I find it relatively easy to forgive people who are sceptical of the Methodist Church, even when they are close to the point of undermining it. After all, the Church belongs to God, and not to us, and whilst congregations rise and fall, the work of God continues. God is big enough to handle the complaint, and we are big enough to listen, even if we become wound-up. Curiously, I find that this distrust of the Church is more apparent in those who are activists and pioneers in the life of the Church. This, I suspect, is for two reasons. Please therefore indulge me in what will be a long introduction to why I have faith in the Methodist Church, and in God for All . (You can, by the way, take my faith in Jesus as read). And also, please do not read this as my questioning our investment in pioneering, innovation and even enabling people who we know will agitate. I write also as a pioneer coach, or at least, someone who does my bit to help bridge the link between the experience of leaders on the margins, and the institution at the center.
First, as a leader I am well aware that there can be genuine problems with how the institution of the church feels at odds with immediate needs on the ground, and of how some our or policies and procedures can feel archaic and non-sensical. This is sometimes a fair point. The issue is not however that the policies are necessarily wrong. it is that they are framed with an approach and in a language that seems overly legalistic and archaic. If for example, I invite a group of Christians who are gathering as a congregation to see themselves as a church, I will often get a good response. However, if I were to suggest that they need a steward, a treasurer, a property secretary, a pastoral secretary, and a safeguarding officer (and the list could go on), they may well look at me in horror (apart from agreeing that safeguarding was the most important thing). However, if I say, ‘That’s an impressive jar of money that people have given so far – do you think someone should start a bank account’, or ‘It’s great to see so many people here, do we have anyone who can keep track of who people are and how we can contact them?’ the result, I guarantee you will be different. Sadly, we overlook all too easily that many of our regulations have been formed, by our reflecting on experience – and sometimes bad experience – in the white-hot hear of mission. Thus you might think that a requirement of fourteen days notice for a church council meeting to take place is unwieldy, until you find yourself in a new church that has become insular, cliquey, and planning things behind everyone’s backs. Or until you find a leader who because they have not considered safeguarding, ends up compromising themselves or wholly unprotected if something goes wrong.
The second reason why people may be sceptical is because – and this is my one and only objection to Fresh Expressions, as someone who is still an Advocate for the movement – we have baked-in to the call for people to develop new forms of church and mission the argument that the inherited church has failed. In other words, we are asking and releasing people to do new work – which, however we measure it, has been hugely successful, but then we ask them in the same breath to trust the inherited Church, the wider body that is in decline, to manage what is fragile and new. Unsurprisingly, people have reservations and Fresh Expressions becomes the victim of its own rhetoric. What people forget of course is that whilst the inherited Church has struggled to adapt, all of this new work has been funded through the generosity and time of people in the wider Church, who have given greatly. Arguably, if we were to measure the level of giving towards mission, we would find that inherited congregations have sacrificed a great deal. Rather than calling for ministers (for example) to serve them tea and biscuits until they die, they have accepted that whilst they miss their minister, and even need their minister, their minister needs to go where they are needed the most. Of course, I am not suggesting that this is always the case, but in what is approaching now twenty years of experience, I have seen a significant shift.
So having addressed two reasons why some innovators and pioneers might be sceptical of the Methodist Church, allow me to share why I have confidence in God For All. In the main, it is a judgement built on my experience on what the Church has got right, and it begins with Our Calling (now 20 years old, reaffirmed in 2018), something that remains a versatile tool for church reflection. It gave way to a process of change that I have lived through. Whilst the Church may be slow to react in certain instances, no one can question the Methodist Church’s ability to ask difficult questions, have the integrity to follow them through, and implement difficult decisions. We might not like the decisions I grant you, but please don’t present the image of a sloth like church that is unable to cross the road in time to avoid oncoming traffic.
Following Our Calling came the Conference Reports:
Where are we heading? (2003)
Priorities for the Methodist Church (2004) – here we identified how, among other issues, people struggled with the capacity to speak of God, and to evangelise.
Team Focus (2005), resulting in the restructuring of the Connexional Team.
Reshaping for Mission (2006) which encouraged circuits to merge for mission.
Fruitful Field (2011 onwards), representing a wholesale change in our understanding of ‘formation’ wherein previously we had focused a disproportional level of resourcing on ordination training, a the expense of other formational needs among lay people.
Methodism’s Hidden Harvest (2016) began to highlight some of the benefits of the Church’s partnership with Fresh Expressions, concluding,
31% of circuits have a fresh expression
37,000 people worship regularly in a Methodist Fresh Expression
24,000 of those attending have no prior experience of church
59% of fresh expressions are lay-led
You can read the report here:
Following this trend and after a period where the Church, nationally, set out with its Reimagine agenda (a shift that included that was much broader than fresh expressions, encouraging circuits and churches to reflect on their mission and develop new work, the Methodist Church then began a lengthy, grass roots consultation which led to God For All, the conference paper for which is available via the link below:
The thing that excites me about God for All as a progression of this is how:
• It has arisen from the wholesale consultation across the wider church, thanks to the early work of the Evangelism and Growth teams.
