IF THERE is one model for church growth which unites the Church of England’s bishops in enthusiasm, the resource churches has a strong claim.
A written account by the Bishop of Islington, Dr Ric Thorpe, Resource Churches: A story of church planting and revitalisation across the nation (CCX, 2020), begins with no fewer than 18 episcopal endorsements. Such churches are “vital for the renewal of the whole Anglican tradition” (Stepney); a means to “reinvigorate struggling city-centre churches” (Blackburn); a “vital — though not exclusive — plank in our commitment to reach people with the good news of Jesus Christ” (Worcester).
In his foreword, the Archbishop of Canterbury writes that there are “literally hundreds, even thousands, of people coming to faith” through their mission and ministry.
Since the planting of St Peter’s, Brighton, in 2009 — the first church to be identified as a resource church — their numbers have grown to more than 100, present “in almost every diocese, planting or set up to plant and revitalise churches across their regions”, writes Dr Thorpe, who estimates that, by 2030, there may be as many as 300.
It is an expansion that has been powered by significant investment from national funds. The independent review of Strategic Development Funding, led by Sir Robert Chote (News, 10 March 2022), reported that more than half of the total sum awarded — £91.3 million — had been allocated to the establishment of new resource churches, or to developing existing churches into resource churches. A further £11.6 million had been allocated to church-plants.
Allocations under the new distribution programme Strategic Mission and Ministry Investment suggest that resource churches will remain a prominent feature of successful diocesan bids. Recent examples include the designation of Holy Trinity, Margate, as a “resourcing church” (News, 28 March). The largest sum ever awarded — £29 million — will support investment in “resourcing churches” in the diocese of Southwark (News, 14 June).
The slightly different name here is deliberate and instructive. “We use the term resourcing church in Southwark, not resource churches,” a 2023 press release explained. “This is because we are not giving significant resources to the resourcing churches but to those who will be receiving skilled assistance from the resourcing churches to establish a platform for growth. The aim is to use the resources and generosity of the resourcing churches to help other churches thrive.”
Against a backdrop of diocesan deficits and over-stretched clergy, the question what it means to “resource”, and who benefits, is a live and often contentious issue. “If I had the same training and the same resourcing, I wonder whether I could be doing as brilliant a job as they are doing,” one incumbent, serving near a resource church, commented last month.
FOR the Vicar of Christ Church, Pennington, the Revd Jack Shepherd, resource churches are a phenomenon still in need of definition. He is due to submit his Ph.D. thesis — a study of Anglican resource churches and the Holy Spirit — next month, and he has already published two articles in the Journal of Anglican Studies, which explore both existing definitions and “origin stories” in current literature.
The report Mission-shaped Church, from the Mission and Public Affairs Council, published in 2004, was a key moment in the story, Mr Shepherd suggests, with its reference to “resourcing networks” and warning against “treating major churches or networks as somehow un-Anglican”.
Diocese of SouthwarkThe licensing of the Revd Hugo Adan Fernandez as Priest-in-Charge of St Matthew’s-at-the-Elephant, a resourcing church, by the Bishop of Southwark, the Rt Revd Christopher Chessun, in July 2018
But he traces the first use of the term to the Revd Mike Breen’s description of the church in Ephesus as “a resource church to the region, sending out missionaries and church-planters and offering a teaching and training base that touched the whole of Asia Minor”. In 1997, while Rector of St Thomas Crookes, in Sheffield, Mr Breen was writing of being called to lead his church to function similarly “as a resource to its city and region . . . to be a base for church-planting and mission and a centre for teaching and training”.
As the general director of the European Church Planting Network, Mr Breen was involved in setting a goal of planting 500 new churches across Europe by the end of 2011. Dr Thorpe picks up the story in his book, in which he recalls a meeting of the Network at a Portuguese hotel in 2008.
Present as a guest of the delegation from Holy Trinity, Brompton, he remembers “standing around a flip-chart with a rough drawing and arrows going from them to other places nearby. . . We dreamed of churches multiplying, beginning in cities and planting and revitalising churches all across their regions, igniting a fire of renewal across the nation.” Within four years, HTB had planted four such churches.
