Why we need an anti-growth coalition in the Church of England

I'm delighted to host this guest post from Revd Angela Sheard. Angela and I had a conversation a few weeks ago in which we discovered we had a shared passion: for a space to be opened within the Church of England for an honest, questioning, and theologically rooted conversation about the dominant language of 'growth'. We offer this piece, and a companion piece from me, in the hope that it will prompt more contributions from others, and the beginnings of that conversation we are both longing for.

If the phrase ‘anti-growth coalition’ causes you to come out in hives, foam at the mouth in rage or tremble in fear, don’t stop reading just yet! I’m keen not to shut down conversations about the church’s future but instead to open them up and create space for new perspectives to emerge. What I’m about to share is by no means the final word – I hope it will be the start of an ongoing dialogue.

The concept of anti-growth may seem like an impossible one to consider in the Church of England at the present time. The dominant narrative describing the state of the church is numerical decline – we even have a measured R (reproduction) number of 0.9 in one set of mathematical modelling, indicating that we are likely to die out around 2062.  The dominant response to this narrative is that we need to reverse the trend, defying all predictions – we need to grow, otherwise we will die.

This narrative is, I believe, at the heart of much of the vision and strategy of the Church of England. Our focus is on growth in order to survive – our mission is powered by our fear of dying out and our instinctive need to safeguard ourselves and our institution. The argument continues along the lines of, ‘What else do you expect us to do? Can there be any more urgent priority than ensuring there is a viable church to hand on to future generations?’

This sense in which church growth is the obvious and (really) the only priority, has the effect of closing down further reflection on what we mean by the word ‘growth’ in the first place. Very often, ‘growth’ is used as a catch-all term to describe good things happening. Think of how often we might hear in the same breath, a prayer for ‘growth in numbers, in resources, in relationships and in faith’. With reference to numbers of people and countable resources, the kind of growth being prayed for here is numerical growth – the intention is for the number to get bigger. But what does growth in relationships or faith mean? Can our relationships or our faith get bigger in some way? Are we really asking God for numerical growth here? If not, what we are asking for?

At this point, I want to further complicate the concept of growth by considering how it’s used in other areas of our society. Politically, perhaps the most well-known use of the term ‘growth’ in recent years was by Liz Truss. She ran on a strapline of ‘Growth, growth, growth’, which meant economic growth without redistribution throughout society. She also labelled her political opponents as being part of an “anti-growth coalition”.  

In response a number of people declared themselves to be members of this coalition, including the environmental writer George Monbiot. Monbiot breaks down a false relationship between economic growth and general prosperity, which is assumed to be true by Truss and others.  The economist Kate Raworth has also argued against unrestricted economic growth with her model of ‘Doughnut Economics’. This model conceptualizes the ideal size of global economies as being bounded by both a (minimum) social foundation and a (maximum) ecological ceiling.  According to this model, the world’s larger economies need not to grow but to shrink in order to enable human beings and the wider planet to flourish. Achieving maximum economic growth (whatever that might be) is an assumed ideal which is not questioned by either of the UK’s major political parties. The great irony is this maximum growth scenario is actually a harbinger of doom not only for us but for all people, in the form of total planetary destruction. 

Monbiot’s concluding comments on Liz Truss’s growth agenda are worth repeating in full: “Her “pro-growth” agenda performs the same role as tax cuts for the very rich. It’s a transfer of power to the wealthiest people, among whom are the bosses of corporations headquartered abroad, ruthless foreign oligarchs and British plutocrats who channel their money through tax havens. In other words, it is a further manifestation of the class war the rich are waging against the poor. Growth, in her vision, is not a promise. It’s a threat.” 

I think that in the Church of England, growth also functions not as a promise, but as a threat. However, it is a threat disguised as a promise to make it inconceivable that anyone could stand to lose. The promise is that everyone gains through the church growth vision and strategy – that church growth is for the many, rather than the few. One way that this promise is communicated is by placing church growth in an ecological context, rather than an economic one. In nature, everything grows – and it’s obviously good that everything grows, right?

Anderson Jeremiah writes brilliantly about how the Church of England uses language of ‘mixed ecology’ to describe what is in fact a ‘mixed economy’, a primarily capitalistic economic system driven by competition in a free market, and survival of the fittest. By contrast, mixed ecology describes diverse ecosystems sustained by interdependent relationships in which each organism has its own valuable role to play. In a mixed ecology, success is about maintaining finely balanced equilibria that enable the whole ecosystem to flourish; but in a mixed economy success is about growth at any cost.  

