Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

Arrest the church’s numerical decline. Raise up more lay leaders. Simplify governance structures. Create multiple fresh expressions of church. More effectively utilize technology. Turn the clergyperson’s role from primary do-er to supporter of ministries led by others. These are a few of the desired outcomes of the (UK) Diocese of Winchester’s “Growing Rural Parishes” project. Initially called ‘The Benefice of the Future,’ this pilot-project recognizes that team ministry – groupings of multiple parishes into collective benefices – have become the standard operating system for most congregations in the Church of England. For example, 80% of the population in the Diocese of Winchester lives in urban areas, but 60% of the diocese’s nearly 400 churches are in the countryside.

That’s not exactly the case in The Episcopal Church. Not in terms of church location, at least. Kirk Hadaway reported years ago that “very few (only 6%) [of Episcopal churches] are located in rural or open country settings. … The largest numbers of Episcopal churches are found in urban locations: downtown, inner city and older neighborhoods in cities with 10,000 or more population.” But while our geographic makeup isn’t the same as Anglicanism in the UK, the reality of life on the ground is remarkably similar: future options for dioceses and congregations are starkly limited given TEC’s median average Sunday attendance of 37 (2022).

For starters, leaders in The Episcopal Church need to more fully embrace Team Ministry. At the same time, however, we need to inspire regional ministry that’s both sustainable (from a resource, especially human resource perspective) and oriented to the future. That’s built into Winchester’s initiative: “Rather than stretching the current rural model,” they state, “we create a benefice of sufficient size to provide enough internal resource, produce efficiency of scale and permit diversity / differentiation.” In other words, asking fewer people with limited resources to do more is the biblical equivalent of Pharaoh ordering the Hebrew slaves to make bricks without straw.

God’s preferred future for The Episcopal Church will, by definition, involve some form of deep, fulsome collaboration. I’ll admit: collaboration has been my primary buzz-word for about as long as I’ve been ordained, now nearly 20 years. I’m fascinated by those faith communities who truly value and practice collaboration, and I’m proud of the lay leaders and clergy team with whom I get to do ministry at Resurrection Parish and All Saints, the three churches / two parishes I serve in Maryland.

Perhaps it was the Episcopal News Service article about the Benefice of the Future / Growing Rural Parishes that first grabbed my attention, especially this: “The program … offer[s congregations] the chance to choose how they’d like to modernize and grow. The project has provided features such as improved broadband connection and portable Wi-Fi, along with updated websites and branding, contact-less giving and centralized administrative services to the churches.” Or this deep-dive, reported from the Church of England’s news service: “The North Hampshire Downs benefice, made up of 12 parishes over 12 villages … has set up pooled administrative support for all the benefice, paid for a youth and children’s pastor and invested in a communications plan across the parishes.”

Wouldn’t it be great to allocate serious TEC funding as well as diocesan financial resources to move the needle on things parishes need? As far as first steps go, it’s a novel idea to actually ask church leaders what they need. A bookkeeper? A reduced-cost, easy-to-manage contactless giving machine (which, by the way, seem to be in nearly every CofE church, even the tiny far-flung places)? Aggregating financial resources to create a full-time or 3/4-time administrator position increases the pool of applicants and, look, most of any given church’s necessary administrative work can be done remotely anyway! There’s no shortage of good ideas out there. What practical, real-life things can we more collectively fund that will, then, free up time and energy and ministry focus for clergy and lay leaders? TEC and its dioceses and our congregations / parishes have more than sufficient resources – both money and people – to do what we need in terms of delivering real-time help to our congregations and church leaders.

We shouldn’t put everything on TEC or its dioceses. The congregations themselves have to learn what collaboration is, and – frankly – what collaboration is not. Collaboration is not about getting someone else to do the work for you, so you don’t have to change. For as long as I’ve been a student and practitioner of collaborative ministry leadership, I’ve seen how this word can get tossed around, sometimes not always in helpful, constructive, fresh ways. Collaboration is not ‘consolidation.’ Nor is collaboration another way to get more money and more people to do what I can’t pull off myself.

Everyone wants more ministry, more tools, more money, more ministers, more resources … more, more, more. But collaboration is, first, a matter of the heart, not (just) a more efficient strategic plan. Collaboration is about our willingness to put ourselves in the direction of God’s preferred future.

The Diocese of Winchester recognizes that this is far more than a program or strategic initiative. For them, it’s about shaping “a culture of change”: “To move the rural church from weakness to strength,” they write, is to “change its culture.” Because it’s about changing culture, not managing a program, they ask participating benefices to “sign up to mutually agreed principles” such as:

• We are not going to do everything everywhere
• We have as much to offer each other as we have to learn from each other
• Clergy may take services; laity may take services
• When something is about the needs of children and young people, adults give way
• The answer is ‘yes’, the question is ‘how?’

I can’t think of a better set of principles to undergird true, open collaborative ministry leadership than these. Each statement has a bit of a pinch: “We are not going to do everything everywhere” means, in practice, that not everyone gets their way (ouch!). But each is also filled with potential joy. Who among us wouldn’t want to be part of a larger, wider church that actively makes space for children and young people? Or one which values lay leaders truly leading? Or regularly makes intentional space for persons to learn and share with one another?