AMONG those who responded to a Church Times survey of incumbents serving in deaneries with a resource church were four who were conscious of a disparity in investment between their church and the resource church, but were not concerned. “As I grew to understand that additional resources came with huge expectation and targets — then my attitude changed,” one wrote. “I don’t think people generally realise the pressure which the HTB teams are under.”
A review of Strategic Development Funding (SDF) grants gives some indication of the expectations that are often attached to resource churches. In London, 18 resource churches were designated in 2018. Fifteen were allocated a training curate expected to plant within three years of arrival, with an expectation that 3000 “new disciples” would be created, and that 30 “struggling or weaker churches” would “benefit from church plants” (News, 29 March 2018).
Another 15 planting curates were to be deployed to 15 “strategic cities, in terms of size and student population”, between 2020 and 2022. Each was expected to grow their congregation to 1000, and plant every three years.
In 2016, the diocese of Southwell & Nottingham received £1.2 million of SDF towards a plan to establish 25 larger resource churches with usual Sunday attendance of at least 150 by 2023, and expected to have shared in planting or grafting between one to three worshipping communities.
A document summarising learning from SDF-backed resource churches, published by the Strategic Development Unit at Church House in 2021, appears to assume that resource churches will grow beyond 400, and diagnoses “vision fatigue” as a possible cause of failing to do so, and the creation of “a culture of preservation or stability, rather than entrepreneurship”.
In Resource Churches: A story of church planting and revitalisation across the nation, the Bishop of Islington, Dr Ric Thorpe, suggests that a resource church should have “multiplication in its DNA”, and that, “if you keep doing something in a particular way, the results begin to multiply fast. If you change the ratio, like planting more often than every three years, the total number accelerates even faster.”
WHILE the independent review of SDF, led by Sir Robert Chote, reported that 76 per cent of SDF-backed resource churches launched between 2017 and 2020 had received a “green” (on track) or “amber” (needs attention) rating in 2021, data that set out the extent to which individual projects have met such ambitious targets is not easily located.
Last month, the diocese of London reported that five of the 15 planting curates allocated had been able to plant within three years, and noted the impact of the pandemic. Thirteen of the resource churches in the diocese had “either started at least one new worshipping community or revitalised their parish over the past six years”. They had established 34 new worshipping communities between them, while one curate had revitalised a parish outside the diocese.
Each of the 15 churches that had received an SDF planting curate had or would receive a second, funded by the diocese, a statement confirmed. Four of the resource churches had contributed toward subsequent SDF-funded projects, or would be involved in the six-year Hackney and Islington Programme awarded £9.4 million by Strategic Mission and Ministry Investment (SMMI) Board in June (News, 14 June).
The Church Army Research Unit evaluation of the two resource churches established in the diocese of Bristol (Features, 9 August) records that St Nicholas’s launched one church-plant, Concord Church, in October 2022 (the expectation was that it would plant or graft into at least three churches).
“The preparation for this took over two years, much longer than was originally envisaged,” the researchers write. “There seem to be fewer opportunities for planting or grafting in the city and certainly there was an underestimation of the complication and extent of time it takes to set these up these operations.” This, they suggest, “presents a problem for those recruited as planting curates according to the original aims of the programme”.
Evaluations have also drawn attention to the financial pressures faced by resource churches, alongside such targets. While the initial funding typically covers the cost of employing staff, such an operations manager, worship leader, and children and youth worker, these costs must be met in other ways when the grant period concludes.
A 2021 CARU report on the resource church in Portsmouth Harbour speaks of the importance of alternative sources of income to supplement regular giving, including “grants, diocesan sources, fundraising, or other income streams such as venue hire”, and concludes that “it is important to acknowledge that city centre ‘resource churches’ . . . may, like many other churches, continue to be financially dependent on the wider Church.”
