OHCT Trustee Stephen Slack reviews a personal look at today’s Church of England.
This book about the future of the Church of England in its current context of decline, written by a priest with a background in church planting is not an easy read. But anyone interested in how the Church should respond to the challenges it faces should find its analysis interesting, even if it raises as many questions as it answers.
Divided into three parts that look respectively at the recent pattern of decline, the response to it that takes the form of church planting, and the more recent response in the form of networks of small, missional communities that exist alongside more traditional congregations.
Bradbury’s analysis is realistic about the scale of the current challenge, in terms of the reduction in church attendance (even more marked since Covid) and, consequently, in the money, time and energy available to meet it. But he takes that largely as read, most of the book being directed to the way in which the Church should be responding to that challenge.
Doing so does not, in Bradbury’s view, involve rejecting the parish church model altogether: supporters of the Trust will welcome the fact that he is more generous about the role of buildings than might be expected of someone of his Evangelical background, accepting the value of traditional ministry focused on the geographical community surrounding a parish church, and (up to a point) that the buildings have a ministry. But he rightly has little time for traditional, building-based forms of church if they fail to engage with the need of the communities around them. And he shares the increasing scepticism about the wisdom of the practice – adopted by so many dioceses for so long – of throwing more and more parishes together into benefices that are so large as to be inimical to mission.
Bradbury also shares the current orthodoxy (expressed, for example, in the Mission-shaped Church report of 2004) that the parish church model cannot be the only one in the contemporary church, given the many different forms of community that now exist in the surrounding society. Instead, a mixed economy is needed, embracing different forms of being church.
However, whilst accepting that orthodoxy, Bradbury departs from the way it is normally worked out – in two interesting respects.
First, even though his own ministry has largely been conducted in church plant, he has doubts whether an approach centred around that model provides a way forward either: his experience of it has raised significant questions for him about the way congregations of that kind often focus, almost hyperactively, on their own programme of outreach activities without serving the communities that surround them in a more holistic way. And, more fundamentally still, he sees the idea of rapid evangelistic growth both as a fantasy and as having a dangerous effect on how we see the place of the church in the mission of God (a view which seems at odds with the thinking underlying the current mission strategy of the Church of England nationally).
Instead, Bradbury finds more hope in the growing number of small, intentionally missional groups which meet, and seek to serve, people where they are. Just what those small groups do in terms of mission or discipleship is left somewhat opaque – though one describes itself as renewing the simple practices of ‘people gathering, sharing food, sharing stories, becoming family, praying together, reading Scripture together.
Bradbury sees such groups (counter-culturally more concerned with being than doing) as having the potential to reinvigorate the life of the church in the same way that renewal movements, from monasticism to Methodism, did in the past – a claim worthy of more detailed scrutiny than he gives it.
But is he right? Although Bradbury paints a positive picture of such communities – which he describes as sharing the characteristics of being small, slow, simple, sent and serving’ – he is vague (beyond envisaging some degree of cross-membership) in what he says about the relationship between them and more traditional forms of church. So this (admittedly theologically untrained) reader was left with a number of questions that seemed inevitably to arise from the small and perhaps inward-looking nature of such groups, including how they fit into the mixed economy from an institutional point of view so as to achieve the aim of reinvigorating wider church life, and how they will enable those involved in them to come to, and grow in, faith as members of the wider, apostolic, Church with its ministry of Word and Sacrament.
Without even identifying issues of those kinds, let alone exploring them, this book seems destined to have rather less impact and value than it might otherwise have done.
In the Fullness of Time’ by Paul Bradbury, (Canterbury Press Norwich) July 2024, Pages 160, ISBN: 9781786226075. Paperback £14.99
