Essentials
The Future of Multi-site Churches
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- Written by: James Hornby
I landed in Launceston in 2017 to begin as Rector of St John’s and joined a Diocese that has an incredible vision ‘to be a Church for Tasmania making disciples of Jesus.’ My problem wasn’t ‘what’; it was ‘how’. How would we take that vision and, under God, attempt to see that come to pass in our little neck of the woods? It became clear we weren’t alone in that wondering. Nine other Anglican churches across greater Launceston were wrestling with the same. That’s right, ten Anglican churches across a regional city. Where I’m from, given the population, that sounded like a lot. And these other nine, like us, were largely struggling to reach people with the good news of Jesus. Faithful in worship. Absent (almost) in mission, Struggling with discipleship. I’m sure not an isolated story.
A year later, I’d been meeting with a small group of visionary, strategic Anglicans, representing several churches and an idea emerged. What if we came together? Our collective response was ‘Impossible!’ If there’s one thing true about Tasmania, it’s how parochial we are. But the idea wouldn’t go away. A nurse doing her PhD offered us the latest demographic data from her research, and the idea began to take shape. I met with all the local clergy, and together, choosing to put aside any differences for the sake of the Kingdom, we developed a strategic approach to future Anglican ministry in Launceston and surrounds.
The Compliance Crunch
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- Written by: Matt Williams
“The system is breaking. Let it break. Your first job is to ensure it doesn’t break you. Then stick around to help us build the new one.”
It seems a bit pompous to begin an article quoting myself, but I do so to illustrate that this has been going on for some time.
Back when the Diocese of Melbourne invested in a solid program for equipping new Priests-in-Charge of parishes (EPIC) they used to invite me back for some frank talk with my colleagues. I always said something along these lines.
Let it break. Your first job is to ensure it doesn’t break you.
The overall structure of our church is not fit for purpose. In many ways, we still have a nineteenth-century structure attempting to satisfy twenty-first century compliance demands. The inevitable result of this is a failure to comply, massive inefficiencies in resource allocation, and the burnout of many of those trying to hold things together in the interim with string and spreadsheets.
Let it break. Your first job is to ensure it doesn’t break you.
We should notice that we’re not alone here. This issue is not peculiar to the church. It’s a widespread problem in professional vocations – education, health, and social workers are all drowning in it, vocationally disoriented, burning out, and leaving in droves.
The whole approach of society to risk is to imagine that everything could have been prevented if only another piece of paper had been filled out. So, each time something goes wrong somewhere sometime; the paperwork and mental load is increased for everyone everywhere all the time.
This is unsustainable. Something bigger must come eventually, in the break of this whole system and the approach of our society to risk management. The pendulum is swinging to maximal red tape.
Let it break. Your first job is to ensure it doesn’t break you.
And yet, the problem in the church is worse. Because even if that pendulum swings back to a reasonable centre, our structures are still not fit for purpose.
Let us speak frankly, for the time is short. These are our problems:
- We do not have an alignment of responsibility, visibility, and capacity to act.
- We cannot create that alignment with a heavily decentralised system, which is what we have.
- Parishes do not trust the centre enough to allow it to centralise.
- The centre does not have the visibility of the parishes to centralise competently.
- Therefore the work of bearing responsibility is shafted onto vicars; the work of being the conduit of visibility is shafted onto vicars; and all expectations of action are shafted onto vicars.
- Vicars have not been selected or trained for anything like that skill set.
These are problems which have proved intractable for a long time. This is not something solved by pat answers, like “just preach the gospel”. We need strategic managerial reform, because bad management hinders gospel preaching. We need, in a word, centralisation.
But can we trust our centre to competently centralise? From a long history of past performance and false starts, not really.
To break this impasse, we need to solve the fourth problem, and then use that to solve the third. We need to engineer systems that build visibility of parish life to the centre. Then – and only then - parishes should hand the centre trust to take over safety, compliance and property management tasks based upon that visibility. If the centre can truly see them, we might believe they can actually do them, and let go.
The order is important. Centralising before visibility will fail to solve the problem and damage trust further, because the centre will be working blind, and we will both fall into a pit.
