Let's talk about 'growth' - seriously

 I started writing this blog post a few months ago. It didn't feel like the right time to publish it. Now does.

Newly potted seeds in the church garden greenhouse.

In the weeks following our posting of our two reflections on ‘church growth’, Angela Sheard and I have been delighted to receive enthusiastic responses from a wide variety of different locations and perspectives. Some were saying ‘yes! Thank you for articulating what I’ve been thinking for so long!’. Others have responded in a more critical and questioning vein, with ‘yes, buts…’, according us at most two and a half cheers! And still others have pointed us to work and reflection on this topic that has preceded our own modest contributions: this is not uncharted territory, even if there has not yet been expansive space within the wider church (in England, at least) for this conversation to be had. What all the responses seem to share, however, is a desire for more of this kind of conversation.

In the hope of adding to the momentum of such conversations, then, I want to offer a few further thoughts, prompted in part by one of the more critical readings of our blog posts, by Ian Paul (https://www.psephizo.com/life-ministry/should-churches-grow/). Loosely, these thoughts cluster around four themes:

·      What does ‘growth’ mean?

·      The desire for control

·      Church-related binaries

·      Doing, death, and the ‘dark night’

What does ‘growth’ mean?

I’ve been struck by how many vocal advocates of numerical growth will add, almost as a footnote, ‘of course, other kinds of growth are important too’. ‘Spiritual growth’, in particular, is often cited as being ‘just as important as numbers’. What seems rarely to be acknowledged, however, is that the same word can be used for very different kinds of ‘thing’, with very little family resemblance between them. And so when we read biblical texts, for example, that mention ‘growth’ without a qualifier, we should be careful not to read in extraneous assumptions.

⁶ I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. ⁷ So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. ⁸ The one who plants and the one who waters have one purpose, and each will receive wages according to their own labour. ⁹ For we are God’s coworkers, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building. (1 Corinthians 3:6-9)

What kind of ‘growth’ is Paul talking about here? There seems to be nothing explicit in the text to suggest it’s about numbers. Most of Paul’s explicit concern, in the first few chapters of 1 Corinthians, is about a ‘growth’ (we might say) into the wisdom of the Spirit, that is contrasted with an immature ‘jealousy and quarelling’. ‘You are God’s field’, Paul says: the growth happens within you. Something similar seems to be the context of the use of ‘growth’ in Ephesians 4:16, and Colossians 2:19, neither of which are obviously about ‘getting bigger’, but rather use the metaphor of the human body, and focus on its ‘held-togetherness’ in love, in contrast to divisive attempts at ‘trickery’, ‘condemnation’ or ‘disqualification’ within the body.

These concerns seem to align closely with one of Jesus’ primary uses of organic imagery, that of fruitfulness (e.g. Mt. 7:15-20, Mt. 12:33, Mt. 13:23, Mt 21:19 & 43 and parallels in other gospels; Lk.13:6-9; Jn.12:24, Jn. 15:2-8 & 16). Just as John the Baptist urged people to ‘bear fruits worthy of repentance’ (Lk. 3:8-9), so Jesus invests much time and parabolic energy in suggesting that the ‘gardener’ (which tends to refer, primarily, to God) takes a stance of patient attentiveness to digging, pruning and manuring, and urging the ‘branches’ (Jesus’ disciples) to a loving abiding in the vine. Fruitfulness and love are intertwined, and so it feels like a faithful midrash on Jesus’ words when Paul unfolds ‘the fruit of the Spirit’ as ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control’ (Gal. 5:22-23).

When advocates of numerical growth want to talk about ‘coming to faith’, then, I want to respond by asking where we see this kind of fruitfulness. ‘You will know them by their fruits’ (Mt. 7:16), Jesus says. Faith is enacted more profoundly than anything that is spoken (see e.g. the parable of the two sons in Mt. 21:28-32). It is lived more significantly than anything that can be counted.

From the time I’ve ministered in the parish of Hodge Hill, to take one little concrete example, I can tell you stories of local people who have participated for years in the living-out of the gospel of Jesus, in the work of ‘growing loving community’. One or two of these would say they have had an explicit encounter with Jesus somewhere along the way (in ways that cannot be ‘engineered’ by any church initiative). And those moments are, of course, to be celebrated. But the kind of ‘growth’ I can point to is of a messy collective of neighbours and friends on a life-long journey together of seeking to embody more fully the gifts of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. You will know them by their fruits.