FOR one resource-church incumbent interviewed by the Church Times, planting on an estate is set to take place just as the SDF period closes. Established in 2019, the church has a current congregation of 200, including 45 under-16s, having grown from about 20. It has already helped to plant two churches, and is now planning a third in an area of acute deprivation, with a building in poor condition and a post described as one of the hardest to fill in the diocese. About 25 to 30 members of the congregation are expected to go with this plant, which will happen, he says, on a “shoestring budget”.
There can be an expectation, he suggests, that the arrival of a resource church in a parish earmarked for revitalisation can be greeted as the solution to a particular problem, such as a lack of children’s work, whereas, in reality, a plant entails a deeper level of change. “The actual gift you bring is the DNA. People think it’s the stuff: the money, the resource. But the thing that is the real gold is that you are a little group of people, and you’ve got this DNA, this heart, this belief about God, this zest for prayer, this heart to worship, and for mission. . . You really go for it together.”
A “trap” that can be fallen into is the idea that a plant can entail a “smooth transition”, he suggests. “The problem with that is . . . actually, you do want something to change. What we are finding is there probably should be a moment of closure, or pause . . . to mark an ending, and mark a beginning.” Ultimately, such a transition “is going to be really hard for some people”, he reflects.
In addition to planting, the church has run a leadership-development gap-year course for 18- to 25-year-olds, in which participants take up placements at other churches in the area. Six of the 13 who attended the course — some of whom had no church background — now work for a church in the diocese. Planted in 2019, the church served as a food hub during the pandemic and continues to run social-action programmes. To date, there have been 43 baptisms, of which 30 were adults.
The incumbent names the Alpha course first when asked about the source of growth: 14 courses have been run in the past five years. The church has also strived to create a culture in which “genuine seekers, those that have never been to church before, can come and feel that they are welcome to come as they are,” he says.
When it comes to transfer growth, he reports none attending from other Anglican churches, although he says that this has happened at some other, larger churches of a similar style in the area. Students have also boosted the congregation: each September brings a new cohort. This does entail a significant degree of transience, however, as graduates and young professionals move away.
Discussing critiques of the resource-church model, he says that he is conscious of concerns about the unequal distribution of resources, but offers an analogy: “If we’ve got hot coals together, you can create a fire . . . and then you take the fire and you plant.” His enthusiasm remains undimmed, despite having learned the “complexity” of church-planting: “If I could do one thing for the rest of my life, it would be to revitalise churches.”
IN COMMON with many of the churches featured in Dr Thorpe’s book, the church described above was a partnership with Holy Trinity, Brompton. In total, 14 per cent of SDF grants went to projects exclusively made up of plants from the Revitalisation Trust (formerly Church Revitalisation Trust), incorporated as a charity in 2017 “to further the church planting activity which was previously undertaken by Holy Trinity Brompton” (Features, 21 April 2017). A further 29 per cent was allocated to projects where CRT churches were present among those of other networks and traditions.
St Thomas’s, NewcastleSt Thomas’s, Newcastle
“Given the professionalism, shared-services support, and track record of that stable, it is hardly surprising they are often the first port of call for a diocese seeking numerical growth relatively quickly,” the book observed. “One key success factor has been CRT’s ability to leverage lessons to both develop and replicate its model.”
But it also sounded a critical note, suggesting that the SIB and the SDU showed “little sign of broader intentionality in shaping the whole portfolio to build capacity and road-test a range of interventions that support and challenge the full range of traditions and contexts in the Church”.
The part played by Holy Trinity, Brompton, is pivotal to the story told by Dr Thorpe in his book. Their work is, he argues, “not so much a takeover as an extraordinary outpouring of missional generosity”.
In his contribution to the book, the Bishop of Chichester, Dr Martin Warner, tackles criticisms of the network head-on. There are those who see St Peter’s, Brighton, as “simply an HTB Trojan horse”, he writes. “They question its cultivation of success, its emphasis on youth and students, and its capacity to pull strings with the hierarchy at the very highest levels. They believe that its instincts, if not stated policies, are homophobic.
