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Bishop of Chelmsford challenges the Church’s ‘Vision and Strategy’

We reproduce here by kind permission of the Bishop of Chelmsford, The Rt Rev. Dr Guli Francis-Deqhani, our transcript of her plenary lecture at the Church Times Festival of Preaching, on Monday 16th September 2024 at Great St Mary’s Church in Cambridge.

You may prefer to listen to it as a Church Times podcast, because her delivery is beautiful and compelling.  (You may need to register to access Church Times free material.) 

Commentary by Emma Thompson:

In this excellent lecture, Bishop Guli describes post-Covid societal weariness and disillusionment. This includes the Church, which fears an existential threat and is “so caught up in a whirlpool of fear and anxiety that we’re in danger of being sucked down a plughole of our own making… we feel it is our responsibility to do something – anything – to avoid this”.  She reiterates her discomfort with the language of Vision and Strategy and its quest for “growth” (with “an awful lot of talk about thousands more young people and tens of thousands additional worshipping communities”).  Like those of us in STP, she has previously been rapped on the knuckles for daring to dissent from Vision and Strategy, with her views treated as “threatening… in a Church that claims to want more diversity”.  The drive for “growth” troubles her both practically (because it makes clergy who can’t meet the expectations feel like failures) and theologically.  Bishop Guli calls for us to “return to our basic vocation, which is to love God through prayer and worship and love of neighbour through devoted service”.  She ends by describing her early life in Iran and the impact of the Islamic revolution there 45 years ago which brought her parents to Britain.  Yet the persecuted tiny Church in Iran is like the precious pearl in God’s sight and even now growing again.  Christianity creates restorative spaces.  She asks: “Can our local churches become places of resonance, where the weary find rest and refreshment?”   

There are two key points in here about the Vision and Strategy programme. 

  1. The whole managerial construct – reaching for a 1970s management handbook instead of the Bible – feels completely inappropriate in the Church.   As I wrote in the Telegraph in 2021, failing empires go into defensive mode, tending to hack away at their own front line and build up their administration when their response should be exactly the opposite. The central and diocesan Church has over £12bn under management for the parishes: what better way to spend its money than on replenishing its own front line, the parish vicars?  Yet Bishop Guli notes: “There’s now a national Vision and Strategy Department with a large staff team.  In order for any diocese to access funding, they have to demonstrate fidelity to the central vision, which is predicated on growth and predictions of growth.  Money will not be released to help us appoint additional parochial clergy, but only for projects and resources over and above the basic framework that any diocese is managing to fund through parish share and endowments”.  [However, please note that this is firmly contested by the chair of the grant giving body, so do encourage your diocese to apply for funding for parish priests.] 
  2. A second extremely powerful point is the tightness with which the CofE’s finance is controlled to perpetuate the Vision and Strategy, which now seems to be “baked in” although the Church has no empirical evidence to support that V and S creates growth, indeed all its own evidence points the other way.  The next Triennium Funding Working Group is launching shortly to consider the next three years of grants (from March/April 2025), with an aim to ensure that there is “Intentional investment”.  But things other than parishes is not what the £10+bn held by the Church Commissioners is endowed for.  V and S is unambiguously a programme which results in closing the poorest parishes, instead of providing parish priests for “everyone, everywhere” under the  historic, universal, means-blind Anglican model.  Two separate reports tell us that parishes in poor areas are the most likely to close and that they are the ones which suffer most.  The concept of “today’s giving funding today’s ministry” is fundamentally flawed from the outset, because application of the Vision and Strategy is reducing giving in many affected parishes.  The independent report on the failed pilot project in Wigan tells us that today’s giving soon becomes insufficient if parishes are merged, setting up a “doom loop” (as identified by Leicester Diocese’s very own implementation team effecting parish mergers at Launde).

 

Bishop Guli’s address at Great St Mary’s in Cambridge, 16th Sept 2024

(paragraphing guessed at by the transcriber based on her pauses) 

Thank you very much indeed and good morning.  It’s really very good to be here with you – thank you to Christine and to Uta today and to others who’ve planned the event. It is particularly lovely to be back in this building, actually.  When we first arrived in England back in 1980, we were offered accommodation in Ridley Hall for a year and this is the church where my parents settled and we worshipped. So, it is very special to be back. 

