The Three Transitions the Church is Struggling to Make

It is widely recognised that the Church of England is struggling to adjust to a rapidly changing context. The gradual ending of the era of Christendom has been reflected not simply in steadily declining congregations but in something far more profound. Until the 1960s, nominal adherence to the basic teachings and values of Christian faith was an important element in the cohesion of society. Today this is no longer the case. We live in a pluralist society in which the Church is one voice among many in the marketplace of ideas and commitments.

What, then, needs to change? What is the shape of the journey the Church needs to make to come to terms with its changing context? I suggest that there are three transitions that need to be made in response to three fundamental challenges. Everywhere, there are signs of these transitions taking place under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. But progress is slow partly because many, including many in positions of influence, fail to understand and respond.

1. The relationship between Church and society: from chaplain to the nation to mission community.

This is the transitions with which we are most familiar and the one that is most widely accepted. In my book Reimagining Ministry (SCM, 2011), I suggested that it was possible to discern several phases in the Church’s response to God’s call to mission:

• Process evangelism. The advent of courses such as Anglican Renewal Ministries’ Saints Alive andthe adult catechumenate in the 1980s, Alpha and Emmaus in the 1990s and a host of others since then signals a move away from one-off evangelistic events to a realisation that conversation is a process that takes time. This move potentially reflects a deeper insight: that everyone is on a life-long journey of faith, and that Jesus walks beside each person, both Christian and non-Christian, inviting them to a deeper faith in him.
• Community engagement. Towards the end of the 1990s, we began to realise that the goal of the journey of faith is not membership of the church but the kingdom of God. In partnership with other voluntary and statutory organisations, it is possible to work together for the coming of the kingdom and seek to bless our communities.
• Fresh expressions of church. Engagement with the community opens the possibility of shaping the church to fit its context. In 2004, Mission-shaped Church documented the move from ‘Come’ to ‘Go’ represented by churches tailored to the culture of their community. In his foreword, Rowan Williams set out the theological agenda: ‘If “church” is what happens when people encounter the Risen Jesus and commit themselves to sustaining and deepening that encounter in their encounter with each other, there is plenty of theological room for diversity of rhythm and style, so long as we have ways of identifying the same living Christ at the heart of every expression of Christian life in common.’
• Chaplaincy ministry. At around the same time as Reimagining Ministry was published, we were seeing a mushrooming of informal chaplaincies: in schools, supermarkets, sports venues, business groups, to agriculture, the canal community and in many more places. This was an acceptance of the church as guest, content to operate on others’ turf and on their terms. It calls for an embrace of what Ann Morisy has called ‘foundational spirituality’, an awareness of the spiritual dimension of life shared by people of all faiths and none.

This is the ‘mixed ecology’ which the Church of England has embraced as a core element of its ‘Vision and Strategy’, whose opening statement, ‘The Church of England’s vocation is and always has been to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ afresh in each generation to the people of England,’ definitively redefines the relationship between Church and community.

Of the three transitions, that from ‘chaplain to the nation’ to mission community is the most widely understood and accepted. It is also the one that figures most widely in ministerial training, with courses in mission offered in most, if not all training institutions. Unfortunately, this is far from the case with the second and third.

2. The relationship between clergy and laity: from clients to colleagues.

In her book The Good Wine (Church House, 1986), Josephine Bax drew attention to the way in which both catholic and charismatic renewal had led to a desire on the part of lay members of the church to both a deeper spiritual life and a share in the church’s ministry.

Everywhere there is a ferment going on among lay peoplewho are seeking, searching, wanting something more; and there is a management crisis among clergy as they endeavour to cope both with the changes that are taking place, and with the change in their own role, from being a one-man-band to being the conductor of an orchestra (page 5).

In the years since, the Church has begun to acknowledge that the mission of God is the calling of the whole church not just the professional few. The ordination service includes the statement:

The Church is the Body of Christ, the people of God and the dwelling-place of the Holy Spirit. In baptism, the whole Church is summoned to witness to God’s love and work for the coming of his kingdom (Common Worship Ordination Services, page 32)

Moreover, the Church is gradually becoming increasingly dependent on voluntary lay leadership. In 2016, the Church Army report The Day of Small Things estimated that 40% of fresh expressions of church were led by people it described as ‘lay-lay’: lay people with no formal ministerial training. In recent years, an increasing number of dioceses have adopted schemes to train lay people for ‘focal ministry’, exercising the leadership of their local church with oversight from the clergy.

One would think, therefore, that the Church would make it a priority to train its clergy and lay ministers to move from the ‘one-man-band’ model of ministry to the ‘conductor of an orchestra’: to train, equip and empower others for ministry. Sadly, this is not the case. A piece of research by Hilary Ison and Liz Graveling, part of the Church of England’s ‘Living Ministry’ research programme, followed the progress of two members of the clergy moving from curacy into first incumbency (Living Ministry Focused Study 1: Collaborative Ministry and Transitions to First Incumbency, July 2019). Both believed strongly in the ministry of the whole church, had served their curacies in thriving churches in which lay ministry was welcomed and encouraged and wished to work collaboratively in their new parishes. Neither, however, had received any intentional training in collaborative working either at theological college or from their training incumbents. Both, on moving to their new churches, encountered embedded cultures of deference and the expectation that the vicar would function as a ‘solo practitioner’, a situation for which nothing in their training had equipped them.

