IF YOU had 12 eggs, and had to allocate them to four baskets, entitled “Prayer”, “Presence”, “Proclamation”, and “Persuasion”, according to the amount of time that your church devotes to each activity, what would the distribution look like?
Those gathered for the conference Leading your Church Into Growth (LyCIG), in Holy Trinity, Boar Lane, in Leeds, last week, tended to report a similar pattern: plenty of prayer and presence, but rather less of the latter two. If you wanted your church to grow, the Revd Harry Steele, the Bishop of Sheffield’s chaplain, observed, “Somebody is going to have to talk about Jesus.”
Reports that Church of England people can be hesitant about evangelism are nothing new. The former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Williams once described the Decade of Evangelism as “necessary idiocy”, suggesting that “much of Western Christianity has gone to sleep on the job.” Yet for ordinary congregations seeking to grow, there was encouragement to take away from LyCIG, now almost 30 years old, about the effect of simple acts of invitation.
The Rector of Ribbleton, the Revd Linda Tomkinson, arrived at the conference the morning after baptising Dawn, a mother who had first come to church for a school-leavers’ service. She took up an invitation to visit the church for prayer, and then to attend a church bingo session, at which Mrs Tomkinson always takes three minutes to speak about Jesus. It was evidence, Mrs Tomkinson suggested, that the four “P” stages of LyCIG constituted “a programme that works”.
CANON Mike Booker, a former director of mission at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, once admitted that the stories of evangelism told by “gifted thrusting church leaders” left him feeling “as much defeated as inspired” (Features, 16 January 2004). In Leeds last week, speakers kept the emphasis on horizons that didn’t seem out of the ordinary: what one described as the “bread and butter” of parish ministry.
Canon Robin Gamble, who founded the organisation in the mid-1990s when he was the diocese of Bradford’s adviser in evangelism, suggested that the parable of the fig tree, in which an apparently barren tree is given another year to bear fruit, was one that Jesus had told, “anticipating the Church of England in 2024”.
People had gathered in Leeds to “think and pray and plan, about digging trenches, shovelling out manure”, he said. The aim was not to work out a “great five-year [plan]”, but to ask what one’s church, project, or new congregation might look like at the end of next June.
A thread running through his remarks was optimism: “Wherever you are, you are surrounded — yes, by lots of indifference, but also by significant numbers of people who would love to think, and to find help from, and be touched by, and would actually like to sit on the bench with, the living God.”
WHILE LyCIG has traditionally worked with existing churches, running courses and training both nationally and at diocesan level, the event in Leeds — organised in partnership with the Archbishop’s Mission Enabler for the North, the Revd Dr Mark Powley — had a particular focus: “Leading your new congregation into growth”.
The word “congregation” had an asterisk against it, footnoted with “or your church plant, church graft, fresh expression or anything else you care to call it!” — a note in tune with the recent report on “new things” from Cranmer Hall, Durham, which found that dioceses were using a multitude of terms to describe the “new things” being established in their parishes (News, 16 August).
The findings of the report were further reflected in the content of the day. In line with its conclusion that 89 per cent of the new things were “integrated within the existing parish system”, each of the speakers was a parish priest who had begun a new congregation, each in an area of deprivation.
Research had shown that “starting a new thing does open a door to growth”, Mr Steele observed. When it came to discerning exactly what to start, vision often began with “holy discontent”, from concern about lonely, socially isolated older people, to a dearth of younger people.
Implementing change entailed “exposing dysfunction”, which might entail asking a congregation why, if the existing approach was working, nobody had joined in five years. Throughout the day, speakers were honest about the challenges of culture change: the first of six steps on the LyCIG roadmap to growth.
AMONG the parish priests speaking was the Revd Paul Pavlou, who was appointed as “church revitalisation plant leader” at St Mary Magdalene with the Risen Christ, in Wyken, Coventry (a graft from St Mark’s, Coventry, a church in the Holy Trinity, Brompton, network), in 2021. The church, in an urban deprived area, had been in decline for a long period of time, with a congregation of about 25 people. The graft had financial backing from the diocese (paying the salaries of staff members) as well as a few people from the sending church.
