A PARISH church in the network of Holy Trinity, Brompton (HTB), and situated in one of the most deprived parts of the south-west has been allocated more than £400,000 for mission to children, young people, and families through the Strategic Mission and Ministry Investment Board (SMMIB).
St Clement’s, Boscombe, then an Anglo-Catholic church, received a church-plant in 2016 from St Swithun’s, Bournemouth, itself a plant from HTB (Features, 21 April 2017). The benefice of St Clement and St Swithun, Bournemouth is now known as “LoveChurch”.
The allocation of £412,333 will fund an administrative post and a children and family worker for schools outreach, with the hope of a youth worker in due course. Funding will also go towards improvements to the church hall and church building.
The money is a drawdown from the SMMI funding of £4.5 million for six parish-revitalisation projects announced by the diocese of Winchester in 2023 (News, 28 July 2023). The other two so far confirmed are: St Andrew’s, Bournemouth (in Charminster), “revitalised” with a team from LoveChurch, and Lord’s Hill Church, Southampton, “revitalised” with a team from St Mary’s, Southampton, another HTB plant in receipt of Strategic Development Funding (SDF). Last year, the diocese reported that Lord’s Hill Church, renovated with the help of the national funding, had had an increase in its congregation from 30 to 130 in less than a year.
Between 2017 and 2021, the diocese received £9 million in SDF grants towards its three-phase mission action plan. In October, the diocese published an external review, Going Far or Going Fast?, of the first phase of the project. Conducted by Brendan Research, it concluded that the project had “achieved a remarkable amount considering the standing start and complex political dynamics in the diocese”.
It highlights the centrality of the HTB network to the diocese’s strategy for growth. All four of its resource churches are part of this network. The review describes “transformative” growth in areas that are not “typical” HTB planting contexts. But it says that “tracking where growth is coming from has proved almost impossible. . . leaders have chosen not to make this a priority.”
At Andover Parish Church, only seven per cent of worshippers are recorded as “un- or de-churched” against a target of 30 per cent. It also notes a five-figure overspend on the building at St Mary’s, Southampton, and contains a warning against “allowing architects to run amok”. Resource churches “appear to have a somewhat detached relationship with the diocese”, it says.
Also studied is the “Benefice of the Future” programme (News, 8 September 2023), the aim of which was to grow worshipping communities in pilot rural benefices by 15 per cent. This is described as “unrealistic”: they declined by 4.8 per cent. But a target for new lay leaders was exceeded, reaching 38. Other successes included simplified structures and governance, and culture change “where parishes now give sacrificially to support the distinctive ministries of other parishes within their benefice”. The review concludes that the project, which has given rise to the “Growing Rural Parishes Programme” in the diocese, was “successful in honouring the Christians already serving their rural contexts.”
Another aspect of the programme was the establishment of pioneer hubs to grow Fresh Expressions of church in areas of urban deprivation. The review concludes: “The slow, small, relational ‘serving-first’ approach to pioneering church seems very much at odds with an SDF programme designed for rapid growth in three to five years.” The approach is, it says, “unaffordable within a SDF programme where a full-time stipendiary pioneer is required to lead”. But, it adds, that this should not be the end of “the type of pioneering that might help reach people that attractional church or ‘worship-first’ models can’t reach”.
Against a backdrop of extensive housing development, the programme aimed to reach 6000 people across six “major development areas”, through church-plants, Fresh Expressions, schools, and nurseries. The review refers to challenges such as delays in housebuilding, the cutting of a vicar’s post, and Covid-19.
The diocese was “justified in closing some projects early due to weaknesses in programme design although more care was needed over how they were closed”, it says. Some at local level were “made to feel it was their fault that projects failed”, and the review was told that “some very good mission-minded parish priests left the diocese as a result.” A student-evangelism project, whose target was to have 1400 students “come to Christ”, recorded just 20. This “calls into question how much student growth in large churches is a result of transfer growth”.
Among the observations is that, with regard to pastoral reorganisation and other changes, “considerable time, energy and ‘trust capital’ were expended in the diocese fighting for the new. . . It would have been far better to wait for key clergy or laity to move/retire rather than fight parish structures that, as one interviewee commented, will ‘haunt the diocese for years to come’.”
All continuing projects remain reliant on further SDF (or SMII) funding. The resource churches are paying a lower or subsidised rate to allow them to prioritise numerical growth. Among the questions posed is “Who will reach people in contexts that resource churches can’t?”