I started my role as Bishop of Chelmsford just over three years ago, around the time when the world was emerging from the COVID pandemic.  And one of the things that I noticed, as I met with and listened to people, was the high levels of weariness.  A deep and invasive exhaustion with subtle overtones of disillusionment. In many ways it wasn’t surprising, given what we’d gone through as a global community but my sense is that the weariness has lingered.  Three years on, it’s still evident, and not just in Chelmsford. 

There’s a whole host of reasons for this.

In the first instance, there’s never been a clear end to Covid.  I remember in Leicester, where I was before moving to Chelmsford, we talked several times about having a service to mark the end of the pandemic, to recognise the horror and the pain and then intentionally move on. But it never proved possible to hold such a service, because the end of COVID, particularly in terms of how we experienced it at its height, was messy.  There was no clear line between the “during” and the” after” and now of course we’re learning to live with it.  So we’ve done very little by way of processing. We haven’t been able to draw a line under it, or take time deliberately to ponder its impact and understand what it did to us.  

During the worst of it, there was a sense that the pandemic was providing us with an opportunity to rethink how we live our lives more generally. A chance to re tune if you like, with a slower pace and a different set of priorities. Arguably, however, as a society we didn’t quite take the opportunity as fully as we might have done. Most of us have simply slipped back into the old ways of doing things: living life at a pace that feels unsustainable and yet without the ability to put the brakes on.

There are other factors too which feed into this lingering weariness…. the growing disenchantment with politicians and public figures; the effect of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and elsewhere; the rise in the cost of living; growing anxiety about the environment; the increasing gap between the “haves” and the “have nots”; and the impact of social media, toxic at its worst, creating silos and echo chambers that put more and more strain on the forming of relationships across difference.

All of these undoubtedly also bring out the best in people. And there are extraordinary examples of the goodness of human nature and of simple acts of kindness and decency that we shouldn’t forget and which are, of course, a source of hope for the future.  Nonetheless, it feels like something corrosive has crept into our culture and that, unless we attend to it, it will further infect and damage communities.  And the signs of danger are evidenced by weariness but also by cynicism, suspicion, mistrust, contempt,  impatience, aggression and so on. 

I started talking about the weariness in Chelmsford Diocese and then I quickly broadened that out to consider wider society and the culture around us.  I want now to return my focus for the remainder of this talk to the church at large – but to retain as a backdrop awareness of the bigger picture. 

And that’s for two reasons. One is that our responsibility is to engage with wider society, not to shut ourselves off from it .  And the other is to notice the extent to which we in the Church seemed to be mirroring the behaviours of those outside the church.  Instead of Christians modelling a different way of being, all too often we reinforce exactly the same emotions and patterns of behaving.

Why is that?  I realise we’re all human beings, the Church is a flawed institution and so it’s not surprising that what you experience outside the Church you also experience inside it.  But still I do have to ask, shouldn’t our faith make a difference?  Shouldn’t the good news of the Gospel influence how we respond to our circumstances even when things are tough and difficult?  Isn’t that the whole point? After all, we follow a Saviour whose faithfulness took him to the Cross. We were never promised an easy ride, but called to a life of sacrificial discipleship, all the while loving God and loving neighbour.

It’s a tough call, granted, but it is the call. So why are we finding it so difficult ?  Why are there still such high levels of weariness, as well as cynicism, suspicion, lack of trust and all the rest?  

Well, again there are many reasons and we don’t have time to address them today.  But I want if I may just to lift up the corner of one possibility for us to explore a little more.  

I wonder if, in the Church, our weariness and all the other emotions and behaviours are fuelled by a deep sense of fear and anxiety about our future – and in particular about the future survival of the Church of England. We are shrinking in numbers and influence; and we feel it is our responsibility to do something – anything – to avoid this existential threat.

Panic and fear, coupled with a sense of responsibility to fix things, exacerbated by grief about what we feel we’ve lost, is all together an exhausting cocktail.  No wonder there’s so much weariness. And weariness, if unchecked, can lead to lethargy and a refusal to face up to our situation in a positive way. We point the finger of blame elsewhere and look to find fault with others in order to ease our own conscience.  “If only that particular group with whose theology I disagree would go away…” (muffled laughter)… “if only the vicar did more visiting…” (laughter)…  “if only the diocese… “(loud laughter)…  if only the Bishop or bishops… 

We are, as a Church, I want to suggest, so caught up in a whirlpool of fear and anxiety that we’re in danger of being sucked down a plughole of our own making. We are disorientated, fixated by the past that we’ve lost and the future we dread, such that we’re becoming unable to engage in a meaningful way with the present.  We’re trying so hard to scramble out of the situation that we don’t seem able to stop and consider whether God might actually be saying something to us in these very circumstances. 

