Church of England – Page 3

All Change (and they don’t owe you)

Today is the penultimate day of clearing out my office. I’m cooking. it’s 9pm and I’m sitting in the kitchen, waiting for the pork chops with celeriac and apple and new potatoes to reach perfection. And I’m exhausted!\r\n\r\nThe office move has taken six weeks. That’s six weeks of clearing space in my small home to make space for the equipment, materials and furniture I’m moving from my small office. It’s amazing how much can be carefully slotted into small spaces.\r\n\r\nAnd tomorrow is adverts day for jobs in the Church of England, and along with at least six of my contemporaries that I know about I will be studying the options and possible moves around the country.\r\n\r\nI’m hoping that exactly the right job appears but the reality is that it’s hard to get a job in the church at the moment. This is partly due to the large reduction in full time clergy posts taking place across the country, plus the unusually high number of existing experienced clergy currently looking for a change in post, plus the high number of curates looking too, many of whom would make excellent incumbents, and perhaps my unusual personal style and CV won’t help me land a traditional role either.\r\n\r\nSo from this weekend I’m without work, without an office, and looking for a job in a highly competitive field.\r\n\r\nOn Tuesday I wake up with nothing in the diary and nowhere to go.\r\n\r\nGreat!\r\n\r\nNo really … great!\r\n\r\nI do not expect the Church of England to be the answer to my personal needs – for money, security, purpose or satisfaction in ministry. I am responsible for my own well being. The church doesn’t owe me. And likewise I remain open to the fact that churches (or even The Church) might not think I’m the answer to it’s needs at this time.\r\n\r\nIt may be a pedantic semantic clarification, but the call on my life is God’s call not mine. I may aspire to say my time is God’s time, but the opposite is true too: His time is my time. We have a shared history, God and I, and it’s brought us to this place: my history in some way a part of His history.\r\n\r\nAnd so with pockets full of skills and experiences and creativity, if I’m not chosen for the jobs I think are ideal for me – I’ll make my own future in a place where we (me, the people I live with, God) can flourish.

Problems with Pioneers – Personal Funding

In a previous related piece – Problems with Pioneers – Revex v Capex Funding – the argument was made that funding pioneers out of diocese or local church funds is difficult, and it’s better for pioneers to obtain their own funding.\r\n\r\nPaul gave us the biblical model for this when he used funds raised in Macedonia to pay for his work in Corinth and from Philipi for his imprisonment in Rome. And when the funding ran out in Thessolonica he and his companions “…worked our fingers to the bone, up half the night, moonlighting so [they] wouldn’t have the burden of supporting them while we proclaimed God’s Message to you”.\r\n\r\nSo before launching out Pioneers need to ask two basic questions. First …\r\n\r\n…do you back yourself to succeed?\r\n\r\nThen ask the question any investor would ask …\r\n\r\n…Why? How do you know? Where’s the evidence? Are you being honest and realistic? (that’s four, I know)\r\n\r\nAnd there is a third question for those who are married…\r\n\r\n…does my husband/wife agree to using our current funds for ministry rather than for our family and pension?\r\n\r\nIf all these questions can be answered positively then crack on and … work out the sums.\r\n\r\nThere are entrepreneurial ways of funding church planting, but the traditional model is to fund one or two ministers for three to five years. So allow £50,000 for one full time minister with a family per year. That’s £250,000 for five years. And don’t forget the possible cost of hiring a venue and equipment.\r\n\r\nSo now all the ducks are in a row, its time to … think about the ‘ownership’ problem.\r\n\r\nIf you can back yourself and raise your own funds why would you do it for a denomination that will not participate in the risk? And if you plant a successful church, and the denomination has not participated in the risk, why would you give them the benefit of your income stream and assets and resources?\r\n\r\nStill interested? Can you afford it? Family on board? Agreed terms with your denomination?\r\n\r\nIf yes – it’s time to plan.\r\n\r\nIf no – it’s time for the church to rethink funding options for church planting …

Transformations: St Peters Bishopsworth (1)

G.L.A.D. – A church near you?

