In the coming months the PCC and its working parties will be reflecting on the journey this church has come in the last fifteen years and where you might hope to go in the years ahead with a new vicar. They will also be anxious to hear the views any of you might have.
A few days ago I had lunch with my first curate here, Matthew Woodward, who is now working in the Transfiguration Episcopal Church, San Mateo, California. His congregation is only a little smaller than ours and with a similar churchmanship and membership, professionally and educationally. He too is thinking about growth and development.
The American Episcopal Church has perhaps done more thinking than is readily available in the Church of England about congregational size and growth. A standard form of categorisation describes the Family Church (0-50 members), the Pastoral Church (50-150) the Programme Church (150-350) and the Corporation Church (300-500+). Both the Transfiguration Church and St John’s are on the boundaries between the Pastoral and the Programme Church.
There are of course differences in patterns of church going between both countries, patterns which have also changed over the years. It is generally assumed that in this country and in the last century it was the case that people went to church most Sundays in the year, whereas the average is usually taken now to be twice a month as defining ‘regular attendance.’ It was probably also the case in a church like St John’s that people for most of the latter half of the last century came to church primarily for the worship, the music and the preaching. They supported the church financially, volunteered for church offices and membership of the PCC and came to church events. They did not perhaps see the church as the source of their primary social relationships, and where they related to other members of the congregation it was through a common interest. This meant sometimes that the church might be described as consisting of a number of cliques.
More recently the pattern of church life has been changing, though in ways that are not easy to define. One change might be described as a greater awareness of the need for mission. Churches are expected to grow. DIoceses put a lot of effort into encouraging them to grow. We are now, however, familiar with the idea that larger churches find it harder to grow. The family church grows more easily into being a pastoral church than a pastoral church grows into being a programme or corporation church. In other words to grow from a regular attendance of below to well above 150 is not easy.
Looking at our statistics over the last 14 years produces the following observations. When I arrived the Electoral Roll had 487 members and an average Sunday attendance in October of 240 with 190 adults and 50 children. The ER was clearly not representative of our regular congregation. The ER in 2014 was 341 with an average Sunday attendance in October of 236 with 181 adults and 56 children. Here the ER is more representative of the congregation which has not changed very much in size. The one significant change is perhaps in the average number of communicants which have fluctuated over the years but show a general decline from 160 in 2001 to 119 in 2014. Overall these figures show that we have been hitting a kind of glass ceiling in numbers but that this has not led us to shrink in size.
We might deduce certain things from this: a lot of hard work has gone into preserving our numbers; all that we do preserves a certain kind of church experience with which people are generally content; we provide an experience of Christian church life which seems to help people in the life of faith. In terms of the categories of church described above and below our numbers clearly indicate that we have already become a Programme church in size while still behaving as a Pastoral church. This would seem to mean, however, that if we wish to grow our experience of this church is likely to change quite significantly. However hard we try to do what we are currently doing we will preserve this congregation but not make it grow. Our current pattern of ministry serves what might be called a maintenance mission – sufficient numbers of people join us so that our overall attendance figures do not shrink but neither do they grow significantly.
And that therefore clearly faces this church with several significant decisions. Are we content with how we are and should the next Vicar be appointed to carry on in his or her own distinctive way what we are familiar with? He or she might bring new interests, new emphasises, but these would not significantly affect the size of the congregation. Or do you want to grow and therefore change? I have been trained over the years in exercising the kind of ministry that you have seen over the last 14 years. A priest who can bring about real growth may need to have had different kinds of training and experience. What this might mean can be seen from a closer look at the American descriptions of Pastoral and Programme churches.
The Pastoral Church relies on the ministry of its priest working with a leadership circle (in our case the Standing Committee and the PCC), which depends on good communication, open, interactive leadership and delegation. The key relationship is still between the priest and the people, though there is also an expectation that people will have a sense of being part of a community where in different ways they can know most other members. The priest and his or her clergy colleagues are seen as the primary preachers, teachers and carers. Such congregations may shrink when they reach a size which means that the priest is regarded as being too busy to see as many people as need his attention, and which also means that there are a lot of ‘strangers’ in the congregation. If, instead of shrinking, the pastoral church is to grow into a programme church there clearly needs to be a lot of consultation and a general agreement that this should be the case. Everyone needs to be behind the idea of growth.
In a Programme Church the clergy cannot hope to have some kind of pastoral contact, however small, with the whole congregation. Many aspects of ministry will have to be delegated either to volunteers or paid members of the leadership team. The clergy will spend more time providing training and support to those to whom they delegate some of their traditional activities such as counselling, teaching, administration, aspects of worship and membership development. The role of the vicar becomes more that of providing vision and encouragement, co-ordinating different ministries, goal setting, strategic planning, and evaluation. As the congregation grows so its members find their natural place in the main groups to which they belong – groups which might concentrate on particular tasks but which also have a regular life together of prayer and study and mutual pastoral care. Communication becomes crucial to ensure that while identifying with their fellow group members, everyone knows what they need to know about what is going on more widely.
Some of this may already be familiar to us. We now have a small visiting team to help us keep in touch with the housebound or those who would appreciate being visited regularly; we held a very successful volunteer led holiday club which brought a good variety of people together and helped develop our contacts with Henderson Court; we have working parties who concentrate on different aspects of the church’s life; we re trying to find a new paid lay leader of our children and youth work; a new PA to the Vicar will be arriving in October; we do our best to make new comers feel welcome both at the door and in new comers’ parties though we have difficulties in providing classes for people new to or returning to the faith; in fact finding time for any kind of faith development is not easy in a congregation of busy people. The American model of a programme church makes social assumptions which in certain ways don’t fit our circumstances.
Perhaps the biggest sense of mismatch, however, may come with the language and the models I have been describing. An easy criticism that is often made is that this is the language of business management which is not appropriate to the church. That may partly be true but it would be interesting to get together a group of church members who have experiences of growing small businesses into larger ones and listening to what challenges faced them and how those challenges were overcome. Is there a ‘wisdom’ there which we might learn from?
Perhaps the title of a ‘Programme’ church is rather uninspiring. And perhaps we could adapt the transatlantic model to a different idea of programming. The Holiday club was a kind of programme which brought people together creatively; the Spring fair might be thought of as a different kind of programme having a similar affect. Both are run without much input from the clergy. What other occasional programmes might be run with significant lay input, bringing people together for a specific and time limited task? It is often said that people at St John’s don’t know each other and that the older and younger members don’t integrate very well. But that view is based on the idea of the Pastoral church where everyone expects to know each other; in the Programme church that is not possible and the main opportunity for people to meet outside their normal social circle is precisely through occasional programmes or activities.
Much of what I have written here will be familiar to some of you – we have been discussing some of these issues for several years now. But I hope this brings together some of the crucial but by no means all the questions you will need to be asking yourselves as you plan for the future.
The Vicar writes
Stephen Tucker