I AM coming to the end of my time as the Team Rector of one of largest parishes by population (just over 86,000) in the Church of England. It was formed in 2016, from what had been seven separate parishes, to encompass a growing town that had absorbed (more or less) the villages that once ringed it. It was clear when I arrived, in 2020, that helping it to function effectively as a multi-church parish team ministry would need to be a priority. But it has not been easy. As I prepare to take on a new post, I find the question running round my mind: Does the multi-church parish actually make sense?
The obvious reasons for saying “Yes” relate to the health and effectiveness of organisations generally. The benefits might be grouped under three main headings: sharing resources, fostering collegiality, and responding flexibly.
IT MAKES sense to share resources. This begins with governance: every parish needs its own PCC, with its own churchwardens, treasurer, and secretary, its own up-to-date suite of policies for everything from safeguarding to financial controls and employment. As many parishes have half the people in their congregations compared with 20 years ago, it is just not reasonable for each to keep trying to shoulder the same load.
And then there is the most expensive resource for most churches: paid clergy. As congregations and income shrink, so does the number of historic parishes that can support the costs of a stipendiary priest on their own. The same goes for lay support staff, who are, arguably, becoming more rather than less necessary.
More than just coping with that situation, the multi-church parish is well-placed to foster new kinds of collegiality. It can encourage those holding the same responsibilities in different churches to work with and learn from their peers. It can create space in team ministries for clergy to develop complementary areas of specialist expertise for the good of the whole parish. It can promote a culture of mutual support.
Finally, the multi-church parish can respond flexibly and strategically to emerging need and opportunity. It can decide to cease holding weekly services in one of its churches, as we have done recently, while ensuring the continuing pastoral care of its congregation and without making any kind of irreversible decision about its future. It can identify and resource a new mission initiative to be supported by several churches in the parish, one that none of them could launch independently.
THE multi-church parish appears to make evident sense, then, as a means of enabling several small and medium-sized congregations, meeting across various locations, to sustain together functions that are critical for church health in the 21st century — from standards of governance to effective community outreach, social-media profiles, and varied opportunities for Christian formation for people of all ages. It looks like an obvious step beyond the multi-parish benefice. So, what is the problem?
During the past six years, I have tried to tune in to the deep resistance that is clearly still around. At one level, there is just a tenacious nostalgia for a time when — as it is remembered — one main congregation, meeting in one main church building, with its own stipendiary priest, served a community with clear geographical boundaries, and had control of its own affairs through its churchwardens and PCC.
Will such nostalgia fade with time? Perhaps. But, even with newer members, an enduring sense of highly localised church identity works against culture changes of a kind that would embed the benefits just described in everyday congregational life.
I ALSO find myself wondering about the longer-term effects in the Church of England of losing the one-to-one correspondence between parish and church, when people no longer understand themselves as part of one church (maybe with several congregations and locations) serving one parish.
The response that I have sought to advocate is to embrace being several churches — each with its distinctive character — committed to serving our one parish together, appreciating the freedom to work together in mission that comes from not carving the parish up into “our” church’s territory fenced off from “yours”. That ought to be easier in our context than in some others, as the parish still corresponds to a readily recognisable social-geographical unit: one town. But, though some people get that, my impression is that many do not. It is not often that church members talk about “our parish”.
Without that, I worry that local ecclesial identity, rooted in “the congregation(s) meeting in this particular building”, starts to float free from definition in formal, legal terms by its relation to the population of a geographically defined area. “Parish” ceases to indicate a framework of relationships with the local community, naming, instead, an essentially administrative institution that we the (actual) church are obliged to deal with from time to time, sometimes helping us, sometimes not.
The question that I am left with is whether the multi-church parish will really make sense in a way that allows its benefits to be widely felt — sharing resources, fostering collegiality, responding flexibly — only when its distinct congregations (however numerous) begin to think of themselves as actually constituting together one church for their one parish (however large). But, at that point, it might just need a new name.
The Revd Dr Jeremy Worthen is Team Rector in the Ashford Town Team Ministry, Joint Area Dean of Ashford, in Canterbury diocese, and an Hon. Canon of Canterbury Cathedral.