At a conference I attended recently one of the speakers – going ‘off piste’ from his subject of The Environment – started musing openly about various facets of church life, increasing in confusion until he finished with ‘…but what is church anyway?’.

“For goodness sake, is it really that complicated?” I thought, as I do so often nowadays when people pontificate in confusion on this subject.

Anyway, I have my own mnemonic for the simple definition of an effective church, which is G.L.A.D. – being

G – gathered in worship, praise and prayer

L – learning together from experience and scripture

A – active in witness and service inside and outside the church

D – distinctive as a community – living well in difficult times.

So, how do you become an effective church leader?

Keep it simple and focus on these few key essentials of an effective church.

(… closely related to ‘The Big Four of Discipleship’)

Discipleship Strategy

A quick post … no explanation … just a sketch from my journal starting to map out a modular approach to discipleship – growing in knowledge, practice and service …\r\n\r\n

Problems with Pioneers – Revex v Capex Funding

Where does the money for organisational growth come from?\r\n\r\nIn business, the first place to look for new project funding is usually from revenue; can growth be funded out of revenue expenditure – or revex?\r\n\r\nBut increasing revex without increasing income reduces profit, and depending on the speed of return from the new investment this lower bottom line can cause problems in cash flow, confidence and shareholder patience.\r\n\r\nSo can new project funding be justified out of capital expenditure – or capex?\r\n\r\nIt depends. While capex is limited usually to acquiring or improving physical assets, it may be sometimes possible to use capex to start a new business to grow the company.\r\n\r\nBut again the bottom line is – the bottom line: in broad terms any capex investment reduces reserves and unless it can be proven that the investment is either acquiring a genuine asset or creating an opportunity for a certain return, why risk it?\r\n\r\nSo if growth can’t be funded from revenues, asset management or cash reserves, that leaves outside investment from increasing shareholder cash, or increasing debt by borrowing. Again, the simple question has to be asked: why would anyone want to do it? Is it realistic? A good rule is: if it’s such a good idea – borrow from the bank. If that’s a problem, then there’s a bigger problem with the idea.\r\n\r\nNow think about a local church wanting to start a pioneer ministry. How can they pay for it?\r\n\r\nWhat about revex? The reality is that most churches are on the breadline, and don’t have surplus money from income to invest.\r\n\r\nWhat about capex? Again, not realistic as most local churches have no strong cash reserves, and even churches with assets find it difficult to reorganise long term assets to release extra funds in the amounts needed to support a pioneer ministry.\r\n\r\nWhat about Head Office investment – in the Church of England this would be the diocese. Would they invest? Well, how would they? Why would they? With voluntary income generally reducing, value of investments declining, and increases in costs only being mitigated by reducing clergy numbers, what compelling argument can be made to fund some new venture with (usually) untried pioneers?\r\n\r\nWhich leaves ‘shareholder’ investment – raising funds from organisations or individuals either inside or outside the church. And that raises rather complicated questions of ownership – who’s buying what and who eventually owns what?\r\n\r\nSo. Want to be a pioneer? Then more likely than not you’ll have to find your own support.\r\n\r\nThe Apostle Paul understood 2,000 years ago that it’s better this way.

Living Cities – the need for Creative and Inspired Urban Theology

Living in cities can be challenging, exhausting and exhilarating all at the same time. Some of us love it. Many don’t.