The story continues with an account of visits to diocesan bishops, alongside Mark Elsdon-Dew, HTB’s communications director, and, in 2013, a presentation “on how the Church of England might double in size in the coming years”, delivered to 50 bishops and diocesan secretaries gathered by the then Bishop of London, the Rt Revd Richard Chartres (for whom Dr Thorpe served as adviser for church-planting).
The following year, research undertaken by the Strategy and Development Unit at Church House (which supported the Archbishops’ Council’s Strategic Investment Board SIB in making SDF funding decisions, and monitored the performance of SDF projects) indicated that resource churches’ average congregation size had grown from 32 to 2018, while the average parish share had grown from £16,500 to £73,700.
Data-gathering from six resource churches, presented in 2016, suggested that attendance across the six had grown from 130 to 2702, that 24 per cent of these were “new churchgoers”, and that another 18 per cent had “returned to church”.
In 2015, another gathering of bishops was told by the Archbishop of Canterbury that “it would be great for every diocese to have a resource church — and not one, but two or three.”
A RESOURCE church is “something very specific”, Dr Thorpe writes in his book. It is “designated by its bishop to be a church-planting church which trains leaders to resource and support mission across a diocese”. A resource church has a calling that “goes beyond its own parochial boundaries”, while a resource-church leader in relation to a bishop becomes “more of a colleague at diocesan level”: a “considerable change to current culture and practice”.
A resource church merits the definition only “once it has actually planted its first church”, he suggests. Examples of resources that such churches “give away” may include training courses in leadership, Alpha, and running debt-advice or foodbank ministries. But “the core purpose of a resource church is to revitalise parishes by planting churches.”
While describing Dr Thorpe’s offering as “the best existing definition of the term ‘resource church’ in current literature”, Mr Shepherd also offers a critique. There is a need, he suggests, for “more empirical research about what’s really happening in resource churches”, to provide a more accurate definition. He has begun to “push against a universal concept of a resource church”, and suggests that the “narrow focus” on church-planting and evangelism in Dr Thorpe’s definition risks losing an emphasis on “the values and culture of learning that earlier perspectives on resource churches believe fuel and sustain their mission”.
Different theological frameworks may lie behind different models, he suggests. One of the London resource churches, St Martin-in-the-Fields, would be reluctant to talk about church-planting, and may have a different concept of “revitalisation” to that of Holy Trinity, Brompton, for example.
While lending support to the claim that resource churches are “part of an ancient ecclesiology and practice”, he also draws attention to the contested nature of some of the claims made by Dr Thorpe, and others, about their historical precedents, such as the assertion that “from the earliest years the role of the apostle involved church-planting” or that Antioch constituted an “inspirational resource church”.
Nevertheless, he writes, “it is not necessary to identify the churches in the New Testament as resource churches, or the early apostles as missionaries or church-planters, in order to interpret the practice of contemporary resource churches in light of these narratives including about the day of Pentecost itself.”
THE Archbishop of York has praised Dr Thorpe’s exposition of the “compelling theological and missiological reasons for such churches”. In two chapters, the book explores both such churches’ “theological underpinning” (such as the church in Jerusalem serving as an “apostolic mission base”) and their historical foundations, from the planting of churches by St Augustine, in Kent, to Victorian church extension.
This is picked up by other contributors — the leader of St Thomas’s, Newcastle, the Revd Ben Doolan, notes that, in the Victorian era, his church had a congregation of just under 2400, in a region with a history of “sending out radical missionaries, evangelists, and church planters across the nation”.
Church-planting, Dr Thorpe argues, “reaches new people, who would not normally attend churches that are ministering already”, and “is more able to design everything around new people and those exploring faith”.
Each chapter of the book ends with the story of a current resource church told by its leader, followed by reflections from their bishop. A thread running throughout is the engagement of people with no previous connection with the Church, drawn in through various routes, including Alpha, community organising, and social action.
