IT WAS one of the Church of England’s “South Bank Religion” sensations of the 1960s. In 1965, The Observer published an article by the Rector of Woolwich, the Revd Nick Stacey, headlined “A Mission’s Failure: The story of one church in pagan Britain”.
Stacey, a former Olympic sprinter, had set himself the target of increasing his congregation six-fold within five years. St Mary’s was to be a powerhouse, with numerous social activities to draw people in. Through his own fund-raising, he was able to deploy five highly educated curates, who conducted house visits, five evenings a week. They had enjoyed, he suggested in the Church Times, “almost everything the rest of the Church is asking for”, putting to the test the idea that, if only certain resources were in place, growth would occur (1 January 1965). “And yet, in church-going terms, we have failed.”
Of the hundreds of parents visited in the wake of a christening (not only in the week of the service, but on the anniversary for five subsequent years), only one was now attending church. Only five per cent of those invited to the parish coffee shop, opened by Princess Margaret and Lord Snowden, showed up.
Although Stacey — who resigned from the parish in 1968 to be deputy director of Oxfam — was criticised for trumpeting failure, he stood by his account. He had hoped, he wrote, to encourage the large number of clergy and church-people who “feel that the lack of response they experience in their parishes is through some personal failure on their part”. It had been worth writing for the number who had written to tell him: “You have made me feel less of a failure.” Perhaps, he suggested, the Church had “more to learn from our failure than we would have done had we in fact been successful.”
ALMOST 60 years on, it is Stacey’s original approach — ambitious goals for growth backed by financial investment — rather than his concluding prescription which appear most evident in the Church. Against a backdrop of numerical decline, and with a pledge on the floor of the General Synod to “return the risen Christ to the centre of our country and culture” (News, 15 July 2016), dioceses have competed to secure resources from the Church Commissioners by submitting bids that promise to deliver ambitious growth within a few short years, their efforts assessed on “the extent to which they are likely to lead to a significant increase in the number of new Christian disciples”.
The independent review of this programme, the Strategic Development Fund (SDF), which was published in 2022, did not conclude that it was a failure. While the number of new disciples “witnessed” fell far short of the target (12,705 against 89,375 — a figure revised to 27,000 last year), Sir Robert Chote concluded that “many people have been brought to faith by these projects” (News, 10 March 2022). While acknowledging that the number of new disciples had been “very hard to measure accurately and consistently”, his team was able to give many examples of successful schemes.
It had relatively little to say, however, about what had not worked or why, and listed lessons learned in the broadest terms. Although one of the original aims of the programme had been the accumulation and dissemination of learning, few evaluations of individual SDF projects — totalling 84 — have been published. The Church of England’s website provides links to four.
It is a similar story with diocesan strategies. While significant time and effort is expended in disseminating them, when their five- or ten-year timespan concludes, they tend to be swiftly replaced with a new strategy, with little public reflection on what worked or didn’t.
It is a habit that has been lamented by the Presiding Bishop-elect of the Episcopal Church in the United States, Dr Sean Rowe. “There are no institutional structures that allow us to learn,” he lamented at a clergy conference some years ago. “Failure is typically penalised; it’s not incentivised at all.” He gave as his example the speed with which the General Convention had adopted a new vision to double in size by 2020 in the wake of the Decade of Evangelism, despite having “no idea” why the previous strategy had failed to deliver growth.
THE few SDF evaluations that have been published are, in fact, rich in analysis that goes beyond a simple measurement of outcomes against targets to include insights about the context in which the Church finds itself. Among them is evidence of the extent to which dioceses struggle to get a significant proportion of people “on board” with programmes and strategies, lending weight to the Bishop of Chelmsford’s observation that “We don’t have the levers to make anybody do anything that they don’t want to do” (News, 23 September 2022).
In Coventry, although about 200 presentations were given at diocesan and deanery forums about its Acceler8 project, designed to reach people in their twenties and thirties, an evaluation found “little evidence of a catalytic effect on surrounding churches”. A push to get churches to use the Natural Church Development tools came up against a “lack of widespread committed adoption”: just 40 were “really committed to using the tools”. “Clergy are seen to be somewhat isolated and defensive to initiatives because of the pressures that they currently feel,” the report observed.
In Salisbury, a survey of worshippers found that almost two-thirds had “very little awareness” of the aims of the Rural Hope Programme, despite the diocese’s having issued “many” communications about it. An evaluation identified “a level of disconnect, through distrust or busyness, between local churches and the diocese”, and “some fear that strategic decisions — involving the allocation of finances — are made by those ‘at the centre’ with little consideration of — or connection to — the realities and pressures of local church life.”
In some parishes, it observed, the language of “mission”, “missional”, “missionary disciples”, and “discipleship’” was “not understood”. Even when explained, the researchers observed, “it is met with a degree of suspicion or resistance.” When it came to clergy, there was anecdotal evidence that a lack of engagement with such programmes “stems from a reaction along the lines of ‘Not another thing’.”
Findings such as this are not often represented in reports to bodies such as the General Synod. The Archbishop of York has acknowledged a “weariness with central initiatives” (News, 2 July 2021); and there is some concern that such initiatives may in fact contribute to decline, or to a decrease in giving, as those beyond a “committed core” vote with their feet and their wallets.
When it comes to the theory that the Church’s financial problems will be solved through mission (News, 12 July 2024), the evaluations also give pause. A Church Army research unit evaluation of the diocese of Oxford’s pioneer mission in new communities, where there was an expectation that the pioneer’s stipend would eventually become the responsibility of the new community, found that pioneers “struggled in practice to secure adequate income from their congregations”. It is not the only review that has highlighted that the journey from new Christian to regular giver can take time. It may suggest that expectations that the new worshipping communities envisaged will be self-sustaining should be adjusted.
The findings also provide evidence about the context in which people tasked with hitting targets are being placed. Those working towards the goal of doubling the number of children and young people in the Church might, for example, be interested in the evaluation of the diocese of Hereford’s project for inter-generational ministers project. In six of the seven placements of inter-generational ministers, there were “significant frictions” in the relationships with clergy.
“Bringing into roles people who are not ordained, are much younger, who bring different backgrounds and experiences, and whose outlook is different from the dominant clerical mindset can be very helpful. However, it is challenging and uncomfortable for both those coming in and many in the church.”
THESE are a few of the findings and observations from a small number of evaluations, and are not necessarily evidence that the projects concerned “failed”. Each review found much to praise.
One finding concerns the impact of setting targets in the first place. A recurrent theme of the evaluations is a feeling that many targets were unrealistic, or not “owned” at a grass-roots level. The finding in Salisbury was that such programmes “risk being an extra pressure point for already over-stretched people, contributing to a crisis-like situation for those managing it”.
Such evaluations are relatively scarce in the public domain, and this fact coincides with the identification by reviews of a crisis of trust in the Church, for which Sir Robert Chote observed that the SDF programme had served as a “lightning rod”. Anxiety about the reaction to a transparent account of projects, including missed targets, is hardly misplaced: those involved may find it hard not to take criticism personally. Nuances may be missed amid the broader angst about the distribution of resources.
Stacey’s public reckoning with results included the suggestion that it might be the underlying approach (resources = output) that deserved attention. It finds a contemporary echo in Dr Stefan Paas’s diagnosis of the dearth of anthropology in church-growth literature, in which “most if not all attention is directed towards the strategic action of the Church.” Is this the real failure at hand?
A realistic appraisal of the context to which new strategies, programmes, and initiatives seek to relate would be welcomed, and perhaps protect, the people given the task of delivering them.