The desire for control

Such a perspective feels like it sits in stark contrast to what we might call a ‘managerial’ perspective on ‘coming to faith’. In the latter, ‘knowing’ people is bound up with things we can count, boxes we can tick. Do they come to church? Would they tick the box marked ‘Christian’? Can we count them as a ‘new disciple’, for the purposes of the stated outputs of this funding bid?

Outputs and inputs, of course, are the language of ‘industrial business’, ‘production management’ and even ‘personnel management’, which is Dr Paul’s own employment background. Which is a curious world through which to frame a theological conversation. It’s a world dominated by the overriding desire for efficiency and productivity, and the method is one of mechanistic control: give us a system that allows us, as reliably as possible, to control the outputs through what we put into the machine. It is a capitalist logic which stretches back to the plantation – the epitome, perhaps, of human power and control over land and crops, and, by no means coincidentally, of elite white male humans’ power and control over bodies they determined as ‘other’ and less-than-human. Reincarnating the production machine of Pharoah’s Egypt, the plantations generated a pseudo-psychological diagnosis of ‘drapetomania’: the peculiar illness affecting enslaved people who wanted to escape their controlled, productive, plantation life. What madness! But as Angela suggested in her blog post, we might well ask where the Church of England today continues in a plantation mindset – and, furthermore, what labels are placed on those who seek to make exodus from its mechanistic structures of control?

Church-related binaries

There is a profound cognitive dissonance in the contemporary Church of England. On the one hand, the imperatives to numerical growth and institutional sustainability are everywhere. On the other hand, we find ourselves in the midst of an ongoing stream of revelations about unhealthy institutional culture, and unsafe and abusive spaces within the church. Do we really want to draw more people into this church? 

One of the profound costs of emphasising numerical ‘growth’ is that it reproduces and entrenches a hard boundary between ‘in’ and ‘out’, a binary of ‘church’ and ‘world’ that so easily veers towards another binary: ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Binaries are rarely truthful and helpful, and this particular binary is not only empirically untrue, it is profoundly dangerous. It both degrades and overlooks the multitude of ways in which the life of the Spirit is at work in the world beyond the church, and also eliminates the possibility of identifying sin and evil within the life of the church. 

The church is not identical with the kingdom of God – at best, there is some overlap. The church is much more messy; it is ‘corpus permixtum’, as St Augustine once put it. A ‘fruitfulness’ perspective here not only summons us to pay more attention to spaces within churches that might be profoundly unfruitful; it also invites us to consider how this expression of church, in this context, might be a gift or contribution to the life, nurturing and growth of the kingdom of God here. This also means that contextual discipleship becomes a vital task – perhaps the most vital task – of the local church: what does it look like to be followers of Jesus here and now?

Again, much of my work in Hodge Hill over the last 15 years has been asking that question. I arrived in 2010, two years after the church building had been demolished, and at roughly the same time as the austerity regime of the new coalition government. At that point, I couldn’t have imagined a global pandemic, or Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, or Donald Trump as President of the USA (twice), or the Archbishop of Canterbury resigning over safeguarding failures. I didn’t know about Black Lives Matter. We had never had far-right marches organised on our doorstep. Even ecological collapse felt like a worst-case-scenario nightmare rather than an imminent reality. We just knew something about living on an outer estate, and wanting to be involved in ‘growing loving community’ here. But all of these things, and more, have pushed us to let go of almost all our assumptions about what ‘church’ should look like here, what ‘the gospel’ looks like here, what kind of God we worship and how and where that God meets us. It has radically changed our liturgy and worship and daily prayer, the ways we hold spaces for conversation and planning and decision-making, the ways we explore and question and share our faith together, and, yes, how we understand the messy edge-lands between ‘church’ and ‘not-church’, ‘Christian’ and ‘non-Christian’, and how we seek to live out and share our faith in those ecological borders. 

An ecological perspective

There are good reasons that Scripture is full of organic imagery. Even as cities began to play more and more of a prominent role in their life and worldview, the children of Israel were a people who live in intimate relationship to the land. And Jesus spent the majority of his time among such land-loving people too.[1]Drawing together the insights of indigenous (including biblical) wisdom and contemporary ecology, we might say, among other things:

·      there is no hard binary of ‘life’ and ‘death’ (as per Ian Paul’s ‘living things grow, dead things don’t’): just as any organism simultaneously includes cells that are dying and dead, and cells that are developing and growing; just as most organic life has seasonal cycles of growth and die-back; so any ecosystem depends on some parts dying and decaying which are utterly necessary for other parts to come to life (compost being my favourite example!);

·      there is no such thing as (the Western, modern concept of) the ‘individual’, separate from an ecosystem: not for plants, nor animals, nor humans; instead, there is interdependence, entanglement, blurred and porous boundaries, a complex ecology of agency and aliveness; we might talk about individuals or organisms as if they are separable ‘things’, with completely autonomous agency, that are therefore easily countable – but the distinction is more a convenient fiction than we often care to admit;

·      organic life and ecosystems are not machines, or even approximate to machines: you can try making interventions with plant life (digging, manuring, pruning, for example) that might play with some of the probabilities of some parts of the ecosystem becoming more fruitful, for a time, but your contribution will only ever be one of a multitude of factors, and so at best can be a wisdom-informed, but always experimental, ‘tinkering’ within a wild, unpredictable ecology;

So we need to let go of fantasies of control, counting, and the kind of ‘growth’ that somehow comes without being entangled with death. And maybe in the letting go, we might begin to make space for the wind of the Spirit to blow.

Doing, death, and the ‘dark night’

‘What can we do, then, to grow the church – or to keep it afloat?’ The question begins to smack not only of desperation, but of denial. It comes from a place of anxiety, but also from a place that imagines the church as a machine, rather than part of a wild ecology. It clings to the imagination that we can determine our desired outcomes by our own ‘doings’.

Which is not a reason for not doing anything. But it is a strong argument for doing something different, and for a different reason. Ian Paul suggests a little list of ‘doings’: ‘invite, talk about faith, challenge the culture around us, stand out as different’. I’d agree with all of those – but I suspect we might mean quite different things by them. I too want to affirm the possibilities in an agrarian understanding of faith, that sees our Christian vocation as being ‘co-workers with God’: but not focusing (anxiously? confidently?) on the future, with a clear outcome in view; rather, out of a deep-rooted faithfulness, to God’s love for us, and to God’s love for the kosmos.

I am struck by the deep ring of truth in these reflections from community-supported farmer Adam Wilson:

If David Abrams[2] is right when he asserts that language is a characteristic of landscapes in which humans participate, we might find ourselves surprised by what we hear emerging from our own mouths. That happened at least twice for me in those three interviews. In the conversation with Hazel, I dared to name the root longing that animates the work here: to be able to see our lives as reflections of the persistent generosity that comes in our direction every single day from the surrounding landscape—to become agents of grace. I won’t soon forget that phrase agents of grace.

When grace becomes a verb, it describes the action plan of gratitude, with whom it shares a root.

The next day I spoke with a graduate student in Colorado researching “post-capitalist agriculture.” Partway through our hour on the phone, she said, “I am guessing you’re not going to like this question, but I am going to trust that you will rephrase it as you see fit. What will the Farm look like in five years?” Hazel had asked something similar, so I’d had a warmup. But what I heard come out of my mouth surprised me: “I can’t tell you what the Farm will look like in five years because I have a sense that to do so would be unfaithful.”

I had a sudden feeling that this researcher wasn’t trying to write a paper about faith and spirituality.

“Can you explain what you mean by that?” she asked.

“I’ll try, but it might take me a second to listen,” I replied. Then I heard it. “Imagine if I was going to have a conversation with you, but beforehand I told someone else exactly where I thought we were going to arrive by the end of it. That would seem a bit unfaithful, wouldn’t it?”

As we remember the landscape as a primary conversation partner, we might find it harder and harder to propose five-year plans. That’s simply not the etiquette of a real conversation.[3]

Imagine letting go of our five-year plans and strategies, and giving all our available time, energies and capacities to faithful, attentive presence. This is the kind of relationship I’m interested in, to give shape to our relationships with our landscapes, our ‘missional’ relationships with our ‘non-Christian’ human neighbours, our relationships within what we call church, and even – especially! – our relationships with God.

