While I am still distilling the notes and conversations from the recent Vital Church Planting conference, I thought I would offer a Coles' Notes version of some things to consider:
- People don't just go to church anymore.
- We don't rule a vast empire anymore.
- We don't need to make more churches like the ones which are declining.
- We need to reach the unchurched. That is, not try to reach those nominal Anglicans who will only come at Christmas or Easter, but those people who are not yet Christian.
One of the things which may frighten and confound Anglicans is the need to face the fact that our branch of the church is in steep decline in the western world. Apart from the wonderful graph presented at General Synod which showed steady decline over the past several decades, in our own Diocese we have seen a 10% drop in attendance in the last 4 years. Now there may be fruitful time spent on analyzing why this is so. But such analysis, in the long run, will eventually boil down to this: we are either afraid of, or confused by, "Evangelism".
The first line of defense against evangelism is to offer a caricature. "I don't want to shove something down someone else's throat", or "I don't want to be pushy." We point to what we think of as poor examples of evangelism, and then we claim that since this is what evangelism is, we should not do it. It is a caricature - it is not an excuse to shy away from the real thing. What does this mean for church planting? We have tended to assume that if we simply get a building and start offering weekly Eucharist, people will come out of the woodwork because there must be a certain number of Anglicans in any given area. Surely another Eucharist will draw them out, the church will grow, and soon there will be 200 children in the Sunday School like there were in 1956. The reason such churches grew in the 1950s was that waves of British immigrants arrived on our shores and filled the nearest Anglican parish.
We didn't make new disciples, we just did large scale sheep stealing from the UK.
As the counter on my blog shows the days to the opening of the Church of the Resurrection in Brandon Manitoba are becoming fewer. We shall taste the fruit of the vine finally that morning and I suspect we will reap a great harvest. Those here chose to plant rather that confront, a solution that may not work everywhere. The diocese will have no one to bus in to fill empty pews and my friends who still minister in the ACoC will have a challenge. God's path is not always smooth but always rewarding.
Posted by: Steve L. | March 07, 2008 at 12:27 PM
Steve: thanks for your input. I pray that God will bless your endeavours. Personally, I am hoping that our diocese (Edmonton) will have some vision around intentional evangelism and that church planting will be a natural part of that. One of the things which kept being repeated at the conference was the need to form a community first, and only then would one need to even think about the usual focus of Anglican thinking: buildings and worship services.
Posted by: joseph | March 07, 2008 at 12:54 PM
Baa....
Posted by: Peter | March 07, 2008 at 12:54 PM
of course, sheep need a shepherd...
Posted by: joseph | March 07, 2008 at 01:11 PM
Building a community? Just wondering, where did practising hospitality fit in to the whole church planting coference?
Posted by: Donald | March 07, 2008 at 05:15 PM
And have we got a Shepherd handy. +Malcolm is our pastor for now and I if you have never heard him speak check here
Posted by: Steve L. | March 07, 2008 at 07:49 PM
Calm me-self. For a second there I thought I'd been promoted.
I'd like to hear you expand on what was meant by "we don't need to make more churches like the ones which are declining."
In the sense that, we do not need to make more churches that are inward looking and that have no sense of outreach, invitation or hospitality, I absolutely agree. But in the midst of the current unpleasantness, I am concerned it may mean we do not need to make more churches that disagree with a particular set of nostra.
I have certainly heard some conservatives and "conservatives" argue that their sorts of churches are growing while more liberal churches are declining. My own observation is that I have seen both liberal and conservative churches thrive and I have seen both decline. The issue, in that regard at least, has less to do with a particular set of ecclesio-political views and far more to do with the inward or outward focus of the priest and people.
Posted by: Malcolm+ | March 07, 2008 at 11:29 PM
malcolm - the quote is from Lings' analysis of immigration patterns of Anglicans after WWII - we in Canada reaped the benefit of having growth and building churches without having to expend too much energy to reach the unchurched. Our churches grew because of the influx of British Anglicans to Canada. The model Lings was talking about is exactly that one you refer to: inward looking vs outward looking; content to hope that people will simply show up vs actively engaging in mission in their neighbourhoods.
It is more about the attitude and culture of the parish: do we want to engage in mission beyond our walls?
Posted by: joseph | March 08, 2008 at 07:24 PM