• The Methodist Church has ‘put its money where its mouth is’. £22.7 million pounds over five years, including £1 million on encouraging personal evangelism, £6.6million for New Places for New People (new work), £8.6 million for working on the margins, in comparison to basic staffing costs of £2.7 million.
• It is a strategy for growth that can be owned fully by the Methodist people and comes from the heart of the church. (I say this having experienced how Fresh Expressions rejuvenated the church, but was not as owned by the Methodist Church, at its grassroots, as much as it could be). This I feel is something that has emerged from the heart of the Methodist Church, of which Methodists can rightly be proud. Of course, I use the term ‘ownership’ and ‘pride’ in the best possible way. Ownership is not about us holding on to, and refusing to share something that is precious to us, it is about churches surviving because the self-govern, self-finance, and self-propagate, albeit in the context of Methodist subsidiarity. (And to that drawing from my ‘what’s healthy in mission perspective’ I would include self-theologising, in the sense that there is ample room within God for All for local churches to discern the shape of their mission. It is not one-size fits all approach.
• It holds the church to account, asks, ‘And so What?’ and suggests a way forward. I believe that the structural changes are much like a new wineskin that God is for us. Now this is in place we need to grow a crop for the new wine. I view God For All as encouraging the variety and blend of people and resources that we need. Another important feature is that I think Methodism is ahead of the curve here in terms of mission. Whilst I can see synods in other denominations are being excited about the stories and good practice that are surfacing from Church at the Margins and/or pioneering contexts, God For All seems to be a much more coherent approach, where different variations in missional work are being woven together in one garment, and no longer is one act of mission taken as more valuable, or given more profile because it is more shiny than another. We need both The Methodist Way of Life, and Everyone an Evangelist for example. Without wanting to sound dismissive, beware any local church that thinks it can deflect difficult questions about their lack of growth – some of my own included (we can all do it) – by over-emphasising (as they fade into oblivion) the importance of spiritual growth alone. Considerable work has also been clearly done on how the different facets of God For All feed into each other. Until this point, I have for example seen dioceses in the Church of England develop say a 2020 vision to reach equity of fresh expressions versus inherited church staff and projects, but God for all seems to go deeper, broader.
• It focuses on us encouraging adaptive (hard) rather than technical (easier) change. I am minded that in their report on Reshaping for Mission, the Strategy Research Team concluded (in my own words) that we were good on the ‘reshaping’, but poor on the ‘mission’ part. I see God For All as being something that can address this.
• God for All faces up to the need for evangelism and growth, and refuses to dodge the fundamental issues by overemphasizing the importance of our ‘spiritual growth’ whilst ignoring our need to make new disciples.
• The foundational tenets of centering our lives on God, prioritising evangelism, and developing transformational leadership (TL) resonates with me. I am excited by how centering our lives on God will be driven by The Methodist Way of Life. From my perspective, this is a resource that needs to be pushed at circuit level, rather than appearing as an option. Doubtless the pandemic has had a significant impact on the different means by which the message, and the commitment cards can be distributed. From my experience, this is an urgent area of review and we may need some even sharper directives from the connexion to accelerate this.
• Linked to Transformational Leadership, if this is taken seriously (and it is a technical phrase that should not be banded about unless you mean what it implies) I find the concept of ‘individualised consideration’ as key, as well as helping teams discover their collective identity and the power that they do have. There is a strong links for pastors here in helping individuals connect their sense of self to a project and then to others within a group. Additionally, I think that the focus within TL on helping people think for themselves is empowering, as is an openness towards what is unexpected or remarkable. I can think of projects that have started in one direction but have had benefits in another. I am not sure whether we have focused as much as we could on how we understand ‘leadership’ in the church – perhaps an area of further work.
• The remaining elements excite me because:
… they arise from our having reflected on our Methodist tradition and have theological depth. They are so clearly anchored people cannot refer to tradition as a way of resisting change. Church on the Margins for example, is exactly what John Wesley did.
…they show a sophistication of thinking – the very fact that leaders are recognised separately from pioneers, evangelists or leaders is telling.
…The focus on Digital Mission simply says to me that the Church is aware and alert to new mission fields, and engaging with this.
So there you have it. That is why I believe in God for All. Above all, and retuning to my opening comments about why people may be sceptical of the Church, we would do well to remember that we are called to follow Jesus, but to follow Jesus is to be part of the Church; the two go hand-in hand within the Missio Dei, Sure, we can talk about how ‘church’ can exist in different forms, and how churches can organise their own affairs (there is a surprising degree of latitude in our current policies, membership aside) but to lose faith in the Church, and its capacity to, just occasionally get things right, is really to lose faith in Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit.