AS RESOURCE churches expand across the Church of England, a new report suggests that attention must be paid to dynamics of power, which can sometimes be “masked” by the language of generosity.
Last year’s Scolding Report into Soul Survivor (News, 27 September 2024) highlighted issues “relevant to the culture of resource churches”. These include what the report lists as the “asymmetry of power (in this case between churches, or when leaders operate in large churches and networks); the strong role played by founding leaders; the effects of accelerated growth; focus on younger leaders; and the challenges that come with success”. The authors write: “Great care and attention must be given to this.”
The report — Resourcing the Church? — was prepared by the Gregory Centre for Church Multiplication, Faith in the North, and the Bede Centre for Church Planting Theology at Cranmer Hall, Durham. It records that there are currently 130 resource churches — defined as “a church called to repeated parish revitalisation through sending leaders and teams to plant or graft into other localities” — across 27 dioceses.
When it comes to the impact of such churches, evidence is “modest”, the report acknowledges. But a study by the Church of England Vision and Strategy team found that in a sample of 25 resource churches, total attendance had increased by 238 per cent between 2016 and 2023, compared with a national decline of 25 per cent. Attendance among those under 16 had increased by 400 per cent, compared with a national decline of 30 per cent.
This growth “reflects a substantial investment of focus and financial resources in settings deliberately chosen for their strategic location”, the report acknowledges. “Other forms of ministry have not received the same treatment. . . On the other
hand, though, it can be argued that many declining parishes have received a subsidy through support for their ministry costs over a number of years.”
A 2021 Strategic Development Funding learning summary recorded that 23 per cent of attendance at resource churches was “un- or de-churched people”, whilst 38 per cent represented transfer from a local church.
Transfer growth has been explored in other studies. A Church Army Research Unit (CARU) evaluation of resource churches in Bristol, for example, raised questions about definitions, noting that the diocese did not include worshippers who had come from places beyond Bristol, including students, in its definition. “De-churched” was used to define anyone who has not attended church for a year (Features, 9 August 2024). At Pattern Church in Swindon, a total of 16 per cent of adults — 27 — were defined as “un-churched or de-churched”.
The new report examines how the “virtues” of resource churches can “tip over into
excess” and calls for “vigilance and discernment”. It acknowledges, for example, that the “language of generosity can mask dynamics of power . . . Gifts can bless and release but they can also bind and control.” Similar reflections are required for the other virtues, it suggests: “The attendant dangers of courage are unreflective arrogance and an unfair distribution of the costs of change.”
The report acknowledges that questions have been asked about whether the level of investment in resource churches is “justified or fair”. It argues that, “to invest in this way is not so much an ideal configuration of the Church’s resources as a dramatic intervention in response to extended and widespread decline.” But there is also a need to “explore how financially sustainable resource churches are”. A 2021 CARU report on the resource church in Portsmouth concluded that city-centre examples may “continue to be financially dependent on the wider Church”.
The story of resource churches is “not one of unqualified success”, the new report says. “Not all planting strategies have been able to show sufficient contextual sensitivity and the ‘soil’ of some contexts is very difficult to plant into. At times, a ‘low’, informal style among church plants can be a flexible connection point, at others it may be perceived as an imposition or make only a shallow connection with local communities.”
The fact that resource churches are “overwhelmingly” in the Evangelical tradition may have theological causes, it suggests, noting “the revivalist concern for individual salvation and societal change”. Evangelical networks are “highly structured and well-resourced”, it says; and the rise of such networks has coincided with “a time of experimentation with local structures and . . . the pursuit of a more explicitly strategic focus by senior leaders in the Church of England”.
The report records that only around 13 per cent of resource churches are currently led by women, while an estimated one to three per cent of leaders are of minority-ethnic heritage. A “homogenous” approach to leadership “may have colonial undertones, where a particular group imposes its tradition on the rest of the church,” it warns.
The Dean of Church-Planting at St Hild College, in Yorkshire, the Revd Dr Christian Selvaratnam, reported that the next cohort of Camino — a new training pathway for future resource church leaders — was likely to be 50-per-cent women.
The report, which includes a call for “generosity of interpretation” from critics of resource churches, concludes that the next decade “will be the making of the model, for good or otherwise”.
