Bishop’s Study Day

Diocese of Southwell and Nottingham 10 March 2016

Towards a Theology of Church Growth

David Goodhew

Cranmer Hall, St Johns College, Durham

Necessary Throat Clearing:

- What is church ? primarily the local church.

- What is church growth ? The has defined it as three things:

Growth in personal holiness; Growth in service to the wider community; Growth,

numerically, of congregations.1

- How do churches grow? Only ‘God gives the growth’. It is not about techniques.

‘God gives the growth’, but He expects us to contribute – as did Paul and Apollos. (1

Cor 3:6).

- Where are we ? Secularity is the dominant culture; we are no longer in Christendom.

Christianity is in the position of needing to creatively subvert the dominant culture –

just as it was in the first centuries.2

Central Point: Salvation shows us why we should grow the church

- Salvation in Scripture: Kingdom and Church, not Kingdom or Church

1 The Archbishops’ Council, Anecdote to Evidence, (London: Church House 2014), p. 3. 2 C. Taylor, A Secular Age – or if you lack time to read it, try: J.A. Smith, How (not) to be Secular, (Grand Rapids 2014). For a portrait of early Christianity as counter-cultural, see: C. Kavin Rowe, World Upside: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age, (OUP 2009). - Salvation: in the Local Church people encounter the Good News of Christ - Salvation: the Trinity and Church Growth - Salvation: a matter of social action AND evangelism - Salvation: a matter of Contemplative Prayer AND church growth - Salvation and Sacramentality

Towards A Theology of Church Growth

Table of Contents

Foreward: the Most Revd and Rt Hon. ,

Chapter One David Goodhew Towards a Theology of Church Growth: an Introduction

Chapter Two David Marshall Dialogue, Proclamation and the Growth of the Church

in Pluralist Societies

Chapter Three Mark Bonnington The Kingdom of God and Church Growth in the New Testament

Chapter Four C. Kavin Rowe The Ecclesiology of Acts

Chapter Five Alister McGrath Theology, Eschatology and Church Growth

Chapter Six Martin Warner Incarnation and Church Growth

Chapter Seven Graham Tomlin The Prodigal Spirit and Church Growth

Chapter Eight Ivor Davidson Church Growth in the Early Church

Chapter Nine Sr Benedicta Ward Verbum et exemplum docere: Bede, Cuthbert, Aidan

and mission in the early English church.

Chapter Ten Miranda Threlfall- Holmes Growing the Medieval Church: Church Growth in

Theory and Practice in Christendom c.1000 - c.1500

Chapter Eleven Ashley Null Divine Allurement: Thomas Cranmer and Tudor Church

Growth

Chapter Twelve Dominic Erdozain New Affections: Church Growth in Britain: 1750 to

1970

Conclusion: David Goodhew Transformed, not Conformed: Towards a Theology of Church Growth

Mark Bonnington

Conversion in New Testament times was a high commitment activity, especially for gentiles:

“A slave converted and wanted to go out early or late to meet other believers. He made up for it by working harder. A household converted and the household gods disappeared from the corner of the room. The master avoided the temples of the gods but instead invited people to dine with him at his own house. When he did so he omitted the traditional libation to his guild’s divinity and instead thanked the God of heaven for the meal. Insider and outsider alike knew something had changed and the reasons why were freely on offer. When this was questioned and opposed and people persisted the reputation of the church to be taken seriously grew rather than diminished. Coming up against the authorities the believers made the case for their faith respectfully, accepted protection gladly and carefully kept their theological distance from Roman divinities and power….The fact that everyone had given up something from their past for the sake of Christ surely created communities where the sense of joint ownership of the new was universal and challenged people to change.”3

Ivor Davidson, on church growth in the early church:

- “the idea that this God loved human beings, willed that they should know him personally, and suffered and died in human form so as to make it possible – that would have struck many pagan hearers as simply bizarre”.4 - Regarding the situation of Christians in the contemporary west, Davidson writes: “Whether this is a threat or an opportunity to Christian faith depends greatly on perspective. Christians today may well lament their marginality, taking it as evidence that numerical church growth is not God’s purpose in their generation. Alternatively, they may, as the early church did, consider it an opportunity to hope in God’s promises, his power to transform the least likely of cultural situations, and to do so in ways which will yet in fact mean substantial, visible growth.”5

Graham Tomlin on the Holy Spirit and Church Growth

- “Theologically speaking, mission and the consequent growth of the church begins with the begetting of the Son and the procession of the Spirit from the Father. It starts with the Trinitarian life of God before it ever involves the creation, let alone the human part of that creation.”6

3 M. Bonnington, ‘The Kingdom of God and Church Growth’, Towards a Theology of Church Growth, p. 71 4 I. Davidson, ‘Church Growth in the Early Church’, Towards a Theology of Church Growth, p. 157 5 Davidson, ‘Church Growth in the Early Church’, p. 167 6 G. Tomlin, ‘The Prodigal Spirit and Church Growth’, Towards a Theology of Church Growth, p.136 - “A church without the Spirit is no church at all. Or in the words of the most recent Patriarch of Antioch, Ignatios IV: “Without the Spirit, God is far away, Christ belongs to the past, the gospel is a dead letter, the church is a mere organisation, mission is turned into propaganda. But in the Spirit, God is near, the risen Christ is present with us here and how, the gospel is the power of life, the church signifies Trinitarian communion, mission is an expression of Pentecost.””7

Miranda Threlfall Holmes on Church Growth in the Mediaeval Period:

“In the thirteenth century as in the nineteenth, rapid urban expansion meant the disruption of historic parish connections and habits of churchgoing and domestic piety, and thus the need for evangelisation of a whole generation. It is well known that St.Francis invented the concept of the Christmas crib: but it is less frequently appreciated that he did so precisely because there was a pressing need for new ways to teach the story of ' nativity to an ill-educated population that knew nothing of the Christian story. The work of evangelism was foundational to the friars. Chapter 12 of St. Francis' 1223 Rule was devoted to 'regulating and promoting missionary activity', and for the rest of the medieval period and beyond friars were to be found preaching not only across Europe but also at the furthest reaches of the known world, in eastern Europe, India, China, Africa and the newly discovered Americas, often well in advance of official envoys or trade delegations.”8

Some Empirical Data on Church Growth in Britain

There is widespread – and oft-commented upon - congregational decline in Britain. Less commented on is significant church growth in Britain, some of the evidence for which is given below.

London

Number of churches (of all denominations) in Greater London

• 1979 3350

• 1989 3559

• 1998 3862

• 2005 4087

• 2012 4791 9

7 Tomlin, ‘The Prodigal Spirit and Church Growth’, p. 142 8 M. Threlfall Homes, ‘Growing the Medieval Church’, Towards a Theology of Church Growth, p. 188-89. 9 P. Brierley, Capital Growth What the 2012 London Church Census shows (ADBC 2013), p.23.

Sunday Church Attendance (of all denominations) in Greater London

1979 696 000

1989 650 000

1998 618 000

2005 623 000

2012 722 00010

- Other, more detailed, studies of London churches indicate that these figures are probably an undercount.11 - Such expansion is happening mainly outside the historic denominations, but some is happening within the historic denominations. Parts of the CofE and RC’ism and much of the Baptist denomination are growing or stable. Membership of the Anglican rose by 70% between 1990 and 2010. London Roman Catholic attendance has been rising since 2005.12

Beyond London:

- The combined membership of Pentecostal churches, Orthodox churches and new denominations founded within the last 50 years, was around 100 000 in 1960 but was over one million people in 2012.13 - There is significant church growth happening in much of the area within 70 miles of London and further afield in towns such as Birmingham, Edinburgh and Newcastle.14 - Recent research on the North East indicates that 125 new congregations were founded in the region since 1980, showing that the growth in new congregations, many of which are highly multiracial, is happening across the UK, even in regions previously seen as ‘white’.15

10 Brierley, Capital Growth, p.57.

11 Being Built Together: a Story of New Black Majority Churches in the London Borough of Southwark, (University of Roehampton, 2013). 12 J. Wolffe and B. Jackson, ‘Anglican Resurgence: the Church of England in London’, in D. Goodhew, Church Growth in Britain, 1980 to the Present, (Ashgate 2012), p. 32; Brierley, Capital Growth, 57; 13 Pentecostal membership membership was 433 000 in 2012. New churches had an attendance figure of 210 000 in the UK in 2012 – with a membership which is probably higher. Orthodox churches had an estimated 444 000 membership in UK in 2012. See: Brierley, UK Church Statistics 2: 2010-20. 14 Brierley, UK Church Statistics 2: 2010-20; D. Voas, ‘Church of England Growth and Decline since 1980’, in D. Goodhew, Growth and Decline in the Anglican Communion, 1980 to the Present Day, (Ashgate 2016), p.15; chapters by C. Marsh and K. Roxburgh in Goodhew (ed.) Church Growth in Britain, and New Churches in the North East, (Durham: CCGR, 2015), see: http://community.dur.ac.uk/churchgrowth.research/research/new- churches-in-the-north-east 15 New Churches in the North East.

For more information, see the website of the Centre for Church Growth Research, based at Cranmer Hall, Durham - http://community.dur.ac.uk/churchgrowth.research/ You can also follow the Centre on twitter, via: https://twitter.com/CCGR_Durham