In The Life and Work of a Priest (SPCK, 2007), John Pritchard recalls the occasion during the time he taught in a theological college when four former students returned to speak to current ordinands about their experience of ministry. ‘One wise student asked them what they now wished they had received more preparation for while at college. Each one replied unequivocally that they wished they had learned more about adult education.’ Since 2007, the Common Awards suite of modules, used by most training institutions, has come to include modules on adult education. But my impression is that these are used by only a minority of institutions. And, crucially, neither do most staff have training or expertise in adult education.*

The second necessary transition is, therefore, severely impeded by the persistence of the nineteenth century professional model of ‘one-man-band’ ministry, a model which was described as long ago as 1983 as an ‘extinct Victorian type’ (in John Tiller, A Strategy for the Church’s Ministry, Church Information Office, 1983, §161). Especially, it is impeded by the failure of most training institutions to recognise and respond to the priority of training ministers to equip others for both discipleship and ministry.

3. What does it mean to be a Christian? from churchgoer to follower of Jesus.

This is by far the most fundamental transition and the one with which the Church is struggling the most. It is the first of three core priorities in the Church’s Vision and Strategy: ‘To become a church of missionary disciples where all God’s people are free to live the Christian life, wherever we spend our time Sunday to Saturday.’ The idea of whole-life discipleship, long advocated by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity (LICC) has now been embraced by the Church under the designation ‘everyday faith’. It refers to the call to live out the Christian faith in all the spheres of life: the workplace, the family, voluntary activities and leisure pursuits.

Jesus taught his disciples to make the kingdom of God our top priority and to pray daily for its coming. To seek the kingdom through the way we live our everyday lives therefore follows naturally as an aspect of the call to participate in God’s mission. However, for generations the Church’s understanding of what it means to be a Christian has been centred on church attendance, with every other aspect of Christian faith, such as prayer and Bible reading, stewardship of money and service in the community an additional optional extra. And for society in general, a Christian is still widely thought of as someone who ‘goes to church’.

If Christians are to understand and embrace the unfamiliar concept of everyday faith, the first thing they need is examples of what it might mean. This is the need to which the booklet Calling All God’s People is addressed, as well as a host of personal stories to be found on the Church’s web pages.

Then, they need to be equipped and empowered to take faith into everyday life. And here again, the Church’s training institutions are woefully underperforming. A piece of research that I organised for the Diocese of Oxford in 2019 found that when it came to encouraging ordinary churchgoers to live out their faith in everyday life, ministerial training was more likely disable the Church’s ministers than equip them. The following remarks that I reported in a subsequent article were typical of those that occurred in focus groups:

• I was coming at it from the point of view of someone who’s late to her first degree and is now serving in a parish where twenty five percent of the working age population have no academic formal qualifications … I’m aware that when I use complicated vocabulary – because I’ve just come out of theological college and that’s what I’ve been trained to do in essays – that I’m speaking in a language that has vocabulary that they just don’t understand. So, I have been mentored through three years of: use more complicated language; get your sentence structure right, you know, … and I’m speaking to a bunch of people who don’t know what I’m saying anymore. I’ve been over-educated to connect with my population …

• Maybe when I get out the other side of this then I will find some useful books that I can read that will connect me with my situation but through this last three and a half years it’s been so many books to read that are useful for writing essays but maybe not for anything else.

• I do a YouTube channel – involves discipleship – and I look at and research a lot of questions that people are asking – of Christians, or Christians are asking – and I make videos about them. And yet all of those questions that you can easily find in a Google search, we don’t address at church … And that’s why I say there’s a disconnect; we’re teaching from the Bible, but they’re going: well, my friend’s asking this question. You haven’t equipped me … We are theologically speaking about some amazing things and pulling stuff out, like, Paul said this, and this is how we live our lives, and a lot of people go, yeah, but Mark asked me a question yesterday and I can’t answer it, and it’s so disconnected.

In Ephesians, Paul writes that the function of leadership roles in the church is to ‘equip the saints for the work of ministry’ (4:12). He goes on to envisage a church growing to maturity in love as each person is enabled to discern and use their gifts for the glory of God and the coming of his kingdom. As long as the Church continues to work on the basis of an ‘extinct Victorian type’ of professional model for its clergy, spends virtually all its attention on the training of this tiny minority of its members, and fails to equip those few to enable and equip others, it will continue to struggle with the transitions it needs to make to adapt to an entirely new context.

*Since 2022, there has existed an online training programme for theological educators to enable them to learn the skills needed to train ministers to equip others. It is available on the Common Awards Hub and, for those without access to Common Award, on the Anglican Communion Moodle site.