Leadership and Church Growth

In this article on the relationship between Leadership and Church Growth, Rt Revd Adrian Newman reprises some thoughts that he first articulated in a Church Times article a few years ago…

Over the past few years we have witnessed the Church of England invest a lot in leadership development, on the basis that good leadership is a critical feature of a healthy church. Fair enough – I think most of us would prefer a good leader to a bad one.

But there is an unspoken assumption about leadership which I will always want to challenge, and it’s this: “where you have a good Vicar you will find growing churches”.

It’s true that successful organisations are enormously indebted to good leadership. But does the ecclesiastical equivalent reduce to an apparently simple equation: Good Vicar = Growing Church?

While the logic seems straightforward enough, there is a deeper discussion to be had. To start with, good vicars are necessary but not sufficient for churches to grow. I have been privileged to work alongside some of the best Vicars you could ever hope to meet – yet, while some of their churches grew, some did not. This is a pattern you will find repeated in areas of urban deprivation across the country.

I find that the ‘standard’ growth formula of growing suburban churches rarely works in deprived parishes, where confident and able lay leadership can be scarce, upward mobility robs churches of asset bases, and the dysfunctionality of everyday living means that congregations can contain a disproportionate number of needy individuals. There are numerous well-researched inhibitors to growth in the inner city, even in the most vital and vibrant churches, even with the best Vicars.

Then there is the growth agenda itself. On a national level, the Church’s first quinquennial aim is “to take forward the spiritual and numerical growth of the Church of England – including the growth of its capacity to serve the whole community of this country”. In the face of inexorably falling numbers, it’s little wonder that numerical growth is a priority – as a statistician in a former life, I would be the first to recognise the challenge in the trends of church attendance and Christian commitment facing the Church of England. But the quinquennial goal is about more than numbers – it is about advancing the mission of the Church in other, non-numerical ways, such as deepening our commitment to a sustainable environment, engaging with poverty and inequality, strengthening our work in education and healthcare, speaking and acting in the public square, and addressing the worlds of business, commerce, politics, sport, the creative arts and much more.

All of this sets the context of what we mean when we talk about a growing Church: it is only partially about the numbers. Growth cannot be an end in itself. Like the Church, it must serve a higher calling.

That higher calling is what takes us into the socio-political dimensions of human life, to food-banks and foster-homes, schools and night shelters, credit unions and creative industries. This is about being a church – and a priest – for the parish, the nation, the world; and it may not lead to numerical growth at all. Sometimes the church may have to lose itself to find itself, to disappear in order to be true to its calling. This idea, based on the theological and Christological notion of kenosis, suggests that we are called as a church to ‘give ourselves away’. It is a counter-intuitive calling for the church, not necessarily to grow and be strong but to be faithful.

And if it is true that growth happens more easily within suburban contexts, then it is also the case that it follows the natural grain of culture and homogeneity. In other words, like attracts like.

Yet, in an increasingly fragmented and tribal world, maybe God is calling His Church to create and become communities of difference? If we are to be icons of hope perhaps diversity is the key, a kaleidoscopic community struggling with the harmony.

Growing this type of a church is, however, hard and counter-intuitive. Networked, homogenous communities (which make up a large proportion of ‘Fresh Expressions’) can allow people to opt out of locational responsibilities – and if the pandemic has exposed anything for us, it is the vital importance of the local. Therefore approaches to mission that focus on network communities can be highly effective but seriously deficient – and an emphasis on growth will be misguided if it only adopts models of homogeneity, because what we ‘grow’ might not be a fully authentic expression of a Christian church for a divided world.

Ultimately, that simple equation - Good Vicar = Growing Church - needs to be nuanced if it is to have real value for us in facing the challenges ahead.

How, then, might we frame the discussion about growth and good Vicars from this point? I believe that the growth agenda is vital for a flourishing church, and a flourishing church is vital for a healthy society. But it cannot, must not, be growth at all or any costs. ‘Good’ growth will have these marks:

• It will hold a priority for the poor (empowering not paternalistic)
• It will have a tendency to heterogeneity (communities of difference not similarity)
• It will emphasise the radical (free but not cheap grace)
• It will affirm the indigenous (local not dislocated)
• It will be wired for longevity (deep roots not shallow)

If my experience across 35 years of public ministry is anything to go by, this sort of growth is possible – far from easy, but possible. It may emerge on a smaller scale than we might like but it has authenticity and integrity when it does so. What is more, it might just help us know what it means to be a good vicar as well.......