Growth or Renewal?

8 August 2023

I have never felt entirely comfortable with the idea of “going for growth” in a parish context. In an age of declining church attendances, however, it seems not so much tempting as absolutely necessary to wish to shift parishes from “maintenance” to “growth” in strategic planning terms.

The difficulty I have with this is twofold. First, many if not most traditional churches have actually been pretty rubbish at maintenance – and I don’t just mean of the buildings. As congregations have grown progressively older, more often than not the emphasis has been on pastoral care and not doing anything that might cause upset. This has sometimes come at the expense of the maintenance of previous standards. Quality of liturgical provision, hospitality, welcome, outreach, local mission – all these and more can easily dwindle, slowly slowly, without us even noticing. All too easily previous levels of expectation – and previous attendances – have not in fact been “maintained.” And a parish cannot move from “maintenance” to “growth” if maintenance (of congregation size, standards of ministry, and yes, buildings) has not already been the strategic priority.

So the second difficulty is, if not growth, then what?

For some parishes, the initial struggle is to move from decline into maintenance mode – to arrest decline in attendance, set some standards for worship and ministry and stick to them, and address, so far as is financially possible, deferred building maintenance. For some others, the initial challenge is starker. Churches which have dropped below a critical point of viability, in terms of people and/or finances, or moved from one congregation size down to another (eg. from “programme size” [150-350] to “pastoral size” [50-150]) face particular challenges. For these it is no longer a question of getting back into maintenance mode; what is required is Renewal.

Church Renewal is, to my mind, a much more Scriptural and wholistic approach than “going for growth.”

“Behold, I am making all things new” [Rev 21:5]

If I may borrow some rather “Evangelical” language, Scripture suggests that constant renewal is a key part of God’s plan for the Church. Renewal of the people of God is a theme throughout both the Old and New Testaments. Take a moment to recall how many stories speak of that which has fallen into decline or decay or even just sleepiness, and God then bringing it back to life.

Renewal seems to me to be a supremely Scriptural approach to the task of the church in the post-Covid world. Pretty much every church community I know has taken a bit of a battering in recent years. For some it has hastened the next steps in a pre-existing process of generational decline, for others it has come as a rude and unexpected shock. It all cases, however, there is a case to be made for pursuing prayer-driven programmes of parish renewal. We need not to be insisting that God should make our churches this size or that, this demographic or that, but rather praying that God will grant us the needful gift of grace, that we may become living witnesses, transforming both the local church and the wider community around us. Will growth come from renewal? Quite possibly. And indeed one might hope that it is one of the outcomes. It is, however, a consequence, not the only goal. Growth for its own sake commodifies the Gospel in a way I do not find helpful. Aiming to renew the church – making church communities more authentically that which God would have us be – seems to me to be a much healthier strategy.

*Cover image credit - Church Times