Renewing the Nation’s Church: God at Work in the Church of England

By Nilfanion - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” - Mark Twain

The Church of England exists to be the church for everyone in the country. We pray for every person. Our doors are open to every person. Anyone can have a wedding, funeral, even a baby’s baptism, in their local parish church. Senior bishops sit in the House of Lords, with influence over the government’s legislative agenda. We educate perhaps a third of the nation’s children through one of our schools. We have chaplains in hospitals, prisons, even shopping malls. All of these connections create opportunities for mission, sharing the faith and serving the common good. The extent to which the C of E is fully integrated in the life of English society is hard to understand from the perspective of the USA, where the separation of church and state is part of the nation’s foundational story. 

And yet, decades of numerical decline, with each new generation significantly less likely to belong to the Church or attend worship services, has left an infrastructure of buildings and parishes which is on the brink of becoming unsustainable. Declining numbers of worshippers not only means emptier buildings and fewer people available to help, but also leads to reduced income from congregations with consequent impact, for example in the number of priests who can be trained and employed. This state of affairs poses an existential threat to the Church and its current mode of operating. And all of this is before we get on to the internal controversies which have at times threatened to tear the Church asunder, most recently over the status of same-sex relationships. 

While the media focus on the newsworthy stories of decline and conflict, sometimes assisted by intemperate social-media activity from clergy, the reality is that there are many beautiful, encouraging, and godly things going on in the Church of England. I see these from my perspective as a national leader in the Church, and it is these that I want to highlight here. 

The Church of England has a vision for the 2020s which is captured in the graphic above. The vision is centred on and shaped by Jesus Christ, and shaped also by the five marks of mission. This leads us into three priority areas. 

We seek to be a church which is younger and more diverse, reversing the rapid decline among children and young people, engaging with our multi-ethnic context and with those groups who are under-represented in our churches, so we look like the nation we are called to serve. 

We aim to be a church of missionary disciples, where every Christian understands their calling to be a disciple and to make disciples, obeying our commission from the Lord (Matt. 28:19-20). Key to this is understanding our place of mission and ministry as being where we spend our waking and working hours, not just where we gather as church. 

And we long to be a church where a mixed ecology of expressions of church is the norm. From glorious cathedral Evensong to a small group meeting in a housing development, from Messy Church and Forest Church and Muddy Church to the most fragile urban outreach project, we want to engage with people where they are in ways which are contextually appropriate. 

Of course, vision statements are notoriously easy to write and hard to fulfil. So how is it all going? 

Well, as we might expect, it’s a mixed picture. But there are encouraging signs, places where God is on the move. For example:

“Thy Kingdom Come” (TKC) is a prayer movement, initiated by the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby seven years ago. For the eleven days which begin with Ascension and end with Pentecost the whole church is called to pray for the evangelistic life of the church, for their own witness, and for five friends for whom they long to receive the good news of Jesus. In a relatively short time TKC has become part of the annual cycle of the Church of England like Lent or Harvest. But more than that, each year new streams of church join in – Pope Francis is an enthusiastic supporter–and Christians in more countries participate. This year TKC resources (journals and reflections) were translated into Albanian, Hindi, Korean, Dutch, Welsh, Finnish, and German and the app was downloaded in 56 different countries.

Here are some quotes from emails that we have received following this year’s TKC: 

“We’ve been praying for our grandson for years. He is now listening to the Bible through David Suchet’s recordings.”

“Over 11 days, we welcomed over 200 people through the doors of our pop-up prayer room, and mobilised Christians from around 20 churches to take part in praying for their community.”

“My brother, whose faith had waned years ago, was one of my five for three years. He called me last summer out of the blue to tell me he’d found Jesus again! He is now filled with the Holy Spirit and active in his church.”

“I helped set up a temporary labyrinth outdoors in our church garden, with a sign giving suggestions how to walk it. We had quite a few non-parishioners come to walk it, and positive comments in the guest book. It was likely the first time some had ventured onto the church property!”

“Two friends, John and Giles (not their real names) who were friends for 32 years fell out because of politics 6 years ago. They reconciled on Ascension Sunday. This was the fruit of God’s answer to Giles’ prayer. They celebrated – praying and worshipping together at church, in the love of God, united in the same Spirit, on the Pentecost Sunday.”

Another example: perhaps our top priority at the moment is to reverse the decline in engagement from children and young people. We have set ambitious targets: to double the number of children and young disciples in our churches; to equip 30,000 leaders for ministry among children and young people, 10% of them as paid youth/children’s/families’ workers; and to have a church with a thriving youth and children’s ministry within easy reach of every single young person. While very significant resources have been released from the Church’s endowment funds to help with this effort, we know ultimately this will only happen through the work of God’s Spirit, and so we have established a national online prayer meeting every Tuesday at lunchtime specifically for children and young people and our outreach to them. 

Already we see God at work in answer to those prayers. For example, “Bubble Church” at Ascension Church in Balham, launched under lockdown in October 2020, takes its name from the socially-distanced “bubbles” in which parents and children gathered for the new service. The Sunday morning congregation now attracts around 80 parents and children every week for worship, prayer and Bible stories and a craft activity for the whole family. It has been so popular that the number of baptisms of babies and children at Ascension has tripled from an average of 5 to 15 due to take place this year. Full disclosure: I used to be Vicar of Ascension.

Children’s ministry at Ascension’s 10:30 service has grown with children who used to attend Bubble Church and a new mid-week group has been formed by Bubble Church parents–the majority of whom were not previously churchgoers–to study the Bible and pray. It’s a simple, creative approach which is now being supported by the Church of England at the national level so that other parishes can run with it themselves. (More here: Bubble Church)

Bubble Church is a good example of the third and final sign of God’s activity that I want to highlight here, and that is the planting of new worshipping communities.

Our ambition is to develop the mixed ecology of the Church by planting 10,000 new worshipping communities this decade. If you set that alongside the fact that we presently have around 15,000 churches, then the scale of that ambition becomes clear. Some of these will be new churches, for example in areas of new housing, or re-planted churches where there was previously a congregation that has dwindled away. Some will be resource churches, hubs for mission and planting across a wide area. Some will be congregations begun in school buildings to engage the school community, and some will be fresh expressions, smaller groups perhaps based around a common interest. Many will be new congregations within an existing parish, offering something different to connect with unreached parishioners. Our aim is for 10% of the total to be planted in areas of urban deprivation, where the Church is often less visible. 

Time alone will tell what the impact of these plans and many others will be. Only God knows. But in a context of continuing challenge, we are privileged to see him at work, bringing pockets of renewal, of life, and of hope. 

Stephen Hance is the National Lead for Evangelism and Witness in the Church of England and former Dean of Derby Cathedral.