A truly ‘conservative’ evangelical account of gender and church office
I want here to take issue with the term ‘conservative evangelical’: a ‘conservative evangelical,’ if words retain any meaning, should necessarily be actively committed to promoting the equal ministry of women and men at every level of church office.
Read MoreAnother myth about gender and church leadership
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the regularly-heard assertion that embracing the ministry of women led to a slide into liberalism, and pointed out that there was simply no evidence to back this up. Today someone told me that a certain well-known pastor from Seattle had spoken at a church leaders conference in the UK and insisted that one proof of the rightness of denying preaching and leadership roles to women was that denominations that did were growing and denominations that did not were shrinking. It struck me on hearing this that I had heard the same argument four or five times in the past few weeks – sometimes as a broad assertion, as my phrasing above; sometimes phrased more anecdotally (‘I have encountered very few churches pastored by women that are growing…’), but with the anecdote used to establish a general principle which was then the basis of an argument. In an idle moment this evening, I wondered what the evidence base for such assertions looked like. First, comparing denominations is of little use; they differ on too many variables. Good evidence will come from comparing local congregations which are as similar as possible in all things save the gender of the core leader. Data like this is in fact easily available, for Church of England parishes, and it suggests that the gender of the incumbent (=senior/sole minister in CoE terms) does in fact influence the prospects for church growth slightly but measurably: Churches with female senior/sole pastors grow more often and faster than churches with a man in the role. This data can be found in tabular form in Bob Jackson’s The Road to Growth (Church House Publishing, 2005), p. 44. Jackson was a mission enabler for the Church of England, and did some survey work on various dioceses (and the New Wine network) between 1999 and 2004. 75 of the parishes he considered had a female incumbent for some or all of the time surveyed, and on average they recorded growth of 9%, against 2% for parishes with solely male incumbents. Now, this data is far from perfect: n=75 is not bad, but not very good either; given the dates and the Anglican context one has to consider whether openness to a female incumbent is acting as a proxy for some other variable (Anglo-catholic parishes shrinking badly, e.g.); it would be much more convincing to have data across a range of denominations – and indeed countries; … All that said, this is hard data, as compared to the windy rhetoric or the personal reminiscence of my opening paragraph. As such, it deserves respect at least until other, better, data is available. The evidence, such as we have it, is that churches grow faster with female senior pastors. How does this play into debates over gender and ministry? I am pulled two ways on this: as an evangelical, there is a strongly pragmatic streak to my beliefs about the church: ‘if people get saved, if churches grow, then we should do it – I’ll make the theology work later…’; as a Baptist, I have a conflicting hesitancy about ‘numbers’ arguments: ‘we are called to fidelity, not to success; you can grow easily by compromising with the spirit of the age…’ So, even if the data were compelling in one direction or the other, I would still hesitate to argue from data to ecclesiological principle. That said, I opened this post with the comment that I have heard the assertion that churches led by women do not grow four or five times in recent weeks; each time, it has been offered as a reason to reject the ministry of women. But the assertion is, on the evidence available, simply false – just as the assertion about ‘egalitarianism’ being a slippery slope to liberalism is simply false on the basis of available evidence. The temptation to get polemical here is strong; I will resist, and simply note in general terms that if someone continues to pile up demonstrably false arguments in support of a position, there inevitably comes a point when the reasonable response is to suppose that there are in fact no good arguments to offer, and that the position is based simply on prejudice. Those who believe there is good reason to support the position in question, therefore, should be as hawkish in calling out poor arguments as their opponents...