The worshipping community at St George’s, Leeds includes asylum-seekers and more than 100 people with “multiple complex needs”, including homelessness and addiction. “We want this to be a place where people experience God’s transforming love, and show that love to others,” writes the Revd Alex Wood, the first incumbent of Harbour Church, Portsmouth.
These are also accounts of impressive numerical growth. At St Peter’s, Brighton, attendance grew from 30 in 2009 to more than 1000 in 2017, Dr Thorpe reports. The church has since gone on to “revitalise” six other churches.
Significant sums invested in resource churches mean that expectations of growth are set high. A city-centre resource-church bid in receipt of SDF money might be expected to grow to 400 within five years, and plant within three.
A summary of learning from 25 SDF-backed resource churches in the period 2014 to 2020, published by the Strategic Development Unit (SDU) at Church House in 2021, states that median attendance was 400 after three years; the majority of those attending were under-30s. Median additional giving stood at £200,000 after year three, while, on average, four people at each were “in discussions about ordination”. The churches planted, on average, twice every three years, most going to deprived areas or resource churches in other towns or cities.
INEVITABLY, such numbers have come under scrutiny. A common criticism of resource churches is that their growth comes from transfers from other churches.
The 2021 SDU paper includes a pie-chart on the “background of church attendees”, which states that 38 per cent had transferred from another church, while 24 per cent had moved into the area. Nine per cent had never attended a church before, while 14 per cent were defined as “de-churched”. The SDU has estimated that “about half of the transfers coming to resource churches may be from independent churches and half from other Anglican churches”.
The Chote review includes SDU analysis of the impact on parishes containing the closest 100,000 people to four “relatively mature” resource churches, which found that, in three of the four, attendance at these neighbouring churches had “continued on the same path” as before the arrival of the resource church. In one instance, the local decline was greater, “but within the bounds of what other urban areas had seen”. The growth in the resource church “exceeded any ongoing decline in other parishes”. Resource churches in Portsmouth, Derby, and Crawley had all resulted in aggregate diocesan attendances and giving growing in those towns or cities after years of decline.
Among those who have scrutinised claims about church-planting and growth is Professor Stefan Paas, a Dutch theologian who describes himself as a “skeptical advocate” of church-planting. In Church Planting in the Secular West (Books, 6 January 2017), he concludes: “The actual evidence for growth-through-planting is rather thin.” Conversion growth is hard to measure, while “much so-called research is worthless. It amounts to wishful thinking and magic with numbers.” He writes: “Often all numerical growth is presented as evidence for real church growth, whereas the large majority of newcomers in growing churches consist of transfers and switchers.”
Church-planters in the secular West “must accept that they will not reach the majority of non-Christians”, he writes. “Cultural conditions to achieve this are lacking at this moment. Their churches will normally consist of a small number of new converts and a majority of people with churched backgrounds (who may have re-activated their membership).”
One concern of his, among others, is that the basic structure of Evangelical church-planting theory “assumes a fertile ground for conversions”, when in fact, the culture of the secular West will require “a truly missionary approach”. In most popular church-growth literature, he writes, “we find hardly any account of the anthropology that is assumed or of the kind of society where church growth is supposed to take place . . . Most if not all attention is directed towards the strategic action of the church.”
A theme of Professor Paas’s book is the difficulty of assessing the background of those who attend church. The 2021 SDU contains no information about the methodology behind its numbers, such as how they were gathered, or how terms such as “dechurched” were defined. Publicly available evaluations of individual SDF-backed resource churches are also rare, although some of those conducted by the Church Army Research Unit (CARU) can be read online.
St Nicholas’s, Bristol, was set up with a grant of £1.5 million from SDF in 2017 towards meeting a total cost of £5.6 million (News, 22 January 2018). It was expected to reach average weekly attendance of 600 within five years, including 40 per cent “unchurched or de-churched”, and 60 per cent to be under-30s. An evaluation report by CARU, published in November, recorded attendance of 364 in 2023, plus 55 at its church-plant at Concord.