\r\nHow can the church flourish (or even survive) in the modern city, when everyone has so little time and energy for anything but the day-to-day business of staying solvent and sane? In fact, one of the ironies of city churches is that while cities exist because they offer an efficient consolidation of resources, one of the features of many city or urban churches is that they are paired down to the minimum because resources are scarce. I know this having spent all my life in churches serving cities – either city centre, or inner city, or the urban poor.\r\n\r\nAnd yet, one of the hallmarks of the Kingdom of God is growth leading to fruitfulness. It is not scarcity leading to barrenness.\r\n\r\nWhat’s the problem?\r\n\r\nWell, there are lots of problems, but a significant one is that we do not invest enough time in understanding the nature of the urban context in which we witness and worship.\r\n\r\nIt is my firm belief based on years of observation that our praxis (how we act) is weak because our understanding of our context is poor and so our application of theology to our context is immature. I once wrote this:\r\n\r\n“… questions such as …\r\n

… what is this context … how is it formed … how does it form its people … what are its symbols and motifs, its myths and images, and how do they shape the community living amongst them?

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… help unravel our context. When informed by our theology they lead us to the key questions both the urban theologian and the local Christian want to answer:

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“where is God in this context, where does He want to be, and therefore, what should we do?”

\r\nThe praxis of urban life is the concern of the poor, the voiceless, the young, the old, of everyone from the makers of history to the inhabitants of shabby cityscapes. Every participant in an urban context is formed by it in some way … It becomes imperative that somewhere within the urban faith community there should be theologians fully engaged with context to interpret it in the light of their learning.\r\n\r\nSo I’m wondering, how many churches have employed theologians, and maybe anthropologists, historians, sociologists, to help them interpret their context?\r\n\r\nFor those that are interested in how this applies to an inner city context see Experiments in Praxis.\r\n\r\nor click on the icon …\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n

When pruning means cutting growth

We started a new ministry two years ago.

It was popular. It was reasonably well attended.

But after one year we cut the programme.

Why? Because although it had grown, our detailed analysis revealed some interesting facts.

First, although the event had grown its growth was mainly due to people who would have gone to any number of events that were reasonably accessible, reasonably competently run, and populated with people they knew.

Second, it was an inclusive, welcoming environment, and people of all ages and abilities came and worked together on great projects. However, that highlighted the difficulty of bringing established congregation members into something they perceived as too creative and out of the ordinary.

Consequently, and third, the church in which this event was hosted never got behind the programme. In other words (or in our words) the event was not renewing the people we wanted to renew.

So our event was inclusive, and welcoming, and creative, and accessible, and, to an extent, growing. But it was unsustainable. And it was taking a considerable amount of our available leadership resources.

And so we cut it when it seemed to be in its prime. It was sad, but we needed the resources for something more effective.

Anyone who’s pruned roses knows the problem. Roses need pruning in the spring to prepare for growth, and then fast growing suckers need to be removed once the growth starts so energy isn’t drained form the main plant, and they need dead-heading, and they need pruning at the end of the season. All this if they are to reach their best.

In other words, to get a beautiful rose all season the plants need to be pruned surgically and often, from before the beginning until after the end of the growing season.

The only time roses aren’t pruned is in the winter when everything is dead.

And that’s probably true of some churches too.

Six Words for a Simple Plan

It’s great to hear a church leader speak confidently and clearly about the aims of their denomination.\r\n\r\nSo it was this morning, when Chris James, Pastor of Vintage Community Church in Portishead, Bristol and Weston-Super-Mare, told us about the aims of the Assemblies of God churches in Britain.\r\n\r\n”We are Apostolically Led, Relationally Connected and Missionally Focused.” he said.\r\n\r\nThat’s it.\r\n\r\nSix words giving a simple and yet dynamic purpose for 600 churches.\r\n\r\nMemorable. Transferable. Legible.\r\n\r\nDefined but with enough scope to allow freedom of thought.\r\n\r\nIs that your church?\r\n\r\nIs that you?\r\n\r\nIf not, try it. Write a six word, memorable, legible, dynamic purpose for yourself or your church.

Community Mission in the Inner City

In 2009 I initiated a community mission in Easton. We called it ‘Easter Outdoors’. We carried out activities that grew our community engagement – from cleaning streets to celebrating Easter day outdoors with our multinational community: a combination of balloon twisting, BBQ halal burgers and celebratory worship.\r\n\r\nI wrote a report.\r\n