“But from the perspective of a bishop, I want to assert that St Peter’s is more ecclesial in its thinking than many people realise. By that I mean that the priest and people of St Peter’s work with the bishop and understand the polity of the Church of England, even if their style of worship disguises that quite well.” It had, he wrote, been a “blessing” to local people, including homeless people, addicts, and LGBTIQ+ people.
THE Dean of Church-Planting at St Hild College, the Revd Dr Christian Selvaratnam, describes HTB as a “distinctive animal. They are very good at working with the structure. . . They are good at finding money, good at working with power, and they have got a really clear plan. And it’s kind of an overflow of the life and throughput of people at HTB.”
While he agrees that resource churches tend to belong to the Evangelical tradition, he argues that those leading them do not seek to “do another tradition down. In their view, it’s a level playing field.” He predicts that if any diocese were to seek SMIIB funding for an Anglo-Catholic resource church, “they’d get it in a heartbeat.”
In his contribution to Dr Thorpe’s book, Dr Warner said that the Catholic wing of the diocese had been “exploring” the resource-church model, and reported that four parishes in areas of deprivation had “come together in apostolic partnerships in order to revitalise a congregation that had grown weary and despondent”. Concern for theological diversity was “absolutely valid”, he wrote.
Study of the resource-church programmes that have secured SDF or SMMI funding highlights that the HTB-linked city-centre model is not the only one that has received backing. The diocese of Southwell & Nottingham, for example, established a “rural resource church”, the Potting Shed (News, 3 February 2017), which currently meets in the village hall in Norwell. Its annual report mentions helping to resource the monthly services of holy communion at village churches, and “working with lay leaders to develop lively, creative festival services”. Average Sunday attendance stands at 57, plus 24 at a midweek service, while many more children participate in a schools programme, Rise and Shine.
Two of the diocese of Southwark’s resourcing churches — Holy Trinity with St Matthew, Elephant and Castle, and St John the Divine, Kennington — are in the Catholic tradition. St John the Divine is working with a deanery on the growth of a new Korean church (the church helped to start the Korean Mission in the 19th century), and to use its music gifts and youth ministry to help another parish to grow (Opinion, 17 July 2020). St Matthew’s will be sharing its learning as a bilingual Spanish and English church (News, 7 September 2018, 9 August 2019).
IN THE diocese of Leeds, two different models are operating. The diocese has invested £4.6 million in a resource church in Bradford: Fountains, launched in a former nightclub complex in 2019 (News, 25 January 2019). But it has also designated six “resourcing parishes”, also in the Bradford episcopal area. These receive less resource than Fountains — largely in the form of administrative support to free up their incumbents’ time, and “mission apprentices” — and the expectations are accordingly “lower and slower”. Revitalisations might entail planting new worshipping communities within their own parishes (some of which cover an entire town), or helping to revitalise a neighbouring parish. Both projects have received SDF funding.
The programme was developed in response to the challenge of maintaining the Church of England’s presence in areas where it was “weak missionally and weak financially”, the Archdeacon of Bradford, the Ven. Andy Jolley, says. “Who can give us some way of doing something new and different there?”
In a two-by-two grid measuring financial and missional strength, those chosen to be resourcing parishes were those to be found in the top right-hand corner. “We’re not about to put money behind someone where we haven’t got the track record already,” he says. “We want to invest behind those where we’ve got confidence, not invest speculatively.”
The fact that all six are in the Evangelical tradition is a reflection of the fact that Bradford is “classically Low Church Evangelical”, he suggests. While there has been “a little bit of resource envy”, he pays tribute to the generosity of those leading the resource churches. With the main Fountains service held on Sunday afternoons, on most mornings clergy are supporting other churches in the area, and it is working closely with two parishes near by: one on an outer estate, and one a Muslim-majority inner-city parish.
“If people could say, ‘You’re getting all this resource, you’re keeping it all to yourself,’ that feeds the argument,” he says. “But, if the people who have got the resource are being open-handed with it, and doing good things with it. . .”
