staring into the distance::as far as our eyes can see

“An emerging profession”: so when is an emerging “community” really a church?

Jonny has recently posted on the subject called “an emerging profession” on leadership in emerging communities, drawing from his experiences in Grace, Ealing. It’s an important post, and all that I want to say is in response to it, so before reading the rest of this, go read it first…

The Church of England is proving a fertile ground for fostering both “Emerging Churches” and other modes of “Fresh Expression”. In recently-published statistics covering 2005/2006, 39% of the parishes in the Church of England indicated that they had begun a fresh expression of Church involving new and regular activity. (Source: Archbishops’ Council of the Church of England, Church Statistics 2005/6). Amongst that branch of Emerging Churches in the UK called alternative worship communities it has long been the case that the majority of these were Anglican in origin. This is the context from which both Jonny and I speak, in his case as a member of Grace, in mine as a member of Foundation in Bristol.

Whilst I agree with Jonny about many of the features of emerging communities and their values which his post draws out, I became rather concerned that he was only painting a selective part of the picture in regard to leadership in these kinds of emerging groups. In particular, he makes these assertions in regard to Grace:

1. “we don’t employ anyone to lead us or to be the minister”
2. “we have an ethos … [which] functions like a rule or measure and has shaped us more that we thought it would.”
3. “leadership is shared and dispersed within the community” (and he explains how this works out practically) “…and there’s plenty of opportunity to lead or minister”.

Then he summarizes the picture by saying: “So leadership for Grace is:

1. dispersed – done by different people at different times with different gifts
2. about guarding the ethos – we have come to see this as a key role of what the smaller group are entrusted to do
3. environmental – by which i mean that the role of leadership is not doing stuff, but creating the environment whereby stuff happens and people relate to one another easily and participate
4. unprofessional
5. cheap/sustainable”

He then points out the anomaly within their Anglican setting of needing an ordained priest to preside at communion (they currently have such a priest who is a member of Grace in his own right) and then cites a discussion where the comment was made, “either we all get ordained or none of us gets ordained” which seemed to “capture the sense that as a community leadership is shared and owned and not something we expect an outside professional to do for us”.

At one level, I want to affirm the pragmatics of how Grace runs, which reflects how most mature emerging and alternative worship groups within Anglican settings appear to run. This picture of community works, and works well. However, I also want to point to some notable gaps in the picture which I’ve heard repeated all too often by Anglican Emerging Church practitioners. The picture Jonny describes is not one of a ‘church’ in the sense in which most theology, ecclesiology, church history or missiology would define one. It’s of a group which is a congregation within a church. So Jonny’s picture is of congregational leadership, which is exists under the leadership of a church. This is a point hinted at by Maggi Dawn in her comment on Jonny’s post:

“how do you tease out further the idea that you don’t have any paid/ordained leadership, and yet you count yourselves as an Anglican
congregation of St Mary’s. Doesn’t that imply a neccesary link? in other words, does it mean that Grace can only function as well as she does because she can lean on the structure that supports her?”

The argument about paid/non-paid leadership, though it initially stimulated the discussion, is (I think) less foundational than the question of whether the picture Jonny, with others, describes of “Emerging leadership” is set in a real church. For if not, then these are questions for how to manage particular types of congregations, and don’t belong to the wider conversation around the Emerging Church. It’s more than time that we had greater precision in the terms we’re using. For example, it’s highly possible for groups of Christians who meet regularly to do things together to be described loosely as a “community”, without being a church. Sunday school leaders, who work regularly with the same group of children for half an hour each week during a typical Sunday morning eucharist, and at other times to plan together, can build up a strong sense of bond, ministry and purpose, but without claiming to be a church. The same could be said of the church brass cleaning team. So the word “community” does not necessarily equal “church”, and I think we need to be cautious about the way we loosely band it around, lest we imply a subliminal ecclesiology which in fact is either unquestioned or not there at all.

From the point of view of Anglican ecclesiology, the kind of discussions Jonny relates happening in Grace indicate an isolation from the broader Anglican context of which they are a part. In that bigger context, a more complex understanding of ministry and church functions, which has to deal with wider issues, theological, communal, historic, catholic and even legal. The theology of leadership in groups like Grace may be different from the rest of the Church of England for the sake of their internal discussions and perspectives, but if it came to the crunch, and more particularly, should Anglican groups like Grace ever move beyond the patronage of a particular parish church, a bigger set of issues would have to be negotiated. This bigger world sneaks into their immediate environment when it comes to celebrating the sacraments of the Church catholic, and there, despite everything, the theology of the wider Church context suddenly makes itself known. And it’s a good thing too! The veil of theological insulation is, momentarily, removed. Perhaps for Anglican emerging groups to have their “own” priests is not helping here, as it may be promoting a congregationalist theology which is at considerable variance with Anglican theology.