If we can achieve those two things, building a virtuous circle of central competence and parish trust, a world of good can break out. Management tasks will disappear from vicar’s heads, they will be vocationally realigned, spend more time on the things they are trained for and passionate about, and more missionally effective.
The people responsible for things will be able to see if they are actually doing them right down to the parish level, through a series of reports.
And so responsibility, visibility, and capacity to act will belong to the same people, those people will be selected and trained for those tasks, and they won’t be the vicars.
That’s the dream. But the reality will be bumpier than that. Real people doing real jobs make real mistakes. Parishes are notoriously suspicious of giving up power. And this is definitely that.
But it’s the only way out. We must support and encourage the centralisation of safety, compliance and property management tasks – even if our own parish can currently do it better than the centre.
We must encourage and honour those doing the slog work of compliance for us, not allowing them to be invisible.
We must use our power to strengthen others, rather than to think of our power as something to be grasped.
Huh. Sounds like someone else I know. Perhaps the solution lies in preaching the gospel after all.
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus… Philippians 2:5
Rev'd Canon Matt Williams is the Vicar at St James' Old Cathedral, Melbourne West
Parish Renewal in Tasmania
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- Written by: Richard Condie
The Anglican Church has for a long time held an audacious aspiration to reach the whole world with the gospel through the Parish system. Dividing up a diocese into a patchwork of joined geographic units, so that everywhere was “someone’s responsibility” has been a remarkable vision. It demonstrates a gospel commitment to the world, not just to the faithful who gather in church buildings each Sunday.
In Tasmania this has been a such a gift. Someone is looking out for people’s spiritual welfare in the remote and sparsely populated regions of the west coast, just as much as the battler suburbs of northern Hobart. But the traditional model of the Parish, with the priest dispensing the weekly word and sacraments and expecting people to come is not a model that meets the mission needs of the 21st Century.
Editorial Winter 2024
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- Written by: Stephen Hale
The Future Of The Parish
This edition of Essentials is focussed on this pressing question. In it we explore a range of dimensions to this big question. As we all know things aren’t all that great in many, many, parishes. Given the Anglican Church is structured around the parish what might the future look like. I have previously written in Essentials about the forthcoming Great Collapse in the Autumn 2023 Edition.
There are lots of great articles here and all is not gloom and doom. Alongside of the many struggling churches there are lots of great stories of renewal and change in lots of different contexts. In this edition we feature a Diocesan perspective as well as a look at a range of models of what’s happening on the ground.
We recently held the National Evangelical Anglican Conference in Sydney. It was a wonderful Conference, and we were greatly blessed by the ministry of Rev Charlie Skrine from All Soul’s Langham Place as our international guest speaker. We hope to feature some of the talks in future editions.
STEPHEN HALE, LOCATION, EDITOR
Essentials - Winter 2024
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- Written by: Chris Porter
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Sing Lustily and with a Good Courage!
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- Written by: Angela Chandler
Sing Lustily and with a Good Courage! [i]
Growing your church through a welcoming music ministry
Most of my life has been spent in small to medium sized churches with limited resources and one main congregation catering for all ages. Although I have trained as a professional musician, one of my special areas of interest has been encouraging people to participate in communal music-making with whatever experience or skill they have. I have delighted in gathering together a community choir for carol services, hand drumming sessions at our after-school kids club, and nurturing the skills of young musicians in our church.
I am grateful for the reflections of some of the participants on their teenage experience in these activities over the years, which are included in this discussion.
Engaging the Heart & the Mind
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- Written by: Alanna Glover and Philip Percival. © Emu Music
Have you ever watched the musical, the Wizard of Oz? I once read about the characters of Tinman and Scarecrow being used to depict the divide that seems to exist in much of our contemporary church music[1]. In the story, Tinman has a brain, but not a heart; Scarecrow has a heart but not a brain; and so they follow the yellow brick road in order to find their missing pieces. Contemporary congregational music is often thought of in the same way. Some songs are ‘Tinman’ songs, they are rich in theology but fail to engage people’s emotions. Others are ‘Scarecrow’ songs that are emotive or catchy, but lack theological depth and end up stirring people through their melodies and experience rather than Biblical truth.