Church Planting
A
Presentation to
by Andrew Watson, vicar of St Stephen’s Church, Twickenham
It was always going to be an awkward evening. The bishop had come to the meeting to tell the PCC that St. Saviour’s Sunbury was no longer viable, and that there were only two options open to it. One was closure – the dispersal of the congregation, and the likely conversion of their building into flats. The other was a so-called ‘church plant’: an invitation to a church in Twickenham to send maybe fifty of its members to start something new, with all the implications for disruption and change that that would inevitably involve.
A church plant. It sounded distinctly threatening to the PCC as the bishop spelt out the details. No longer would St. Saviour’s consist of a gentle group of people who had known each other for years. No longer would their liturgy or hymnody go unquestioned. The bishop’s vision was apparently being met with all the enthusiasm of a small Northumbrian village in the ninth century being told to expect a wave of Vikings at any moment! Rape and pillage were not quite on the agenda; but references to ‘happy-clappy’ worshippers and ‘fundamentalist Bible bashers’ most definitely were.
And so the outcome of the meeting seemed sad but inevitable: that the congregation would prefer their church to be closed than invaded. The kettle was on. The biscuits were ready. It was about time for the business of the evening to draw to a close; and then Joan, an 86-year-old churchwarden, spoke up. ‘I’ve been a member of this church for sixty years’, said Joan: ‘and in all that time we’ve never made any difference to our community. Tonight is our big chance!’ And as she continued speaking, other members of the PCC began to nod in agreement, as the vision for growth and life began to prevail over the vision of decline and death.
The Vikings duly arrived, and were found to be surprisingly friendly – even, dare we say it, civilised!. The church community was saved, and is currently more than a couple of hundred people strong, with playgroups and youth clubs and lunches for the elderly bringing great blessing to the neighbourhood; and all the original congregation remained – and remain - as part of the new St. Saviour’s: all except Joan, who died just three weeks after the meeting, having secured the future of the church which she’d served and loved over all those years. At her funeral the words of the old man Simeon took on a special new resonance: ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word…’
Now I was privileged to be distantly involved in that story as the vicar of the sending parish, the Viking Chief if you like, the happiest and clappiest Bible basher of them all! It seems to me to encapsulate many of the dynamics and emotions which surround this issue of church planting, and especially the most controversial area of planting where one church, in effect, is invited to take over another.
Church planting along these lines is costly. There’s no two ways about it. It’s costly for the receiving church, whose old patterns of parish life will never be the same again. It’s costly for the plant team, who are leaving behind old friendships, old patterns of worship and stepping out into the unknown. And, having embarked on three such church plants over the past seven years, I’d have to say in all honesty that it’s costly too for the sending church and its leadership.
From the beginning of my call to ordained ministry, I’ve seen my role as being that of a Gatherer, perhaps a Hunter-Gatherer, for the
And I tell you that not to evoke waves of sympathy around the Synod, but simply to point out that the costliness of this exercise is considerable and it’s shared. Which then raises the question, why on earth do it?
It’s 86-year-old Joan who best answers that question. It’s because there are churches around who are making no difference to their communities that this model of church-planting is quite so necessary. I don’t want to judge those churches: sometimes they’ve had a difficult history of disunity and division; at other times they’ve been inadequately led, or have simply reached a numerical point where growth is virtually inconceivable. Very often they have some real saints among their remaining members. But whatever our theology or churchmanship, there are times, I’m sure, when we’d all acknowledge that a church is simply failing both to proclaim good news and to be good news in its community.
A sick church can often be healed by better leadership, a clearer vision and a number of local Christians perhaps being encouraged to worship there rather than in the mega-church down the road. A terminally sick or a dead church requires not healing but resurrection. And while we might take our lead from the Dead Parrot sketch and quibble for hours about when a church is dead and when it’s simply resting – how important that we have a robust diocesan strategy for the resurrection of Christian communities, not simply for their healing.
There is though a further dynamic here at the ‘sending’ end of the equation: and that is that big churches aren’t always healthy churches. When we first started praying about church planting in the year 2000, a member of the congregation had a vivid picture of a forest of pine trees. In the picture some of the largest of those trees were moved and planted elsewhere – and the result was that the forest was flooded with light and air and sunshine, so that the smaller, more spindly trees which had always grown in the larger trees’ shadows could now develop into the full stature for which they were created.
It’s a picture which has always stayed with me – and it’s been gloriously fulfilled as some of the best and largest trees from our church have been transplanted into Isleworth, Sunbury and the Ivybridge estate - and St. Stephen’s simultaneously, even miraculously, been flooded with new light and energy. Even our electoral rolls and our finances have grown considerably more since we started church planting than they ever did before. For big churches can become obese churches, self-satisfied, resting on their laurels, existing primarily to keep the show on the road, to meet their own need, even greed. It’s when people are sent out, not just gathered in, that the enlivening, transforming work of God’s Spirit can truly be released.
Now there’s a tendency today for so-called ‘fresh expressions’ of church and church plants to be lumped together: and ever since the publication of ‘Mission Shaped Church’, we’ve got used to the idea that there are basically two types of churches around the place – inherited churches on the one hand (in other words, parish churches) and fresh expressions-cum-church plants on the other (in other words, experimental mission initiatives).
But as someone who believes that 95% of the best mission initiatives will always be taken by the local church, inherited church, the parish church working at its best, I increasingly find this distinction unhelpful. The reality is that the kind of church planting most spectacularly undertaken by the church in which we’re sitting now has not borne much resemblance to a tentative fresh expression. Instead it’s breathed new life into parish churches, enabling those churches to serve their communities in a way they haven’t done for decades if at all. It’s precisely because many of us believe in the parish system; it’s precisely because we think it’s a scandal that a church in Sunbury serving a parish of 11,000 should have just 25 in its congregation – that the whole planting thing should make complete sense to catholic, liberal and evangelical churches alike.
So are we talking bums on seats here? Yes, we are unashamedly, rejoicing that every
The Revd Andrew Watson is vicar of St Stephen’s Church, Twickenham, London
These posts are by guest authors for Fulcrum