Grace, along with many other Anglican Emerging groups, is a congregation of an Anglican parish church, a point Jonny rightly makes clear early in his post. (Note my terminology here:) The church of St Mary’s Ealing is under the oversight (episcope) of the Bishop of London, through his area bishop. The vicar of St Mary’s Ealing exercises oversight of all congregations of St Mary’s Ealing on behalf of the bishop, through the cure of souls he shares with his bishop, and granted him by the bishop’s licence. In terms of ministry, the minister with the oversight (episcope) of Grace, as with all congregations of St Mary’s Ealing, is the Bishop, acting through the vicar of the parish. From what Jonny’s post describes, the vicar delegates most functions of leadership to be dispersed (Jonny’s word) amongst regular members of that congregation. But this does not mean that anyone, other than the vicar, has responsibility for Grace – at least not as far as Anglican theology, law and the diocese of London is concerned. The model of ministry and leadership that Jonny describes, therefore, is only operating at Grace because the minister exercising the Bishop’s oversight of the parish church has permitted it. Words like “permit” imply a concept of authority in leadership and ministry which are rarely mentioned in Emerging discussions so far, but often because the full picture is quietly being ignored. In most Anglican situations like Grace’s, the ministry with the oversight is exercising an extremely light touch in order to foster creativity and innovation. Maybe this is part of the genius of Anglican contexts which have led to such a flourishing of Emerging and Fresh Expressions. But if members of such Anglican groups start to believe that no leadership exists beyond the dynamics of the group, nor any wider authority, they’re going to be in for a shock at some point in the future, or whenever there is next a communion service.

None of this need impinge upon the dynamics of a congregation such as Grace while two things remain the same: firstly, the vicar of the parish maintains his or her present policy of oversight, and secondly, while the congregation remains part of the parish under whose patronage it exists. Were the congregation to move elsewhere, different issues would need to be faced, and either the group would have to cease to be Anglican, or it would need to ask the Bishop to provide some mode of episcopal oversight, or it would need to come under the patronage of another parish church. In other words, the minute the congregation became a “church” in the full sense, it would have to come to terms with leadership of the oversight variety. And here’s the rub: because it is “leadership of the oversight variety” that lies at the heart of what ordained ministry is. The issue of oversight raises issues and archetypes which reach right back to the New Testament, and are linked with the integrity of the message which the Christian community has been called to bear: the Gospel. Now I’m not arguing for Episcopacy here. I’m arguing for coherence. Many other forms of Church polity do a good job of tackling this issue (Presbyterian and Congregationalist models also address the issue of oversight and its required authority), but tackle it they do.

Let me make it clear that I regard Grace as an inspirational community who have led the alternative worship movement in the UK in responsible and commendable ways to the benefit of many, many people. I would be proud to be a member of Grace myself (but, hey, I live in Bristol so belong to Foundation) and I am proud to be a friend to a number of people within Grace. All the points I have made about Grace could equally be made about many other alternative worship groups in the Church of England, including, for the bulk of its history, my own congregation of Foundation. So no criticism should be inferred from this post about Grace whatsoever; quite the opposite. Because of Jonny’s citing of his own experiences of Grace, I have had to challenge some of his argument by reference to what Grace is in relation to its parent church St Mary’s and the wider London Diocese. In what I’ve said, I’ve made some assumptions that the setup at St Mary’s follows usual patterns of ministry licencing and so on within the Church of England, of which I am a part. These assumptions may in fact turn out not to be the case, in which case I will gladly accept and publish any correction.

The reason I’ve written at such length is that I am troubled, in some ways, that the global Emerging Church conversation may be fudging important issues bearing on the Gospel and its attendant authority by being a little over-romantic and fuzzy in our notions of “community”, “partnership”, “creativity” and indulging in some blurring of boundaries which may be intellectually lazy at best, and at worst, socially damaging. Of course I am probably over-worrying here, but I have seen what can go wrong when issues of oversight, personal accountability, named authority (and being under authority) and group accountability have been parked in the interests of pragmatic mission into “contemporary culture”. I’d certainly counsel caution if groups within the Church of England are being treated by the wider Church as having cracked the issue of ordained leadership in Emerging churches, when in many cases, it’s highly debatable whether we’re talking about churches, in the full sense, at all. I would want to argue that the reason the Church of England has managed to foster so many instances of creative Emerging Church congregations such as Grace is precisely because the issue of oversight in leadership is so stabilized and defined in our setting that there can be these instances of “light touch” oversight and accountability. But for the whole thing to move forward, so that  England becomes a place where Emerging congregations become Emerging churches, will require some grasping hold of the nettle of ecclesiological reality.

Posted on Wednesday, 14 November 2007 by Paul | Posted in emerging church,theology | 4 comments