He described how the congregation had grown to 55 or 60, with a “wide span of ages” and greater community engagement through the restoration of “bread-and-butter” parish ministry that had once been under way, including children’s work, engagement with the three local primary schools, and an Alpha course.
Mr Pavlou, who has written a book, Journal of a Church Planter, about his experiences, recalled that it had initially been “quite lonely” arriving at a church where he didn’t have many existing relationships, and funding had come with pressure to adhere to a timeline. While the plan had stipulated running Alpha within the first term, he had decided to wait 15 months, realising that it was important to first build relationships and trust.
“Strategy without relational discipleship is a waste of time,” he observed. “We need to be curious about the person in front of us.” This included “embracing individual interruptions”, he said, telling the story of how, upon his return from a retreat, he had been called to the church to see a man who had needed to talk for 45 minutes about the traumas that he had endured. Mr Pavlou had ended up praying with him, and meeting him every week.
“It’s so easy for us to get bound up in plans, strategy, PCC, finances, that we can end up treating people as interruptions to our work, when actually to pastor those people is the work,” he said. “It’s no good planning to preach in front of thousands if you can’t minister to the one person in front of you.”
Another lesson was that preparation was “paramount”. Bishops and archdeacons proposing new things needed to explain what had been spoken about “on the ground”, he said, and how much change had been agreed locally.
THE Revd Sarah Maughan became Rector of St Helen’s, Thurnscoe, in Barnsley, in 2022. The parish is numbered 250 out of the 12,239 parishes ranked in the Church Urban’s Fund deprivation scale. When she arrived, it had had no incumbent for more than a decade, and had a congregation of around 13 people, mostly family members. There were no buses after 6 p.m. owing to anti-social behaviour; so all activity needed to take place in daylight hours.
She had begun, she said, by conducting extensive research on social media, learning from locals about the parish, and identifying key community leaders, who she had then met face to face. Having taken a decision to “live and breathe” the place, she made sure that she shopped in the local Asda, transferred to the local doctors’ surgery, and carried invitations to church.
She had also made the decision to start something new very quickly (“I didn’t feel I had time to wait”), establishing a contemporary service for unchurched people, and a “warm space” that included access to practical advice. Part of the challenge had been working to change the “ark” mentality of the congregation to one that looked outward, overcoming the fear of talking about one’s faith in public. The church was now “bursting at the seams”, she reported.
BEFORE her appointment in Ribbleton, Mrs Tompkinson served on the Mereside estate on the outskirts of Blackpool, where the church, St Wilfrid’s, had closed. She was licensed for five years as a pioneer minister, with “freedom to fail” — another theme of the day — and had no resources or team: just the house where she began meeting with her husband and neighbour. There were just five people at her licensing. Among her first efforts had been sitting in the middle of the estate in her cassock, offering to pray with people..
On a Sunday, most people were in bed, taking their children to football, or at the local car-boot sale; so she decided to establish a tent among the stalls, where people could light candles (“We never had less than 40 conversations on any morning”). She had established a community choir, which had also led to growth.
Her three-minute talk about Jesus during the church bingo evening was an example, she said, of turning a “presence” event into a “proclamation” one.
Mr Steele went on to describe how, when asked to put on an evangelistic event, churches often decided to “do a chaplaincy to the presence event”. There was “nothing wrong with that”, he emphasised: it was “vitally important, but it’s not proclamation”. There was a fear that nobody would attend such an event, he recognised, but this was “not the worst thing in the world”. He reminded the gathering of the invitation at holy communion: “Draw near with faith.”
IN JULY, it was announced that the Strategic Ministry and Mission Investment Board (SMMIB) had awarded LyCIG £755,100 to support 1000 parishes and to fund more courses in youth outreach, in partnership with Youthscape.
Two weeks ago, it was confirmed that the Vicar of St Thomas with St Stephen, Balham, in south London, the Revd Sue Cooke, had been appointed to lead this work, succeeding Canon Gamble.
Among those who have endorsed the approach is the Archbishop of York. “In a church culture which is too easily besotted and beguiled by all that is shiny and new, [it] concentrates on the tried and tested, putting parish and people, evangelism and service front and centre,” he has said.