It seems to me that the approach the Church of England has broadly taken is to develop stringent methods aimed at moving us beyond this crisis point, to create programmes and strategies to ensure that we increase in number and grow in size.  There is an awful lot of talk about thousands more young people and tens of thousands additional worshipping communities.  There’s now a national Vision and Strategy Department with a large staff team.  In order for any diocese to access funding, they have to demonstrate fidelity to the central vision, which is predicated on growth and predictions of growth.  Money will not be released to help us appoint additional parochial clergy, but only for projects and resources over and above the basic framework that any diocese is managing to fund through parish share and endowments. 

When I was still relatively new in Chelmsford, I explored some of this during an address to Diocesan Synod and this is what I said. As a rule, I’m not so comfortable with the language of “Vision and Strategy” being deployed in the Church. It risks, it seems to me, putting too much emphasis on our human powers: that, if only we try hard enough and pull together well enough and all follow the same programme, then we can solve the problems and challenges and ensure the future survival of the Church – either much as it has been in the past or, preferably, producing a shinier, bigger, better version. 

The language of Vision and Strategy risks ignoring the reality of frailty, brokenness, sin – all of which can of course be redeemed, but it risks missing the blessings in that which is small and vulnerable and marginal. It leaves us relying heavily on our own strength, instead of remembering that everything depends on our faithfulness and our reliance upon God. 

These reflections seemed to chime with a number of people and, to my great surprise, gained a little bit of traction on Twitter (as it was then).  I should also say that they earned me a slap on the wrist from central church (laughter and applause) – who told me that such talk undermines the work of the Vision and Strategy department (laughter).

That was definitely not my intention.  I’m not a troublemaker.  I was simply speaking with my own Diocesan Synod, reflecting on what I was discerning locally. 

But I was shocked that one lonely voice could be regarded as so threatening within the wheels of power, especially in a Church that claims to want more diversity.  The whole experience was quite a learning lesson for me, if nothing else, about the strength of the pull of the centre.  

But back to our present reality. There’s no denying that our numbers are declining and influence is diminishing.  I’m not suggesting that we ignore that, or pretend it isn’t happening and bury our heads in the sand.  I’m suggesting, rather, that we face up to it but not imagine that we can control our way out of it by setting targets, devising plans for getting us there and spending millions on projects that fit the mould.

Instead, let us dwell a while and listen to the whisper of the Holy Spirit, to hear if there might just be a still small voice beckoning: “Come to me all you that are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest”.  A voice that may help us find meaning in the present; a voice that confirms our primary calling not to be successful in worldly terms but to be intentional in our faithfulness and prayerful in the present moment. 

Consider for a moment the story of Peter walking on the water towards Jesus in Matthew 14. The disciples were in the boat, in a state of great fear and agitation.  Jesus calls Peter, who gets out of the boat and starts walking on the water towards him. Peter then takes his eyes off Jesus and begins to concentrate on what’s all around him: the strong wind, the danger, the utter stupidity of what he’s done. His attention moves from Jesus to himself, the mess that he’s in and how he’s going to get himself out of it – and that’s when he starts to sink.

Now the impression we have in reading the story is that Jesus is some way ahead of Peter, but what actually happens is at the moment Peter acknowledges his need of Jesus, which is his moment of greatest desperation, he cries out for help “Lord, save me!”  And Jesus is immediately right there beside him, lifting him out of the water and back into the boat.  Jesus, who had seemed far off, was in fact always very nearby.  Peter simply had to acknowledge his need, recognise his own frailty and call for help. 

Perhaps that’s exactly what we need to do more of.  Some I know are close to feelings of despair and desperation. So this is the moment to cry out: Lord, save me!  Not to strive to find the answers through our human powers, but acknowledge our frailty and rely on God’s strength to lead us to a better place. 

Certainly we can learn from the secular world of businesses and organisations; but in the end we are not a business or an organisation. We are the Body of Christ, God’s beloved people, those who strive to stay faithful with our eyes fixed firmly on Jesus: in season and out of season, when we see the fruits of God’s blessings and when we don’t.  

