IN HER lecture at the Church Times Festival of Preaching last month, the Bishop of Chelmsford, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, described the weariness that she found in clergy and congregations. This, she suggested, was fuelled by a deep anxiety about the Church’s future, as numbers continued to decline. She went on to question, not for the first time, the Church’s current preoccupation with “growth”.
When she had initially done so, in an address to her diocesan synod (Comment, 18 November 2022), she had, as she put it in her lecture, “earned a slap on the wrist from central church” for undermining the work of the well-staffed Vision and Strategy department.
She indicated that one of the reasons for the exhaustion and disillusion of many clergy and congregations was that they felt pressured by impossible demands from the centre, as fear was passed down to them from above, and money was thrown at shiny new initiatives. The mistake of Vision and Strategy was not its failure to recognise the problem, but its prescription of the outcome in worldly terms of numbers and money. But “We are not a business or an organisation. We are the Body of Christ. . .”
She suggests that we should pause and slow down, and respond to Christ’s invitation to rest and listen to what God is saying. Our primary calling is not to be successful, but to be intentional in our faithfulness and prayerful in the present moment.
In recent years, bishops, on election, have been required to be loyal to the House of Bishops. This recent innovation seems designed to prevent their expressing independent views. Dr Francis-Dehqani insists that she is not a troublemaker. But it seems to me that, when a diocesan bishop publicly questions the C of E’s preoccupation with growth, this represents a significant breaking of ranks and a potential new direction. It is not a coincidence that she is being spoken of as a potential successor to Archbishop Welby (Press, 13 September).
Dr Francis-Dehqani came to office from a very different background from that of those who currently run the Church. She was brought up as a member of a tiny and virtually invisible Anglican community in Iran, where the Islamic revolution of 1979 stripped the Church of its assets, buildings, infrastructure, and numbers.
Yet the Church there survives and has recently seen signs of blessing. It is out of this that she is challenging the Church of England to consider that its current task may have nothing to do with growing in numbers and everything to do with serving the wider community, by offering what she calls “resonant spaces” where we can listen afresh to one another and to God.
As T. S. Eliot wrote in 1934, we should, perhaps, “take no thought of the harvest, But only of proper sowing.” A word for the weary.
Listen to Dr Francis-Dehqani’s lecture here