Read MoreChurch Growth in Britain 5: analysis
Goodhew offers both an introduction and conclusion to the book, which are valuable. In the introduction, he identifies the classical secularisation thesis as a ‘dominant narrative’ assumed by much of the academy, and by essentially all of the media. He suggests that the book serves to ‘subvert’ that narrative. This might be ambitious: the secularisation thesis is a macro theory, concerned with what happens in general on a whole-society scale; particular accounts of growth cannot, by themselves, subvert the narrative, only a large-scale sociological change could do that. That said, the book is of great importance in drilling below the headline statistics. There is a bad old joke to the effect that a statistician can lie with his head in the freezer and his feet in the oven and announce that, on the whole, he is feeling completely normal; global statistics do, of necessity, flatten out local variations, and sometimes that can be of enormous significance. Imagine that you were the leader of a small denomination in Britain, which showed a 15% decline in attendance each decade since 1980; if that pattern was universal – every congregation declining at more-or-less the same rate – then your denomination seems destined to cease to exist by about 2050. If, by contrast, on drilling into the statistics you were to find that your rural churches were declining precipitously – 40% per decade – but that your suburban churches were in fact growing, your denomination is destined to change, certainly, but to survive. Individual stories of growth matter; identifiable patterns of growth matter even more. The narratives of Goodhew’s book suggest that the church in the UK is not destined for extinction, but for shrinkage, certainly, combined with change. It will become more ethnically diverse, more (sub)urban, more charismatic – it will not disappear. Church growth in Britain seems to be occurring in the centre of cities and in the suburbs – not in the inner city UPAs; it occurs along major trade routes – the A1/East Coast Mainline corridor, for instance; it is presently focused around London in the SE of England; it is in part driven by female leadership (data suggests churches with a female leader are more likely to grow than churches with a male leader); … In some of this, we might see signs of hope. For some centuries, religious change in Britain has followed a pattern well-known to historians as a ‘centre-periphery’ model. Something begins in a cultural centre – London, always. From there, it spreads to other sub-centres – the main trade towns; from there it spreads into the wider community, eventually reaching the peripheries (the Scottish islands, always, in Britain…). If this pattern continues to obtain – and (a) there is no reason to suppose it should not; and (b) the data around trade routes suggest it does – then the focus on church growth in London is profoundly significant: this will be the reality for the rest of the UK over decades to come. Other points demand explanation. I suppose that the statistical association of church growth and female leadership reflects not a preference for women in ministry on the part of the Holy Spirit, but the reality that, given the human prejudices still operative, women who make it into church leadership tend, on average, to be rather more able than men who do. It is inescapable that conservative churches are generally growing, whilst less conservative churches are – not so much shrinking, as disappearing rapidly from sight. Particularly, churches that self-denominate as both evangelical and charismatic tend to grow. I confess a temptation here: I happen to be committed to a charismatic, evangelical Christianity that is affirming of women in leadership; statistically, I could claim that I am obviously right… I suspect, however, that the reasons are more complex than that. Charismatic evangelical churches tend to be considerably more flexible and mission-minded than other congregations; my supposition – I have no evidence – is that these characteristics are more important than theological stance. For some years after I formally left, I used to teach from time to time in Spurgeons College, my alma mater; generally, that coincided with the day in the week when, as a gathered community, the college would pray for its former students, having first solicited news from a number of them. I recall vividly one such service: having read the news from several sisters and brothers in Baptist ministry, Nigel Wright, the college principal, paused, looked over us all gathered, and commented, ‘it’s not difficult to grow a church in Britain today, is it?’ No. It is not. Some intentionality, some thought, some support – or...
Read MoreChurch Growth in Britain 4: The Nations
Three final chapters look at Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, offering some helpful different perspectives on church growth. Ken Roxburgh notes that the recent narrative of decline in Scotland is even more catastrophic than in the UK in general, before looking at five congregations in Edinburgh that have nonetheless grown to some extent. The case-studies are deliberately denominationally diverse: an ecumenical congregation; ‘Ps & Gs’ (St Paul’s & St George’s Episcopal Church, to non-locals); St Mary’s Roman Catholic Cathedral; Morningside Baptist Church; and Destiny new church. Ken notes that the growth generally – although not exclusively – happens within the evangelical and charismatic wing of Scottish Christianity, and also that each of these success stories features a city centre congregation that has been conscious in identifying a mission strategy into its community, and aggressive in pursuing the strategy through, for instance, the appointing of dedicated staff. Paul Chambers looks at Wales, first noting that the ‘secularisation thesis’ never applied very well to Wales, which managed to respond to rapid industrialisation by staging a major revival… He proposes instead a critical paradigm borrowed from Bourdieau, which focuses on the interactions of symbolic capital within different fields of action. The overarching field is unquestionably secular, and so inhospitable to church growth; congregations that grow do so because they find a smaller field of action, typically a local community, in which they become deeply involved and connected. The collapse of the old South Wales economy, particularly coal mining, has left needy communities in which local congregations can make significant connections if they try. Claire Mitchell looks at ‘Evangelical vitality and adaptation’ in Northern Ireland. She follows Christian Smith in using social identity theory to examine and narrate the changes in evangelicalism, although of course Smith was working on American evangelicals. Late modernity, on this account, creates a particular, pressing, need for belonging amongst disassociated people; groups – of whatever sort – can survive and flourish by becoming subcultures with strong social identities, and by defining themselves against ‘out groups’. Mitchell suggests that Northern Irish evangelicals have done this in a number of different ways, and shown great adaptability in a rapidly-changing political and cultural context in so doing. In different ways, these three essays all point to the idea that church growth happens to congregations that are intentionality situated within their local cultural context – either in targeted missional engagement, or in conscious self-differentiation, or (most likely)...