Here lies the threat hidden underneath the promise, revealed once all the greenwashing façade has been stripped away. The threat is that parishes which do not grow will be seen as failures; that they will systematically lose physical resources as they under-perform compared to their neighbours; that they will lose psychological resources as they continue to compete and lose; that they will lose spiritual resources as people wonder why the Holy Spirit is not working to produce numerical growth in their context, despite their fervent prayers and best efforts. 

So is there an alternative to our current model of church growth? I think there are many possible alternatives, but I’d like to explore one which takes as its starting point the story at the beginning of the book of Exodus. Here’s how the story begins: the enslaved Israelites were pushed to work harder and harder by Pharoah, who refused to let them go into the wilderness to worship God. Instead, they had to keep making the same number of bricks with less and less straw. In fact, they were deliberately kept so busy that they could not conceive of an alternative to their situation. Eventually of course, Pharoah did let them go and they journeyed through the Red Sea into the wilderness. In the wilderness, they were finally free. And yet, the people frequently wished that they were back in slavery, where they had better food and more security and stability.

I think that in the church, we have been striving for so long to make the same number of bricks with less and less straw, that we have become our own Pharoah. We no longer need any external commands to work harder – it has become part of our own collective psyche. In fact, I think that the voice of Pharoah – the unrelenting shout of the mixed economy to grow, grow, grow – is drowning out the voice of God, calling us into the wilderness. Like in the book of Exodus, entering the wilderness is a radical abandonment of the structures and resources that we associate with safety and security, despite the anxiety and burnout that they also bring to our lives. Even though we can often feel the wilderness lapping at our ankles in this precarious age, we are desperate not to enter those chaotic waters. We would rather keep working harder and harder to try and produce the same number of bricks, becoming so busy that we have no time to think about what happens when we there is no longer any straw at all, when we are grasping in frenzied fashion at the empty air.

The great irony of course is that, while the Israelites grumbled about being in the wilderness, God provided for them. They received manna to eat, they were commanded not to work but to rest, they could see God’s presence physically leading them through the wilderness during those 40 long years. The wilderness was a time when the people deepened their relationship with God, when they received God’s commandments that would define them, when they had to trust God because they could no longer rely on their own resources. Entering the wilderness was a kind of death – but a very fertile death, out of which came transformation. Entering the wilderness was essential for the people of God then – and it is essential for us today.

'wilderness': the Negev desert

The wilderness was also very important in Jesus’s life and ministry – after his baptism the Spirit drove him into the wilderness for 40 days. When he emerged, he went to his home town of Nazareth and read from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah the words which were the manifesto for his public ministry. The Spirit, which drove him into the wilderness in the first place, appears again as the one who has anointed Jesus for the task that lies ahead of him, for his unique vocation as the Son of God. Perhaps his time in the wilderness was a time when the Spirit was forming him, a time of preparation for him to exercise his calling.

If we can find the courage to intentionally enter the wilderness as a church, I think we will be better able to hear our vocation, our collective calling as the people of God. This must be the starting point for our ministry and mission; if we don’t do what God is calling us to do, there is frankly no point in us existing as church in the first place! I think that we cannot hear the call of God while we are still enslaved to the idea that we must grow at any cost. We cannot hear God while we are dragged into the wilderness kicking and screaming. We can only hear God when we accept this time of trial and tribulation, this time of danger and instability, this time of radical loss of all the things that maintain institutional safety and security. 

Perhaps this radical approach isn’t for everyone! If we are still in the business of making bricks (as I am and as I suspect many of you also are), perhaps we might try defying Pharoah in smaller ways by making bricks at our own pace, resting when we need to, not desperately seeking more straw but accepting whatever is available to us. Perhaps we might try simplifying our production, quietly resisting the various psychological pressures to produce more, gathering instead of more straw the courage and faith that comes from God and that prepares us (someday, when we are ready) to walk that wild road, to leave behind all that we know as The Church, to die and to be born again by God’s call upon our lives together. 

I’d like to end by returning to where I started – by taking some unlikely inspiration from Liz Truss and her political opponents. I feel that those of us who are resisting Pharoah, however big or small our efforts might be, should recognize ourselves not as fragmented individuals but as a collective. Therefore, I’d like to mischievously suggest that we might emerge, out of these turbulent times in the church’s history, as the anti-growth coalition of the Church of England.

If this piece by Angela resonates for you, and you'd like to contribute your own reflections, experience, wonderings, invitations and more, then get in touch with me at hodgehillvicar@hotmail.co.uk. We want to nurture a conversation with depth, breadth and a real diversity of voices. We'd love to hear from you!