Church Growth in Britain?

David Goodhew (ed.) Church Growth in Britain: 1980 to the Present (Ashgate, 2012) I suppose most of us in academia have a list in our heads of books that ought to be written: there are positions that you know to be true, but that have not yet been demonstrated to be so to the satisfaction of the academy. This book crosses off number one on my list of such books. I have known for years that the standard public narrative of catastrophic church decline in contemporary Britain is at some level a misrepresentation: it is based on collecting statistics concerning Sunday attendances from mainstream denominations; but most vibrant church life in Britain today is not happening in mainstream denominations on Sundays; most of it is happening beyond the ‘mainstream’; that which is happening within is not generally happening on Sundays. This book tells those stories in academically credible ways, and so offers a significant corrective to the prevailing public narrative. For me two themes stood out in the book. First, any of us who have been around the evangelical world know many individual stories of church growth, but to try to place these in a national context, and to seek to measure the extent to which growth in the lively parts of the British church is offsetting decline in the moribund parts, is both ambitious and fascinating. Second, the story of growth in Black majority churches is not news to anyone with open eyes (which apparently excludes almost all media commentators on contemporary British Christianity…); for me, other stories of growth I knew had often seemed occasional and unconnected; to have them placed in some broader narratives of patterns of growth was very helpful. So what is the book about? Well, what it says on the tin: church growth in Britain since 1980: where it has occurred and (as far as can be discerned) why. The underlying theme is that the standard public narrative of church decline is an inadequate picture – not false, but needing qualification from another story. The basic point can be easily made: I do not know, presently, how many church congregations are active in my home town of St Andrews. Were I to be talking about Edinburgh, that might not be a surprise, but St Andrews is a very small community – about 20 000 inhabitants. There are three parish churches, two episcopal charges, a Free Church, a Roman Catholic parish, the university chapel, my own Baptist congregation, and a Vineyard church. Beyond that things get more difficult. There used to be two different Brethren congregations; I believe only one is still meeting, but I have no firm evidence for that belief. There used to be an independent charismatic fellowship; I have heard nothing of them for a few years, so assume they have folded, but I could be wrong. In recent months we saw advertising for a new Nigerian church; I think it is presently meeting, but I do not know. That reflects Sunday mornings. During the week there is a second university chapel which holds services during termtime; I know of homegroup type meetings which attract people not presently involved in any other congregation; much student Christianity happens outwith the town churches, for good or ill. It happens that, if we were to plot the Sunday attendances at the ten relatively mainstream congregations I have listed, I believe that they would show a slight increase over a decade; given the other uncertainties, that figure must be suspicious: if two other congregations have closed, and one new one begun, even the Sunday figure is difficult; if other things are happening during the week, that complicates matters further. Traditionally, however, we calculate church attendance by contacting mainline churches only and asking them to count ‘bums on pews’ on a given Sunday. Goodhew’s book is largely, although not exclusively, about the hinterland, the ecclesial activity missed by the mainline congregation Sunday census count. One of the themes of the book is that in places – London; Birmingham; York – the hinterland is becoming bigger than the foreground. In other places this may not be true, but to focus only on the mainline churches is, even in a small rural Scottish town like St Andrews, to miss much of the reality of what is going on. The book is topped and tailed with an introduction and conclusion from Goodhew; I will look at these at the end. In between are three sections, on mainstream churches, new churches, and Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. I’ll spend a blog post on each...

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Baptist Theology

My book on Baptist Theology is now out, or at least I have been sent the preview copies. If you are interested, you can read the first few pages here. Amazon have it available for pre-order. In the introduction I describe the thesis of the book thus: …I begin by suggesting that there are two foci around which Baptist life is lived: the individual believer and the local church. On the one hand, the practice of believers’ baptism demonstrates an intense individualism, a focus on the belief that God deals directly with each particular human person;on the other hand, the Baptist stress on the significance of the local congregation provides a focus on that community as the context in which God has promised to be active.Theologically, God’s work in each of these poles needs to be described Christologically and pneumatologically. Christ alone has the right to command the individual conscience, which means both that every particular person is responsible for their own religious decisions and practices, and that state interference in, or legislation for, religious belief and/ or practice should never be permitted. Faith and regeneration are always a miracle of grace, dependent on the atoning sacrifice of Christ and made actual in each individual life through the present work of the Holy Spirit; believers’ baptism is (at least) a powerful witness to this pneumatological regeneration. Turning to the second pole, the local church, I wish to argue that the particular Baptist vision of the local church depends, theologically, on the belief that Christ’s rule over the church is experienced directly by each local congregation,and not mediated through a translocal hierarchy. Christ is directly present wherever his people are gathered – congregated – in his name, and Christ’s presence guarantees the reality and adequacy of the church. In seeking to know and discover the call of Christ on its life,however, each local church is dependent on the Spirit’s aid and guidance, which is ordinarily experienced in gathered community.This is the church meeting, and the reason for the primacy of the church meeting in Baptist decision-making is that this is the place where the church can expect the Spirit to reveal the mind of Christ. These two poles are not in tension in Baptist theology – or, rather, they can be in particular contexts and instances, but there is no necessary tension – but neither may be lost without losing the heart of the vision. God, through the Son and the Spirit, calls indi- vidual believers into covenanted relationship in the local church, and equips them to build up one another within the local church, and to hear and obey the ongoing missional call to make every other human person a believer.This is Baptist...