Read MoreChurch Growth in Britain 3: New Churches
Six chapters of the book focus on new churches, three looking specifically at Black Majority Churches, and three more widely. Hugh Osgood gives an excellent overview of the growth of BMCs; Richard Burgess offers an account of one denomination, The Redeemed Christian Church of God; and Amy Duffuor offers an account of a single congregation, Freedom Centre International in Peckham. All three chapters are interesting and valuable in charting the changing experiences of BMCs, and their intentional moves to keep the next generation and to adapt to changing cultural locations of their worshippers. George Lings (who was my vicar for the few months of my life I spent worshipping in an Anglican parish) offers a chapter on ‘Fresh Expressions and Church Planting in the Church of England’. These are big stories: George estimates, very credibly, that a thousand new congregations have started since 1992, either as plants or as fresh expressions, although he acknowledges a certain degree of false branding (in discussing things badged as fresh expressions, ‘the “annual Christmas tree lighting service” is an entry on a recent database that entertains me most and convinces me least.’) There is – properly, in the case of fresh expressions, where service and mission should be as important as attendance – no attempt to estimate the numbers of people attending these events, or how many of them are either also attending normal parish worship, or have left parish worship to join a fresh expression. We might guess at 50 000 people involved in Anglican churches and largely invisible to standard measures, however. David Goodhew’s analysis of new churches in York does give numbers, and they are fascinating. Twenty seven new churches have been founded in York since 1980, with a total attendance of just below 2000 adults and just over 500 under 18s; this can be compared to Gill’s figures (from Empty Church Revisited): mainline adult Sunday attendance decline between 1989 and 2001 was 1683 (741 Anglican; 322 Free Church; 620 Roman Catholic). There is some double-counting in these figures – some of Gill’s Free Churches probably class as ‘new churches’ on Goodhew’s analysis – and the time periods are not directly comparable, but we might be justified in suggesting that new church growth almost cancels out mainline decline in York, at least (Goodhew notes that York enjoys unusually vibrant church life). There are more adults in new churches than in old Free Churches; Goodhew predicts that the new churches will have more worshippers than the Anglican churches across the city very soon. The new churches include some international churches – BMC; Portuguese-speaking; &c. – and also a number of small Eastern Orthodox congregations; the majority, however, and all the larger congregations are non-denominational, or new denominational (Vineyard; New Frontiers; …) new churches in the classic mould. Broadly evangelical and charismatic in theology, appealing strongly to students and staff at the universities, well-organised, and mission-minded. Clive Marsh looks at new churches in Birmingham through the lens of four case studies; here the BMCs are a much more significant part of the new church story than in York; although Marsh does not attempt to offer city-wide statistics, he opines that in Birmingham also ‘the decline of mainline denominations is being offset, if not balanced, by the growth of other churches’. He further suggests that if we factor in other religions, it is almost certain that Birmingham is desecularising. These chapters do not tell a story of the reversal of the national decline in church attendance, but they do tell local stories of vibrant and growing churches, that are significant enough in at least some contexts to challenge the national story quite...
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