Which brings us back to the ‘dead whale’ metaphor with which I started my first contribution to this conversation. Is it (as Ian Paul misreads it) a death-wish for God’s beloved children who make up the CofE? By no means! Is it wishing for the end of the institution of the Church of England? Maybe – and on some days in the rolling polycrisis of abuse, evasion, self-protection and privilege-defending, it feels like a more or less passionate Yes. But I originally proposed it as neither of those. Instead, it was a ‘what if?’. What if the institution is dead, or dying – and what if embracing that reality might just offer the possibility of some kind of release, some kind of liberation? What if we were no longer burdened by the anxious need to keep the institution afloat, prop up its structures, plaster over the cracks? What if we were able to let go, let it fall? What, then, might be possible, imaginable?

In the months since the ‘dead whale’ piece was first published, the cracks have begun to feel more like chasms. The Archbishop of Canterbury has resigned over safeguarding failures, collective and personal. As I write this, the futures of the Bishop of Liverpool and the Archbishop of York hang in the balance, as allegations of sexual harassment and assault by the former, and inaction by the latter, have become public. And through the last few months many, many bishops across the Church of England (with just a very few notable exceptions) have maintained a hard line of corporate silence, with some even writing letters to discourage clergy colleagues from expressing opinions in public, rather than (heaven forbid!) opening up spaces for concerns and dissent to find a hearing.

The inability to embrace death is, ultimately, a lack of faith. Who are we to imagine that a dead institution is the end of God’s work?! We are a resurrection faith. Of course new life will continue to spring up beyond, and in the midst of, the ruins of the Church. Our calling is to notice where we find ourselves in a collective impasse, hitting up against a dead end that no amount of growth strategy, or revised structures, or improved processes, or changed leadership, will break through. And once we’ve noticed that that is where we find ourselves, to embrace it, with utter seriousness, with sheer abandon: to enter the dark night of the ecclesial soul that God has waiting for us; to release what is dying; to let go of our anxious efforts to change the future or redeem the past, and to be present, as much as we can, to the breaking, crumbling reality of now; to stay with the trouble, to ‘tarry awhile’, to watch and wait, together.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

(Wendell Berry, ‘Our Real Work’, in Standing by Words, 1983)

---

[1] See e.g. Kenneth E. Bailey, Poet & Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes: A literary-cultural approach to the parables in Luke(Eerdmans, 1983).

[2] The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World

[3] Adam Wilson, ‘Agents of Grace?’, newsletter, 16 Dec 2024

In the ruins: the beginnings of a conversation

 

On 10th June, I had a wonderful conversation, in public, with Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani, as part of a day-conference organised by Reconciliation Initiatives: 'Being Missional Today: Disruption, Liminality, Reconciliation'. The setting was daunting: on the chancel steps of the vast space that is Coventry Cathedral, overlooked (and very much humbled) by the giant tapestry of 'Christ in Glory'. One of the many joys of the conversation was that, while it took much prior thought, we didn't plan it in advance. We agreed to be as honest as we could, and to embrace the possibility that it might go in directions that we had not anticipated. Which, indeed, it did. You can watch our initial conversation here (in many ways it's quite gentle - the Q&A with the wider gathering, later on, was more 'sparky' - but that wasn't recorded!). What I offer here, then, is some of the things I thought I might say, if our conversation took us there...

Where do we start? 

Perhaps by acknowledging the vulnerability of dialogue itself. The risk of clunkiness. The intentional resistance to things being too 'sewn up'. Stepping back from the conventional lecture mode of 'authoritative delivery'.

Perhaps also by acknowledging the particularity of the bodies we speak out of. And, for me, the particularity of a place within which I've been rooted and grounded now for 15 years. And a sense, as I come to a public conversation like this, of wondering how I do justice to the wisdom and stories of a particular community (many of whom have become friends and teachers to me over the years), and the particularity of its more-than-human ecosystem: its built environment, the M6 motorway, the Common land at the heart of my parish, the two rivers (the Tame and the Cole) that frame it. All these I carry not just in my head and on my lips, but somehow in my body too. All of these, somehow, I want to speak through me.

