Developing Healthy Churches

Returning to the Heart of Mission and Ministry

Robert Warren

• Publisher: Church House Publishing
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780715142813
• eBook ISBN: 9780715146781
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Developing Healthy Churches is an utterly practical and realistic guide for any leader seeking to revitalize and grow their church.The long-awaited sequel to the bestselling Healthy Churches' Handbook, this new volume will help you implement tried and tested approaches for healthy church growth in your parish.

Part 1: Foundations

Chapter 1. What’s it all about?

These are challenging days in the life of the Church.

It is called upon to bear witness to ‘eternal verities’ in a world addicted to what is new, and guided by personally constructed creeds drawn from a mish-mash of philosophies. It is called to ‘be still and know that I am God’ in a world where everyone is rushing about and fearful of stillness or silence. It is called to be a community in a world focused on the freedom and independence of the individual, indeed where identity is defined over against any community or norms of society. Moreover the Church, that has for so long been at the centre of society and government, and has become used to its role at the centre of power, now finds itself marginalized and, at least relatively, powerless.

The word parochial says it all. We understand it to point to what is local, predictable, normal and safe. Above all it points to a sense of rootedness and belonging. Yet the word comes from Peter’s description of the churches to which he wrote, and, translated literally, means ‘aliens’, or rather, ‘resident aliens’: the odd ones, the misfits. As the epistle to Diognetus, written in ad 150 puts it:

They live in countries of their own, but simply as sojourners; they share the life of citizens, they endure the lot of foreigners; every foreign land is to them a fatherland, and every fatherland a foreign land.1

In such challenging circumstances it is hardly surprising that many churches are in decline numerically and ageing in the process. The older generation is not being replaced.2 Declining church incomes are a headache for many, sucking some churches in a fund-raising spiral which ends up consuming virtually all the church’s energies and attention. While all this is happening, clergy numbers are in decline, with 41 per cent of stipendiary clergy and 60 per cent of all currently serving clergy due to retire by 2020.

But it is not just the statistics. In many ways the culture is against us. Our Christian heritage seems like a steadily retreating tide. The Christian ethical framework plays a decreasing part in shaping much of the contemporary moral climate. Things are not looking good.

Yet the tide is not all one way. Some churches, indeed dioceses, are seeing growth. People continue to come to faith, and many personal stories on Songs of Praise are remarkable ones of faith being lived out in testing circumstances and people experiencing the reality of God in the darkest of settings. Good news happens.

That happening of the good news of Jesus Christ comes, very often, through the Church; whether in the sense of the Church itself doing things that help people come to faith, or people finding in Christians (who are the Church) the way to God and to finding meaning and purpose in life.

Like a small boat caught in the midst of strong cross-currents, the Church needs to know where it is going. It also needs to hold fast to that ultimate vision, however much it feels pulled in different directions. It may take all our energies to navigate our way through these currents, so it is vital that limited energies are used well.

The heart of the matter

The first mark of a healthy church: it is energized by faith

The management guru Tom Peters advises businesses, when facing adverse trading conditions, to ‘stick to the knitting’; that is, to focus on their core business. The Church today needs to be clear about its core business and avoid getting distracted into other matters, however attractive and enticing.

Although the Church is not a business, we can sharpen our perception if we use familiar marketing terminology to identify what we are about. So what is the Church’s core business? The central thesis of this book is that the ‘product’ which the Church is called to ‘market’ is nothing other than the knowledge of God. ‘Knowledge’ is meant here in its primary sense of knowing someone rather than gathering information.

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Biblical roots

The whole of scripture is the story of people who encountered God and for whom that meeting permanently transformed who they were and what they did.

Abraham: the senior citizen becomes Abraham the pilgrim as he responds to God’s call to go to the land God would show him. Abraham and Sarah, the childless senior citizens, became the parents of a vast people. The whole story unfolds in terms of their many encounters with God.

Moses: the bulrushes-baby and palace-misfit finds his vocation at a burning bush in the desert while in enforced early retirement. There he meets with God and not only leads the children of Israel across the Red Sea, but teaches the whole world, through the Ten Commandments, an ethical framework for living and for society that has never been surpassed.

Jesus: proclaimed at his birth as Son of God, encounters God in his baptism as the one who defines him in terms of his relationship with God: ‘You are my Son, the Beloved’ after which he devotes his life to pursuing that relationship and passing it on to the new Israel he brings into being.

Paul: knocked off his horse by the presence of God and off his high horse of prejudice against Jesus Christ, goes on to live his life in response to the call of God at every turn, laying the foundations of the faith and the Church as he does so.

Scripture is the record of people encountering the holiness of God.

Classic texts: The many Gospel encounters with Jesus (e.g. Bartimaeus Mark 10.46–52); Hebrews 13.

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As John Baillie, the Scottish theologian, put it many years ago, in the opening sentence of his book, Our Knowledge of God:

The great fact for which all religion stands is the confrontation of the human soul with the transcendent holiness of God.3

Albert Einstein was feeling his way after this knowledge when he wrote:

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man … I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvellous structure of existence – as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.4

This is what the Church, with limited resources, needs to devote its energies and attention and best endeavours to today. This is always how the Church finds the renewal of its life and vitality. The New Testament church, the monastic movement, the Celtic saints and church, the Reformation, the Evangelical Revival, the Oxford Movement and Charismatic Renewal, to name but a few, are all examples of what happens when the pursuit of the knowledge of God moves centre stage in the life of the Church. As Bishop Alan Smith puts it:

The focus of all that we are and all that we do is God. It is not, in the first instance, church – or even mission. When other things become our main focus we will be little more than a campaigning group … a heritage lobby, a self-help group catering for the needs of its members, or simply an outdated organization looking beyond its membership to delay the arrival of its sell-by date.5

This knowledge of God can be seen as operating in three intertwined dimensions, illustrated in the diagram on page 7.

This is the heart of the Christian faith, this is what it is all about, knowing God. Yet in the busy-ness of church life it is all too easy to miss it. The ‘heart’ in scripture is the seat of our rel...

Table of contents

• Copyright information
• Contents
• Marks of a healthy church
• Introduction
• Part 1: Foundations
• Chapter 1. What’s it all about?
• Chapter 2: Overcoming obstacles
• Chapter 3. Rich resources
• Chapter 4. Living the Christian distinctives
• Part 2: Practicalities
• Chapter 5. Nurturing spirituality
• Chapter 6. Re-working pastoral care
• Chapter 7. Re-working home groups
• Chapter 8. Re-working giving
• Chapter 9. Re-working evangelism
• Chapter 10. Re-working mission
• Part 3: Resources
• Introduction
• Study questions
• Leaders’ resources