Among the six resourcing parishes is St John’s, Great Horton, led by the Revd John Bavington, which, three years ago, sent a group of people to revitalise the neighbouring parish of St Wilfrid, Lidget Green. It has since set out plans to rescue St Columba’s, Horton Green, which was originally put up for sale.
Another “parish revitalisation” took place at John’s, Greengate, which, a few years ago, had a congregation in the low teens. A new offering was started on Sunday afternoons, which grew from monthly to weekly. The PCC then took the decision to stop the Sunday-morning service, in order to put energy into this afternoon service, which has since grown to 60, with a mid-week eucharist still available.
An important aspect of running the resource-church programme, Archdeacon Jolley says, has been monthly gatherings of the leaders of the resource churches as a learning community. Were he advising another senior leader on resource churches, he says, he would emphasise the importance of supporting their leaders. “Don’t enter into this lightly. When the pressure is on, pressure finds the cracks in people.”
WITHIN a decade, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s ambition to see every diocese have a resource church looks close to fruition, and with it a growing conversation about the theology underpinning the model and its impact on the wider Church.
While a perception can exist that this conversation is fuelled by animosity towards the Evangelical tradition, it is striking that searching voices exist within this sphere, and among practitioners.
In Church-planting in the Secular West, the Dutch theologian Professor Stefan Paas, who describes himself as a “sceptical advocate” of church-planting, and has himself helped to lead plants, is particularly critical of the idea that renewal can be “planned” and models applied. “By submitting people to great visions and strategic planning, churches render people into objects,” he warns. “If church planting is used as another strategy to escape our weakness, it is an utter failure.”
Church-planting must be “intimately connected with repentance and prayer. It must be done in a spirit of humility. . . It must refuse to submit people to strategies,” he writes. “In short, church planting can only be a source of renewal when it is truly open to God.”
The strongest argument in favour of church-planting, he suggests, is that it is “something that follows from the deep relationship between church and mission”, and that it may provide the Western Church with “a rich potential for missionary experience and reformation”.
Among the new leaders of resource churches in the UK are those willing to offer their own reflections on the criticisms that they face, going beyond simple argument to engagement, and suggesting the humility that is prescribed by Professor Paas.
In 2020, two years before his ordination, the Revd Richard Barber, now Assistant Curate of St George’s, the resource church in Leeds, wrote a blog for St Thomas’s, Newcastle: “The Takeover”. Attending the earlier morning service at the church — a traditional eucharist — had been an education, he wrote.
“I’d heard in the past about the perception of church plants coming in and ‘taking over’ from churches that had been doing their best for years. I was confident that we weren’t doing that right up until I sat opposite a member of the 10 a.m. congregation who said that, whilst that they knew that wasn’t the intention of the church plant, that was how they felt.
“I knew that fully robed ministers and sung liturgy were significant parts of people’s faith. However, sitting opposite someone for whom the loss of these things served as something of an obstacle to their ability to connect with God made me realise in a whole new way that we weren’t simply tinkering with the window dressing of a service. We were dealing with things that hold deep-seated significance for people. . . Unity and community is hard-won and not simply thrown together.
“Let me be clear, I am not saying that the changes that take place as part of a church plant are wrong. I happen to think that a lot of what’s changed as a result of the church plant at St Thomas’s were things that needed to change.
“However, what I have learnt is that, even with good intentions, you can still upset people. I have learnt that, by aiming to attract a particular demographic of people, you will create the perception that other demographics aren’t as welcome. I have learnt that just because something isn’t important to you doesn’t mean it isn’t important to others; and I have learnt that — even when you don’t mean to — you can easily become the person doing the ‘taking over’ without even realising it.”
In Manchester, now home to a £3.6-million SMMI-backed resource church (News, 31 March 2023), the Revd Jack Shepherd is preparing to hand in his Ph.D. thesis on resource churches, and planning a third article looking at opposition to them. What would he say to such critics, if asked to defend the model?
“I’d say we need their voices,” he says. “For something to be theologically robust, we need to able to ask questions about it. . . We also need to crack on with sharing the good news of Jesus.”