I wonder too how we might do justice to our wider context. The big picture. The multiple fallings-apart of our world: ecological breakdown; genocide in Gaza; dismantling of democratic government in the USA. And here in the UK: hostile borders; the rise of the Far Right; deepening inequality (in the name of economic 'growth'); anti-trans rhetoric and policies, reinforcing gender binaries against the far more complex reality; the combination of assisted dying legislation alongside savage cuts in disability support... And then the Church: anxious about survival: numbers, money, unity, theological purity. Resources and money being hoarded and siphoned off by the powerful. Unquestioning faith in 'new initiatives and programmes', 'vision and strategy', 'more effective processes'. And institutionally racist, classist and ableist, with legally enshrined sexism and homophobia held up as 'flourishing' and 'faithfulness'. How do we justice to all of this? How can we name what these dynamics are doing to us right now? How they are shaping and moving our bodies and souls?

I want to name the way so much of our collective life is shaped by anxious responses; collective, physiological responses in the face of threat or trauma. Fight, flight, freeze, fawn, force.. alongside other F words that might spring to mind... The urge to try and 'take back control'. A necessary survival response in moments of real threat and danger, but profoundly self-destructive when our bodies get 'stuck' in that response for the longer-term.

I want to name the way our ecclesial divisions are rooted, deep down, in profoundly different theologies: of church, of salvation, of God. And that we very rarely get anywhere near talking about these together. Perhaps we don't know how to. Perhaps we're scared that if we do, things really will fall apart. As if they're not already.

I want to name the ways in which we seem to find ourselves coming up against what theologian Constance FitzGerald called 'collective impasse'. When rational and strategic responses just don't seem to be making any difference. When the stories we've been in the habit of telling ourselves no longer seem to be working. FitzGerald, a Carmelite, identifies this collective impasse as 'the dark night of the soul'. And suggests that we need to learn how to dwell there. To slowly discover an imagination that has been nurtured in the dark.

What, then, if we choose to not try and 'manage' the multiple fallings-apart, but to face them, with courageous honesty? That's the invitation I hear in the conference theme, 'Disruption, Liminality, Reconciliation'. Although I'm nervous about it too. It still sounds a bit too easy. A bit too quick. As if 'disruption' is like the trains - an annoying but fairly temporary blip in service. As if reconciliation (a bit like 'unity') is something that's within reach, an initiative we can take, a project we can manage, rather than something that is only, really, in the wild hands of God. 

I want to talk instead about 'dead ends' and 'dark nights' and 'decomposition'. To give more weight to death and stopping and finality and not-coming-through-this-in-any-recognisable-form. To wonder out loud about what needs to die (racism and hetero-patriarchy in the CofE, to name but two). To explore the kind of radical 'Wintering' that writer Katherine May testifies to in her book of that name, and which I've experienced first-hand in the aftermath of my daughter's traumatic, life-threatening accident. A long, dark season of dormancy, when things like 'growth' and 'fruiting' are far beyond our present sensing.

If I'd fully appreciated the context of the Coventry Cathedral conversation, I would have talked about ruins. I would have recalled Dougald Hine's four tasks for the work we need to do in the ruins:

1. salvage what we can, that's worth saving;

2. grieve what we cannot save, but need to remember;

3. leave behind what was not as good as we once thought it was;

4. recover and re-weave some of the 'threads' we've dropped along the way.

I like these a lot, because they're nuanced enough to call us to the patient work of discernment. But they're bold enough to not let us get away with imagining that we're not living among the ruins. A patient honesty is what we need right now.

Our conversation came back round to wondering how we might nurture such spaces - 'small circles of radical presence' - for patient honesty, for discernment, for 'staying with the trouble' (as Donna Haraway put it). How we might inhabit and open up spaces for 'non-anxious presence'. In the Q&A later on, we were gently corrected: 'non-anxious' is both unrealistic, and also devalues the experience and wisdom of those who live with anxiety as a regular part of their lives. Perhaps better, it was suggested, we need to nurture spaces where we aren't driven by our anxieties, where our vision is not narrowed by them - but where we can pay attention to the messages they are trying to give us. And to the forces that are causing or exacerbating them. 'Compost heap communities', I've sometimes named them, where we can tend and attend to what is decomposing around us and within us.

The time went too quickly, as in all good conversations it does. We barely scratched the surface of the challenges, and the possibilities. I didn't feel I did do justice to the community and the place I'm rooted in. On the piece of paper that sat on my lap, I had a list of things that we've been learning to practise in Hodge Hill over the last 15 years: practical wisdom embodied in our place that might just have something to offer the wider church. But we mostly didn't touch on those. And I've not done here, either. That's for the next blog post...