The Church historically has waxed and waned in size and influence. It continues to exist by God’s grace. And I want to suggest that it has seldom been at its best when it’s been largest and most powerful.

Now please don’t misunderstand me.  It doesn’t give me any pleasure to see shrinking congregations and a Church that seems to be retreating.  Along with others, I rejoice when people come to faith, where congregations increase in size.  We are indeed called to baptise and make disciples.  Mine is not an invitation to laziness or passivity, to feeling sorry for ourselves or giving up.  

Mine is a plea that we individuals and congregations remember and return to our basic vocation, which is to love God through prayer and worship and love of neighbour through devoted service.  To live this vocation faithfully and joyfully without fear and anxiety about the future, working hard, doing our best, being intentional in mission and ministry and always remaining faithful and hopeful.  A small congregation can do this just as well as a large one. And who knows how our efforts and faithfulness will bear fruit in the future?  We plant the seeds in smaller or larger ways and God brings forth the harvest according to God’s will and timing, not ours. 

Some years after my parents have died, I still encounter people who met them, often very fleetingly and many years ago, but whose lives were touched by that encounter and who still want to tell me about it.  I share this by way of encouragement.  Our is not to know the results of our efforts. There is no conversation or encounter, no sermon or meeting, no e-mail or phone call, that doesn’t have the potential to be used by God,  however small or inconsequential it may seem to us. 

Broadly speaking, there are two reasons why the current drive to increase in size and numbers worries me. One is practical and the other theological – although inevitably they overlap.

The practical one relates to my concern for the well-being of clergy and by extension congregations. The constant mantra that we must grow, indeed that we are going to grow if we follow the strategy, the deliberate setting of targets to increase the number of worshippers, the judging of a church’s success according to its size, all this is putting undue pressure on clergy who are overstretched and congregations whose morale is low. 

Increasingly, I see clergy who are feeling like failures because they aren’t meeting the expectations that our Church culture is heaping upon them. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have difficult decisions to make.  We do; and we must face up to these. But the feeling of failure causes anxiety, even fear and then leads to weariness and the other emotions and behaviours we’ve already spoken of.  

In truth, our clergy and our lay leaders are our greatest resource, our congregations a gift and a blessing from God. All these are to be loved, treasured encouraged – and yes sometimes challenged – to be who God has called them to be.  To discern what resources they do have and how they might use these in the service of the community.  To be faithful in the present – and joyful.  Not burdened by how things used to be in the past or paralysed by fear of obliteration in the future.  We cannot and must not continue placing unreasonable and unrealistic expectations of growth in numbers on the shoulders of our clergy. If growth is to happen, it will be God’s doing. 

Theologically, this whole drive for growth troubles me too.  And the reasons are bound up with my own life story and experiences. And my apologies to those of you who are already familiar with this, but I need to explain, as briefly as I can, for the benefit of those who don’t. 

I was born into the tiny Anglican church in Iran, where my early faith was fostered.  In 1979 came the Islamic revolution, which swept through the country and turned our lives upside down. Our schools and hospitals were confiscated or closed down, our financial assets were frozen and our legal identity removed. Church offices were ransacked, properties damaged or appropriated.  Foreign missionaries were all recalled home, others fled or were forced to leave, some were imprisoned, injured in attacks or assassinated. 

It seemed that the Church was being stripped of all that had been built up by faithful Christians over several generations. Things that had been good and blessed by God were indeed taken away. But, in the process, we were being invited to learn the meaning of discipleship in new and deeper ways. To learn what it means to walk in the way of the Cross.  

Nearly 45 years on, numbers now are so small as to be virtually insignificant. The infrastructure is practically non-existent, leadership is scant, baptisms are illegal, and the persecuted community live under daily pressure and uncertainty about the future as the government continues to squeeze the life out of them.  Arguably the Anglican Church in Iran was a human experiment which has failed.

And yet.  Against all the odds, the faithful remnant remain.  They are small in number,  utterly marginal and without influence in wider society, and their survival seems to hang by a thread.  But they are there, they are present and they are faithful. And while they remain, they witness to God’s love and faithfulness and to the miracle of life in Jesus Christ.  And, in so doing, they offer hope for all of us.  

