THE Church of England, beset by fears of scarcity and chasing a vision of “something bigger and better”, should look to the experience of the Church in Iran, which has survived being stripped of everything that it possessed, the Bishop of Chelmsford, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, told a Church House webinar this week.
Finances and buildings were “both a huge gift to us but also a great curse; they are like nooses around our necks”, she said. “And I think if something were to happen, and they were all to be swept away, we would find at that point new life coming.”
Her comments were made during the first in a series of webinars exploring the Church’s Vision and Strategy for the 2020s: “Has strategy eaten theology for breakfast?” Introducing it, Dr Nick Shepherd, a senior vision and strategy consultant at Church House, acknowledged the existence of concerns about the salience of strategic terminology and planning (Comment, 1 July 2022).
Dr Francis-Dehqani offered episcopal solidarity with such concerns in June (News, 8 July 2022), when, in an address to her diocesan synod, she warned against “putting too much emphasis on our human powers — that if only we try hard enough and pull together well enough and all follow the same programme, then we can solve the problems and challenges and ensure the future survival of the Church, either much as it has been in the past, or preferably producing a shinier, bigger, better version.”
Her contributions to Tuesday’s panel suggested that she still had concerns. If pushed, she would answer the webinar’s question in the affirmative, she said, although she was not “against strategy” in some areas of the Church. She had promised her diocese “no more central initiatives; no more strategies; no more straplines”. Although there was “nothing wrong” with talk of growth in numbers, she said, “I don’t see it as our primary Christian calling, which is actually about valuing what is small and fragile and vulnerable, and I think the language has put a lot of pressure on some of our clergy and lay leaders, who then feel they are failing.”
Invited to provide a theological framework for the discussion was the Bishop to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, Dr Emma Ineson, who has helped to lead the work of Vision and Strategy. The word “strategy” was “a bit like Marmite” in the Church, she said. “I sometimes wonder if that is what we get hung up on most: that there’s a word, and things attach to it, and we are not sure if they are things we like or not.”
She went on to argue that the Bible was “no stranger to strategy”, pointing to the stories of Moses and Nehemiah, before suggesting that Jesus’s words in Luke 4 (“He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor”) might be considered “a bit of a strategy document” today.
he was unapologetic in offering definitions of strategy from two business writers, including Professor Richard Rumelt, who has recommended that organisations have a “guiding policy”.
For the Church, this could be the Kingdom of God, she suggested, which meant “making choices and priorities that are not always obvious in the eyes of the world”. The Church must “allow room for failure”, she argued, to avoid missing “opportunities for risk and innovation”.
Dr Francis-Dehqani had her doubts about the feasibility of “a set of principles that need communicating and adopting”. “We don’t have the levers to make anybody do anything that they don’t want to do. I could be an absolute expert, and come into Chelmsford diocese and develop a fantastic vision with a perfect strategy, but I’ve not got the levers to make anybody adhere to it. . . I think the only one [lever] we have really is our relationships. . .
“Our final destination doesn’t matter as much as the way in which we journey together. . .We are beset in the Church of England by divisions and faultlines and disagreements. I think that’s where the nub of our challenge is, and not the lack of ideas.”
There was a commonality among the panellists that the Church needed to get better at relinquishing things. The Vicar of Lancaster Priory, the Revd Leah Vasey-Saunders, described how strategy — having discerned a vision, “working out how we get there” — had helped her to avoid being overwhelmed by the complexity of her new post. Concerned about the tendency to become “more and more frenetic” and allow finances to dictate decisions, a question she returned to frequently was “How do we get people to face that reality of death, of what needs to stop? . . . It’s something we should be able to be good, at because it’s what we know: that death is not the end.”
It was a theme taken up by Dr Francis-Dehqani, who spoke of the “devastating impact” of the Islamic Revolution on the Church in Iran, her childhood home (News 14 July 2017) “Everything we had built up there . . . institutions, schools, hospitals . . . was all, almost overnight, stripped away. And the Church was left with nothing, tiny numbers, very little leadership.” More than four decades later, the “miracle” was that there remained a Church at all. “The Church is there because the Holy Spirit has ensured that it’s still there.” During this period, she observed, there had been an “extraordinary rise in interest in Christianity through the underground church movement in Iran.”
The Church of England could learn from the persecuted Church, she argued. “It is very difficult to stop doing things, and, in a sense, being stripped of things is easier than having to dismantle it yourself; but that aside, if we could concentrate on the nature of our relationships, and what it means to be a faithful gentle presence in our communities, I just wonder whether that would give space to the Holy Spirit in a way that currently our driven-ness to find the solutions ourselves is possibly getting in the way of.”
A question from a former diocesan secretary, who noted the risk of diocesan bankruptcies driven by stipend bills, came amid discussions on the tension between the Church as a “cosmic body” and an institution to be managed. The NHS Borough Director for Greenwich, Neil Kennett-Brown, reported that the experience of Covid had provided important lessons in “what you need to do at scale, and what you need to do locally”. A proponent of strategic thinking, he spoke of “young vicars who have gone into roles and their whole job was trying to sort out maintenance on a building, and that’s nothing they have had any training for. Surely that’s not the best way to maximise our resources?”
Conscious of the “many, many people” not currently reached by the Church, he observed: “If we didn’t have some of the structures we’ve got now, some of the institutions and the buildings, we probably wouldn’t build the things we’ve got now in order to reach the people around us and to share Jesus’s love, and we might do things differently.”
While acknowledging the difficult financial decisions to be made in her diocese, Dr Francis-Dehqani, suggested that narratives “about what we don’t have, about what we have lost, about what we are having to give up” needed to be replaced by ones of abundance.
“Actually, we have vast amounts both of wealth and of people . . . but we are not at the moment able to see that because we are so driven by a vision of something bigger and better,” she argued. Historically, the Church had never been “its best” when at its largest and most influential, she added. “You just have to think about the Crusades and Prosperity Gospel.” The Strategic Development Fund had shown that “simply pouring money into a project doesn’t bring about the results that many people would hope for” (News, 10 March 2022).
“We are also frightened of using what we have got because we are trying to preserve it, trying to keep it so that we have got it for the future, and the reality is we haven’t got it for the future it’s there now,” Ms Vasey-Saunders observed.
With Dr Shepherd prefacing the webinar with reference to the events of the past ten days, after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Dr Frances-Dehqani offered a defence of a commitment to “preserving the institution” of the Church. “I know it might be a kind of dirty word . . . and we don’t like to say that now, because it’s all about mission and evangelism. I am not saying those things aren’t important, of course they are, but . . . the institution of the Church of England does have a role to play in this country, and I think the last ten days have proven that it absolutely still does.”
“We are in a liminal season,” she concluded. “We know things have got to change . . . we can’t quite see what it’s going to be like. And that’s a frightening place to be, and it’s full of uncertainty and it requires very deep faith. . . What we are called to is faithfulness, to hold steady, whilst the future emerges. . . It’s only in the dying that the new stuff will emerge.”