Diocese of ManchesterThe official opening of Fabric Church Manchester
Among the factors referred to were the impact of the pandemic, “the general fluidity of St Nicks as a city centre church which attracts students”, and a building capacity of 150. Of the total, 61 per cent were under-30s, while 20 per cent were reported as “unchurched or dechurched”, although this figure had been growing. The researchers report that, in a recent survey, 30 per cent of the congregation said that they had transferred from other Bristol churches, mostly Anglican.
The study also considers the definition of “transfer growth”: the diocese does not consider this to include worshippers who have come from places beyond Bristol, including students, while “dechurched” is used to define anyone who has not attended church for a year. “In the era of Covid and changing patterns of attendance and online involvement, this definition is in need of revision,” the researchers suggest. “One indication of reaching the unchurched is the number of baptisms, and there have been 42 adult and 21 child baptisms at St Nicks.”
Pattern Church, in Swindon, was set up in a historic railway building with £1.49 million from SDF in 2018: part of a project initially costed at £6.45 million (News, 21 December 2018). It was expected to achieve average weekly attendance of 430 within five years, of which half were to be either unchurched or de-churched, and 70 per cent under 40 years old. Average weekly attendance was 224 at Pattern Church, and 120 at its church-plant, the Well. A total of 16 per cent of adults — 27 — were defined as “unchurched or dechurched”, while 35 baptisms (just short of a target of 40) had taken place. Two-thirds were under-40s.
The researchers found much to praise, including the commitment to the wider community. “St Nicks is definitely a church with a social conscience and active approach to setting up projects, partnering with others in projects, and supporting members to engage with some challenging issues in their community,” they wrote. Pattern Church had “brought faith and hope to Swindon in new and vibrant ways . . . it has successfully planted and encouraged many people in their discipleship and vocation.”
Even if not all targets were met — and a key theme of independent SDF evaluations is the “unrealistic” nature of many of these — Professor Paas’s research also highlights an important piece of context in which to view the results. He estimates that a typical British, Dutch, or German church with 100 members may expect to welcome one “initiate” or “returnee” in every five to ten years.
MUCH of the existing literature on resource churches concerns study of their congregations, and interviews with their leaders. To explore the experiences of clergy in churches near by, the Church Times surveyed the incumbents of three deaneries in which resource churches had been established.
Last month, the anonymous online survey was sent to directly to 49 clergy in total, which included six leaders of church-plants. In total, 25 responses were received, including from the six plant leaders. Many respondents chose to make additional comments.
What emerged raises questions about how “resourcing” is defined, communicated, and put into practice.
A sizeable minority — seven — reported concerns with the way in which the resource-church launch had been communicated. “It was not at all clear how the resource church would be a resource for other churches,” one wrote. “The title seems misleading. Who is it a resource for?”
Presented with Dr Thorpe’s definition of a resource church, almost two-thirds (64 per cent) said that it matched their understanding, while 24 per cent disagreed. The 14 comments received in response to the question were critical in tone: a common theme was a sense that resourcing was confined to church-planting within the church’s own network.
One incumbent observed that, while the resource church was clearly defined as a church-planting resource, “the expectation is that a resource means it will provide support with ministry to all churches in a deanery. This misunderstanding was short-lived.” One who agreed with the definition later commented: “I work in the poorest parish in the diocese, and we have seen no support or help from the resource church.”
Asked about the impact of the resource church, only two said that church-planting had made a negative impact on the life of churches locally; three reported a negative impact in other ways. Most reported either a positive impact — largely through church-planting — or mixed impact. Concerns about transfer growth were mentioned. One respondent wrote: “Where plants have been successful, parishes have been revitalised. Where those plants, or proposed plants, have been insensitive or not appropriate, both individuals and church communities have been damaged.”