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The Holy Trinity

My book on the Trinity is now published in UK & RoW (US rights are with IVP USA – don’t have a date for their publication). Paternoster have it available for order here; No doubt Amazon et al. will catch up soon. The book is cast as a history of Trinitarian doctrine, with a heavy emphasis on the fourth and twentieth centuries; to give a flavour of the argument, it closes with these words, citing some of the authors I consider along the way: …we set out on our own to offer a different, and we believed better, doctrine. We returned to the Scriptures, but we chose (with Tertullian’s Praxeas, Noetus of Smyrna, and Samuel Clarke) to focus exclusively on the New Testament texts, instead of listening to the whole of Scripture with Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Daniel Waterland. We thought about God’s relationship with the creation in the economy, but we chose (with the Valentinians, Arius, and Hegel) to believe that the Son must be the mode of mediation of the Father’s presence to creation, instead of following Irenaeus and Athanasius in proposing God’s ability to mediate his own presence. We tried to understand the divine unity, but we chose (with Eunomius and Socinus) to believe that we could reason adequately about the divine essence, instead of following Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin in asserting divine unknowability. We addressed divine simplicity, and chose (with Socinus and John Biddle) to discard it, rather than following Basil and the rest in affirming it as the heart of Trinitarian doctrine. We thought about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but chose (with Sabellius, Arius, and Eunomius) to affirm true personality of each, rather than following Augustine and John of Damascus in believing in one divine personality. We called what we were doing a ‘Trinitarian revival’; future historians might want to ask us...

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Books on gender and ministry from an evangelical perspective

I’ve been asked by several people in recent months to recommend books on this subject. I can’t claim to have read everything on the topic, and I probably have a bias to British authors, but here are a few suggestions – not necessarily all the best books, but a selection that, taken together, will open up most of the standard arguments well. I’d welcome other suggestions in the comments. Lis Goddard & Clare Hendry, The Gender Agenda (IVP, 2010): Lis and Clare are both Anglican ministers, but take different sides on this debate; the book is a series of emails they exchanged exploring many of the standard issues and arguments. It is accessible to the general reader, without being simplistic, and offers sympathetic presentations of two different positions. This would be the first book I’d give to most people – fair, generous, and informative. Gundry & Beck (eds), Two Views on Women in Leadership (Counterpoints) (Zondervan, 2001, rev. 2005) (chapters by Linda Belleville, Craig Blomberg, Craig Keener, and Tom Schreiner, with responses by each). A bit more technical; again, a sympathetic and non-controversial presentation of different viewpoints; the format means the arguments are more connected than Goddard & Hendry.) Pierce & Groothuis (eds), Discovering Biblical Equality: Complimentarity without Hierarchy (IVP/Apollos, 2004, rev. 2o05). A heavy and technical presentation of various aspects of a case for women in preaching and leadership positions, including serious treatments of all the crucial passages by respected evangelical Biblical scholars (Fee, Marshall, …) Wayne Grudem, Evangelical Feminism and Biblical Truth (IVP/Apollos, 2004). A large and comprehensive presentation of every aspect of the case for ‘complementarianism’. (This isn’t a great book, really, but I know of nothing that does the same work better – does anyone else?) Millard Erickson, Who’s Tampering with the Trinity? (Kregel, 2009) Explains and explores a curious contemporary argument that gender subordinationism somehow reflects the Trinity; I confess that the argument seems to me to rely on a simple, albeit rather common, misunderstanding of ecumenical doctrine, but some people seem to find it convincing, and Erickson does a good job of explaining what’s going on. Scott McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking how you read the Bible (Zondervan, 2008) and William Webb, Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis (IVP, 2001) both address the question of hermeneutics – how we should find meaning in the Biblical texts – and how that applies to gender relations and roles. On specific texts, the best places to go are the commentaries. Any good evangelical commentary will summarise various points in the debate, before offering a reason for the author’s preference for one side or another. At a basic level, try the relevant volumes in Tom Wright’s NT for Everyone, or the Bible Speaks Today; for more in-depth discussion, try, for example, Fee on both 1 Cor. and 1 Tim., or Thistleton on 1...

