 people in this demographic entering the voca­tions process has been exceeded by ten (although some have not gone on to pursue ordination), and financial giving in churches with an Acceler8 leader is up by 36 per cent.

“Outputs” include 20 new services started by the 20s-to-30s develop­ment leaders, and 81 young adults who have taken up positions of leadership in their churches. Work is under way to share learning with those churches without any people in the target age-range; and the most well-attended seminar at the “Reaching 20s-30s” conference was one that explored how Anglo-Catholic churches could reach this age-group. An unexpected outcome has been a growth in children and people below the age of 20.

DIOCESE OF COVENTRYSt James Live, an open mic night held at a café in Coventry city centre as part of Acceler8

Across the churches of all tradi­tions, midweek groups have been established, Miss Morgan-Jones re­­ports. “That seems to be what works for young adults.” Buy-in from senior leaders in the diocese has been crucial, and, while the team has experienced some negativity from older people in their congregations, this is now much better understood.

“There is that resistance to change, but we are also finding that, for some of them, they have children who have turned away; so that is quite painful. . . We can work with that, now we understand that there is some hurt there.”

Plans for the next year include running another conference, estab­lish­­ing the second Acceler8 church-plant, and continuing to train and support younger leaders.


THE SDF programme is set to run until 2026. After the awards made in June (News, 8 August), about £130 million will be left to distribute to dioceses, although this will depend on the outcome of future spending reviews.

The message from the centre is that it is still early days, and too soon, in most instances, to draw con­­clusions about success or failure. In the mean time, however, increas­ingly large sums are being allocated. When the programme was launched, it was announced that applications would be received for grants of between £500,000 and £1 million. Most now far exceed this — in 2018, the average grant was £3 million.

The largest grant has been to London, which was awarded £8.7 million, £3.9 million of which is to be used to train 15 “planting cur­ates” who, at the invitation of dio­cesan bishops, will be deployed in 15 “strategic cities, in terms of size and student population”, between 2020 and 2022.


Next week, the Church Times will explore this rapidly expanding model.