One leader of a church-plant reported that it had grown from 15 to 150 people within four years. Another incumbent wrote: “I understand there may be a new plant just on the borders of my parish — this will have a sizeable impact on my congregation, but I still think it will be worth it. Long term, I expect it will even out, because they will introduce people to Jesus and, after some years of excitement, they can come to ponder with us.”
Eleven respondents said that the resource church had made “little impact” on the life of the wider community, while eight said that it had been positive. This was a striking finding, given that the Charity Commission filings of all three churches show social-action programmes in place, including programmes for young unemployed people, and local food provision.
The survey also asked: “Do you feel that you have been ‘resourced’ by the resource church in your area?” Most — 17 — replied “no”, while the six leaders of church-plants responded positively. “Resource churches revitalise other churches where the church-planting curate and a team are sent, but I think their impact locally is less significant,” one commented. “I think the main impact locally is raising faith to see that growth can happen, but they don’t have the time or resources to help every church in their deanery.”
“We have received very little or no benefit,” one respondent wrote. “Requests and emails are ignored or rejected. Funds and energy are restricted to HTB plants. They won’t share resources, staff, equipment, or learning. They don’t turn up to deanery meetings. They operate out of Church of England practice. A law unto themselves.”
The Church Times also heard directly from two incumbents who had filled in the survey, and who expressed frustration about responses to their requests for help. One described asking “a number of times” for help with worship and children’s work, but had been told that nobody was available, which surprised him, given its strength in volunteers and interns.
The church had received multi-million-pound investment through the SDF fund, he said. “I guess my perspective would be if that money was spread around a wider group of churches, if we all had £200,000, £500,000, then that would have generated a broader range of growth rather than into one specific set-up.”
Every parish church would love to be able to employ music, children’s, and operational workers, he commented. He identified the decision by the resource church to launch social-action projects without consulting others on what was already running on certain days as an illustration of the lack of collegiality.
Only three respondents reported that people had left their congregation to join the resource church, although nine said that they were aware of transfer growth from other churches, including non-Anglican ones. One church-plant leader commented: “Transfer growth is not all bad — many of these resource and revitalised churches were not viable before the revitalisation; so people for whom it is their local church, but were attending another, and then return, I would say is positive transfer growth! Also, in other cases, asking the courageous question of why people may leave their church to join a resource church — what does it say about the church they’ve left?”
One incumbent commented: “My church is in the Catholic tradition; so we have not been adversely affected, other than by a proposal to close us down so that the resource church could plant into us.”
The survey concluded with the question: “If you could request resources from the Resource Church, what would be most helpful to receive?” The question raised concerns for one church-plant leader, who felt that it risked “implying that [the resource church] has failed if it hasn’t delivered these things, and also risks disempowering other local clergy who might presume through the question that these things were part of the resource church aims.”
The resource church had succeeded in meeting the terms of its SDF funding, through its partnerships, the leader emphasised, while listing the other ways in which it contributed to the life of the diocese.
THE Dean of Church-Planting at St Hild College, the Revd Dr Christian Selvaratnam, suggests that there may need to be greater clarity and communication of the purpose of resource churches. He regards the term as “a shorthand for a church-planting resource or resourcing church. In my mind, it’s crystal clear that the focus is investing in church-planting.”
Many diocesan leaders are still working out what a resource church is, and a degree of “nervousness” is evident, he says. Most senior leaders have not planted churches, he observes. “So, they are trying to understand what they’ve heard about, but they’ve not done it. That is problematic for practitioners.”
There is also, he suggests “a lot of nervousness, particularly when money is involved, and not every resource church is getting money, but some are, and some have got huge amounts.” This can mean, he suspects, that some senior leaders are “a bit vague”, or may end up “over-promising what is available”, with suggestions that “we are all going to get something out of this.”
In response to the Church Times survey, two-thirds (68 per cent) of the respondents said that they were conscious of a “disparity of investment between your local Resource Church and your own church”, and that this concerned them.