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The spirituality of doctrine?

Renovaré, the organisation founded by Richard Foster (Celebration of Discipline, et al.), have recently published a book entitled 25 Books Every Christian Should Read: A Guide to the Definitive Spiritual Classics. The list can be seen here (you’ll need to scroll down a little). I’ve read most of them, and at least some of almost all of them (as it happens, the only one I’ve never opened is Nouwen’s Return of the Prodigal Son; I know it’s wonderful; there’s even a copy in the house, as Heather’s homegroup worked through it a few years back; other things just keep getting in the way). The title is, I take it, deliberately provocative; such lists always generate argument, and an argument that leads to people being exposed to previously-unencountered classics of Christian spirituality is surely a good thing? I don’t particularly want to start that argument here; the list is a good one. It contains, however, three texts that would not often be included in the genre of ‘spirituality’: Athanasius On the Incarnation; Calvin’s Institutes; and Lewis on Mere Christianity. These are texts in doctrine (or perhaps apologetics for Lewis); the study of doctrine is not generally considered to be an aid to prayer in those parts of the church in which I move, at least. (And academic theological conferences do not often feel like powerhouses of prayer…) When John Rackley was BUGB President, he ran a survey asking (British Baptist) ministers what fed them devotionally, and commented in writing it up that almost none of them (two, from memory) mentioned reading doctrine. As it happens, reading Calvin does inspire me to devotion from time to time; the same is true of Barth, and one or two others in the dogmatic tradition. But if devotional inspiration is my aim, Brother Lawrence or Mother Julian are far, far more reliable options for me (and much lighter to carry around than Calvin or Barth!). This is, of course, a modern problem. The connection between doctrine and piety was routinely assumed in the tradition, whether in arguments that only the true contemplative could even try to do theology (Gregory of Nazianzus, First Theological Oration), or arguments that any right understanding of doctrine will inevitably lead to heartfelt worship and devotion (Calvin, Inst. 1:1-2). Less happily, heretics are routinely accused of the grossest acts, because it is assumed that their wrong doctrine must make them morally incompetent. This connection is, one way or another, traceable down to the beginning of the nineteenth century (it’s there in Coleridge (‘They must become better before they can become wiser’) and, in a way, in Schleiermacher), but had begun to fall apart a century, perhaps more, before that. By the time we get to the middle of the twentieth century, there is something of a prevailing assumption that theological scholarship will destroy piety and that practiced piety is at least an impediment to proper theological scholarship, and assumption that has begun to be overcome in the decades since, but that is still sometimes visible. What happened? I can think of various explanations. Perhaps St Bernard’s fulminations over Peter Abelard’s Sic et Non were well-directed, and the founding of the European university system was all a catastrophic mistake? (I don’t think this, by the way, but any academic theologian needs to reflect on it from time to time.) Perhaps theology should be done only within the local church (memorably, the Black Rock Address on ‘theological schools’: ‘In every age, from the school of Alexandria down to this day, they have been a real pest to the church of Christ’)? (I don’t think this either, but the authors were Baptists, and I accept that the challenge is as much mine to prove them wrong, as theirs to carry the point.) I have an alternative explanation, not quite so easy, which relies on some genealogical reflections. Doctrine, we should remember more often, is – or at least used to be, and should still be – the science of reading Scripture well. Athanasius’s On the Incarnation is a contribution to an ongoing exegetical debate. (I assume we all know by now that the whole debate over the Trinity in the fourth century was exegetical? The ontological schemes and logical distinctions that Athanasius and others worked out were proposed to offer ways of reading certain disputed texts that made better sense of the whole of Scripture than other proposals.) Calvin’s Institutes are written as a simple and easy textbook to give his readers the crucial concepts and distinctions they will need to make sense of Scripture when they read it for themselves. At some point (Hegel? Schleiermacher? Around then,...

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