Alan Stanley puts forward a vision for the future.
There are, of course, many models for lay-led churches. The question for Anglicans and others with either episcopal or an equivalent ecclesiology is how to develop a lay led church without resorting to a congregational model.
As we mature, we add experience to the original ‘deposit of faith’ and it changes us – changes how we think, speak, act and pray. We learn that faithfulness does not involve circling the waggons to defend our position against attack, but willingness to step out ‘beyond’, following the God who goes before us.1
Let us take an imaginary parish church, All Saints, which is without an incumbent.
A confident congregation
The diocese is one with a wealth of lay training which All Saints has benefited from over many years. It has a couple of people who are confident to lead a home study group, an informal pastoral care group which also looks after bereaved people, and a reasonably resourced but small group of people who love working with children and young people. A few people from All Saints have attended diocesan courses which have led to them being authorised as pastoral assistant, worship leader and occasional preacher, and there is in place one Licenced Lay Minister and one in training.
The diocese has also provided training for churchwardens, PCC secretaries, intercessors and church treasurers, all of which the various post holders have attended. Since the last incumbent left, the churchwardens have held monthly meetings with the other PCC officers, the LLM, children and youth leader and the pastoral assistant. This group has provided leadership on day-to-day matters with the more strategic decisions being discussed by the PCC. The churchwardens have been able to consult the area dean and the archdeacon for matters which are either beyond their remit or on which they need guidance. Services of Holy Communion, baptism and marriage have been arranged with local or diocesan clergy through a contact list provided by the diocese. Funerals have mostly been taken by the LLM.
The All Saints’ congregation is used to having a service of Holy Communion on two Sundays each month, their previous incumbent being shared with another parish. With the support of the lay worship leader, occasional preacher, the All Age Worship team and the LLM, this pattern of needing a visiting priest to take Communion services, along with baptisms and weddings, was sustainable. The congregation was understanding if visiting clergy could not be found for two Sundays a month and were happy to drop to one Communion a month when necessary. Permission has just been granted for the LLM to take a Public Worship with Communion by Extension service when a priest cannot be found.
The work of the pastoral visitors continues, and the pastoral assistant convenes regular support meetings, as do the children and youth team leader. The worship leader and occasional preacher have been meeting for some time as a small peer support group convened by the LLM, and the home study group leaders join the leadership group once a term to discuss the direction the group should take.
The diocese runs a Leading Your Church into Growth course, and the archdeacon has invited All Saints to send two members to the next one. Two volunteers have been found, and the church is gradually adopting their suggestions.
All Saints has not ended up in the happy position of being able to sustain its own life by chance. Its previous incumbent knew that one day she would leave, and that cuts in diocesan budgets meant she would probably not be replaced by an equivalent minister, so she had planned and worked for the time when the church would have to be self-sufficient.
What is missing from the life of All Saints? It has a connection with the wider Church through the area dean, archdeacon, and visiting clergy. It is nourished by episcopal ministry through the support provided by the diocese for its wide variety of ministries. Its ministry is episcopally controlled. This is primarily through the churchwardens, who are officers of the bishop. The bishop’s oversight is strengthened in depth through episcopal authorisation of the pastoral assistant, worship leader and occasional preacher and the licensing of its LLM. The saints are in effect equipped for their ministry by the work of the bishop through the diocesan training team, so are truly an episcopally-led church, which is fulfilling the injunction in Ephesians (4: 12–13).
Challenges
However, All Saints does face a number of challenges. The duties and responsibilities of the churchwardens are enshrined in law and are very wide ranging (one diocese lists eighty-three of them in its guidance to wardens!)2 and it is not clear that anyone will be willing to take on the load when the current wardens retire. The PCC had been hoping to install screens so that printed service material could be reduced, and to replace the pews with chairs so that the nave could be used for community activities as well as worship. However, the difficult and lengthy process to get diocesan approval for these changes, plus the potentially heavy legal consequences if the church does not follow the procedure accurately, has placed something of a dampener on these ambitions.
One of the biggest challenges that the PCC faces is in moving from a hierarchical pattern of leadership to a flat and collaborative one. Everything that it has experienced so far in the church has been predicated on the pyramid model, including the previous incumbent’s work to make the church self-sustaining. One of the churchwardens is an entrepreneur who has successfully founded and grown a number of small businesses using a flat management model. This, she found, really helped everyone in the business to feel deeply involved and confident to work passionately and with minimum supervision in their own particular area. She is acutely aware that some of the most successful companies like Amazon and Google have this sort of flat management system. She would like to introduce this model to the life of the church but feels frustrated at the constant clashing with the pyramid model where every initiative has to be sent up the line for approval. This recently came to a head in discussion with the diocese about the screens, pews and chairs, when the overwhelming sense was that some remote level in the pyramid would need to make decisions which, in her experience, should be made at local level.
She is aware that in her many years in the commercial world, management and leadership patterns have changed over time. When she ran her first business, she was the boss, and everyone did what she decided. The lessons she learnt from the bursting of the dot.com bubble in the mid 1990s totally changed her subsequent leadership style. She moved her business from what she now thinks of as a dead-handed majestic monolith into small, nimble units that could respond rapidly to changing opportunities. She abandoned the old organisational charts and replaced them with interaction charts. Most of the more successful companies that she did business with had also recognised the many disadvantages of the pyramid structure. This made working with others much more creative.
The contrast between her working environment, where good communication, making friends not enemies, innovation and reinventing the way people work together produced team commitment and dedication, and how as a churchwarden she is required to relate to the diocese and the parish is huge. She will not be disappointed when her term of office ends.
Afterword
All Saints has been operating (in my dreams) as a lay-led church for five years now. The leadership team consists of two wardens who between them keep an eye on fabric and finance, a member for each of the children and youth teams, the pastoral visiting and worship leader’s teams and the Reverend Sue. Sue is a self-supporting minister who, in return for free housing, gives the equivalent of two days plus two Sundays a month to the parish. Sue has been given a brief by the whole team to spend time praying and being available for people. She has been asked to keep her parish diary as light as possible.
Sue has found that she is often approached by people from both the congregation and the community for advice and prayer. Numbers in the fellowship groups and Sunday services have been gradually rising. The leadership team believes that growth through relationships has happened as a direct result of the leadership, and through it the whole church, being relational not hierarchical. The most important incremental decision facing the leadership team now is how to refresh its membership without losing the trust that has developed between them.
The fundamental question which All Saints seems to have answered in a pragmatic way, is ‘Is the church defined by her ordained ministry or the ordained ministry defined by the church?’ Vatican II points us to the latter by designating ministry as service. The Roman Catholic theologian Peter Neuner pithily points out the implications of this:
A service can be defined only in the light of that which it has to serve, for the sake of which it is there. That means that the ministry is defined in terms of the church, and not the church in terms of the ministry.3
All Saints has defined the ministry of leadership in terms of its whole community, not in terms of one ordained person. Will the Church of England ever have the courage to follow the aptly named All Saints?
Alan Stanley is an LLM in the Elmete Trinity Benefice, Leeds Diocese. He is also a part-time prison chaplain.
References
- J P Williams, J P, Seeking the God Beyond: A Beginner’s Guide to Christian Apophatic Spirituality. London: SCM Press, 2018, p.42.
- Lichfield, accessed at: https://ecclawsoc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Churchwardens-Induction-Handbook-2017.docx
- Neuner, P, ‘Ministry in the Church: changing identity’. In: Kerkhofs, J (ed) Europe Without Priests? London: SCM Press, 1995, p.130.