“We would like funding from the central Church of England in order to build my own parish rather than these millions being applied to these ‘mega church’ plants, most of which are of a particular tradition,” one wrote. “The Church of England is a broad Church whereas this funding appears to favour only one tradition.” Another called for “greater transparency about this investment, and its success criteria”.
Some were critical of the question, noting that not all resource churches received diocesan or national investment when launched. One church-plant leader reported that, while the plant had received some money from the resource church and a stipendiary priest, no other paid members of staff had gone with the planting team.
There are, Dr Selvaratnam says, “things that are hard to talk about. There are some churches that would say ‘If only we had some more money, we’d be growing and thriving.’ And, I have to say, for some of those, I’m totally not convinced. The reason you are not growing runs far deeper than money. Money is either a separate consideration, or a symptom of the fact that your church isn’t healthy. If we gave some money, it would make your life easier for a few years, but would it actually do any good?”
Some of the church-plants that he led were not given any resources, he says, but were funded entirely by volunteers: “If you’ve got a will to grow, you’ll find a way” (Comment, 7 June).
“It does sound unkind,” he observes. “Surely we should give everyone the same help? But I’m not aware of any teaching in the Bible that says that.” He refers instead to the parable of the talents. One option, he suggests, is “micro-investment”: an smaller initial investment for proposals to reach unchurched people which could be scaled up over time.
“In a way, a resource church is a disruptive element,” he says. “And the diocese and the bishop are choosing to do that. But it’s very hard to do that and keep everyone totally happy. . . You can’t maintain the status quo and change things with a sense of urgency.”
THE concept of “disruption” also appears in the work of the SDU. Its 2021 learning document suggests that this may involve “changing diocesan policies which are acting against the diocese’s aim of having an impactful resource church. This might cover ministry policies such as curate allocation and financial policies such as adapting parish share formulae which provide barriers to fast-growing churches. This isn’t about showing favouritism towards the resource church, but making sure these policies serve the diocese’s strategic aims.”
In his book, Dr Thorpe suggests that resource churches are “disruptive to a system that is either in decline or unused to change”. While acknowledging that SDF allocation has, at times, proved “controversial”, he argues that many dioceses “recognise that spreading funding thinly across the board, so everyone gets the same, does not lead to the changes that are necessary to see development and growth. A strategic, more targeted approach is necessary.”
This is “challenging for those at the sharp end of divestment”, he writes. “But it is necessary so that those same places receive missional investment in the future . . . future planting means that previously under-resourced places can be revitalised.” Such investment, he argues, “will give a return in the future, in terms of new believers, stronger parishes, better maintained buildings and increased financial giving”.
He refers to calculations suggesting that, “if a heavily supported parish is revitalised by a resource church paying its own ministry costs, it can easily save a diocese £0.5 million over ten years.” Like Dr Selvaratnam, he also points to the Bible to argue that “we should reframe the notion of fairness.” In the parables, “everyone is not always treated the same.”
IT IS now ten years since the launch of the Strategic Development Funding programme, and 11 since Dr Thorpe’s presentation “on how the Church of England might double in size in the coming years”. In those years, resource churches have undoubtedly transformed the Church of England’s presence in many cities.
“We have seen a city centre church which had less than 20 people worshipping there grow to a vibrant church of over 200 mostly younger people in their 20s and 30s,” one respondent wrote to the Church Times survey, when asked to comment on their impact. “There are three flourishing churches where seven years ago there were not,” another wrote. Church-planting is likely to play a crucial part in the “parish revitalisation” increasingly referred to in diocesan strategies.
But a panoramic view of the Church in 2024 includes some stark figures. Average weekly attendance in every diocese since 2015 has fallen by between 25 and 50 per cent since 2015. More than 20 per cent of churches have an average weekly attendance of fewer than 20. Diocesan consolidated deficits for 2024 are forecast to stand at £60 million, and cuts to stipendiary posts will be part of the medicine administered. Against this backdrop, questions of resourcing have the potential to deepen the distrust diagnosed in a growing number of reports.
In part two of this report, the Church Times will explore how the model of the “resource church” is evolving in this context.