Yes, they are small and insignificant in worldly terms.  They have no institutions and in some cases no church buildings either, but in God’s sight they are like the priceless, precious pearl: loved and valued. 

And more than that: over the past 40 years or so, without missionary support or institutions, with very few resources, without leadership to provide long-term vision or strategies for growth, the Holy Spirit has been active in Iran and amongst Iranians.  Despite human weakness and failure, and during a period that should have seen the Church eradicated, there has been an extraordinary surge in the number of those who are exploring faith and coming to Christ – often through the underground church movement and often at great cost to individuals and their families. 

Surely this is a lesson for us: a gift offered by the persecuted church that, when given space to breathe, the Holy Spirit works through our fragility, brokenness and failures?  Our task isn’t to control our way into the future, but to lean more heavily on God,  prayerfully discerning the next step of the journey, seeking always to be faithful and loving, whatever our present circumstances. 

So all of this has given me a theology that is “Cross-shaped” and yet full of hope.  A  theology which allows for transformation through suffering, that values the small and the marginal and relies on trust in the One who leads us into the future, one step at a time. 

The Resurrection too is seen through the lens of the Cross.  It is not triumphalist, nor does it speak of worldly power and influence; rather it offers a glimpse of God’s Kingdom and God’s true nature, as shown in the example of Jesus Christ, whose moment of greatest suffering was also His moment of greatest glory.

This turns upside down our notions of success; and it offers us a pathway from fear and anxiety towards hope. The Church in this country is undoubtedly changing and we don’t quite know what the future looks like. We are perhaps the seed that is dying before shoots of new life come forth. Change is always painful and yet we know that “if God is for us, no one and nothing is against us”; and therein lies our hope.  And perhaps a word for the weary too…

Like Mark’s Gospel, I had two endings! (laughter)  And I think with your permission I’m going to go for the slightly longer one: it’s just an additional 3 or 4 minutes. 

So let me finish, if I may, by sharing with you what I remember from a talk I attended in the Spring of 2023 in Tallinn in Estonia, at the five yearly General Assembly of the conference of European churches.  

The speaker was the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa.  He presented us with a picture of the ideologies that have shaped Western democracies and demonstrated how they are predicated on: the notion of progress and growth; aggressive competition; dominance and power.  Both internally within Europe the capitalism that our society is based on but also when set against other world powers.  To succeed, businesses and organisations must not only keep pace but prove themselves ahead of the game, able to continue growing and progressing, innovating and modernising, destroying others as necessary.

But, in the process, individuals, human beings are being crushed by the unbearable and unreasonable pressures.  It is destroying our planet and impacting our mental health, leading to depression and burnout.  The whole model is unsustainable and yet it keeps marching onwards. 

Professor Rosa suggested that instead societies need to develop a model based on what he called resonance. The space to engage with others whose ideas are different. To learn and adapt; to reflect and appreciate; to connect more deeply and allow for the possibility of transformation. He suggested that Christianity already has those spaces, or at least at our core we strive to provide them.  And that is why society still so desperately needs the Church.   Spaces to pause, slow down, listen to one another and to God. 

Crucially, however, we should provide such resonance spaces without trying to predict what will emerge.  He said, if the Church believes that it always knows what is right and what should come out of it, then it is no longer a resonance institution but a resonance killer. That in a nutshell describes something of my discomfort with the Vision and Strategy approach.  It has already defined the outcome as being one of growth and increase.  But what if God is saying something different to us about learning to be a new kind of community?  What if we have things to learn during a season in which we’re smaller, more marginal and less influential? 

In our drive towards an agenda of growth, might we be missing something essential in our Christian identity and calling?  Can our local churches become places of resonance, where the weary find rest and refreshment? 

And that is where I’ll leave you, not so much with a definite answer but with some questions and an invitation to continue pondering.  But also with some encouragement to remember that the future of the Church is in the hands of God, who will lead us one step at a time.  

In the words of Saint David, in his last ever recorded sermon, all that is required of us is to be joyful, keep the faith and do the little things well.   Thank you.   

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2 Comments

  1. Excellent, it resonates parti ularly with those of us outraged at the Bishops’ frankly insane and cowardly decision to close the churches during Covid. The biggest act of self harm ever inflicted on church going people.

  2. Bless you for your insightful message that makes so much sense. You speak as a prophet to the church but give hope to those who are ‘keeping the faith and doing small things well’ despite the weariness and despondency.

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