Beyond Growth with Al Barrett & Angela Sheard

An honest conversation about some of the challenges facing clergy today amidst the pressure to “grow”. The conversation questions what the priorities and concerns of ordained ministers should be, and wonders how we might remain focused on what really matters. 

With Al Barrett and Angela Sheard

Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speaker and do not necessarily reflect the official positions of Ridley Hall, the Church of England, or the Diocese of Ely.

Transcript

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Welcome & Why Beyond Growth

SPEAKER_00 0:03

You're listening to Reflections on Ordained Ministry. Drawing on the wisdom of clergy from across the country, we explore together the changing landscape of ministry and the huge variety of contexts for it. Welcome. It's great to have you with us for this episode Looking Beyond Growth. Why don't we just begin by you introducing yourselves?

SPEAKER_03 0:32

So hello, my name's Angela Sheard. I was the curate at St. Martin the Fields, and I've just started a new role as Anglican tutor at the Queen's Foundation, Birmingham.

SPEAKER_02 0:42

And I'm Al Barrett. I'm the rector of Hodgshill Church and have been since 2010. Fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 0:48

Thank you. And thanks for coming in today. So we're looking at Beyond Growth today. Growth is everywhere in the in the rhetoric and narrative of the Church of England at the moment. We see it all over the place. And of course, you know, you probably think growth is a good thing. But we've entitled this episode Beyond Growth. So what why

Relief from Numbers Anxiety

SPEAKER_00 1:10

why is that? Why might that be uh why might we want to look beyond growth and not just simply celebrate growth?

SPEAKER_03 1:17

Okay, well, I guess I have a story that I will tell to kick us off, which is that I was having a conversation uh a while back actually on Zoom with a another clergy person who was in charge of a benefice and was we were talking about difficulties in ministry and mission and and in kind of regular life, I guess, as as keep trying to keep um the parish together. And I was mentioning in the course of our conversation that the reality is the church changes in size over time. It it always has done and it always will. It gets bigger and smaller in different places for lots of different reasons, which are, which are good and bad, really. And and in in a way, our kind of narratives around church growth sit against this much broader backdrop, I think, of of 2,000 years of history in which there has been so much change for so many different reasons. And since we've been talking a lot about the pressures of trying to grow or achieve renewal in a congregation, when I said that, I could just see her shoulders kind of slump back and the expression on her face kind of relaxed a little bit. And she's and she said, Oh, I I just never thought about it in that way before. I had never thought about the church and about church growth as something that just happens over time for lots of different reasons. And and I thought at the time, actually, the feeling I had was of this release of pressure, this release of kind of expectation. And what I had said is is in many ways just a statement of fact. It's it's something which, when you look at the bigger backdrop of church history, is is incredibly obvious. And so it got me thinking. I was quite surprised at the strength of the reaction and and that that feeling of of release. And and it got me thinking about how do we understand church growth and and you know, against what backdrop do we place the dominant narratives in our wider church.

SPEAKER_02 3:09

And I think I'm really curious about this sense of release from something. And I think one of the things that potentially we need releasing from is a deep anxiety as a church institutionally. And I think there's a real worry around our survival collectively at this point in time, a sense of, you know, looking at the numbers, we might not be around in 10, 20, 50 years' time. And I feel like that that's kind of in the air that we breathe in a lot of the discourse that's going on nationally and also at diocesan level, and it kind of seeps into a lot of the day-to-day feelings of those of us who are parish priests. And genuinely, I think, you know, uh, in these kinds of conversations, quite a rare opportunity to open up a space that says, actually, can we can we look at church through different lenses? Can we ask a different kind of question about what makes a church good or healthy? Um, or where can we see the presence of God in a church and in a church's relationship to its community that isn't necessarily captive to this very particular and quite narrow way of looking at church that's about counting numbers and attendance? And just

Counting, Control, and Resistance

SPEAKER_02 4:35

just to kind of add in my own story on that, um as usual as a parish priest, in around September, I received an email from the diocese saying it's time very soon for you to be counting attendance on a Sunday morning in church in October. Um and I was really busy with other stuff and didn't really have uh space to think about it. Uh and then I got another email in January saying, uh, now you've you've had your your year and it's time to fill in the form uh with those numbers on. Uh and in January I was kind of knackered from Christmas and and didn't really have the capacity to think about this. And then I got a final reminder urgent uh in February saying, you have still not filled in your statistics for mission return for the last year. What are you going to do about it? And suddenly I had a bit of a penny drop moment and I thought, actually, I don't have to fill in this form. I'm getting these emails telling me that you know it's essential and and it's it's all part of the uh you know the counting processes and and wider um evaluation uh from the diocese and from national church. But actually I thought I don't need to. And and a similar kind of release happened in me that actually I I don't need to play that game, which feels like there's a real anxiety attached to it, and certainly stirs within me an anxiety. Um and it made me ask the question, well, what if we tell a different story about our churches?

SPEAKER_00 6:18

I remember when I was a curate, uh, I was in this uh very old cold vestry and uh discovered in the church safe, you know, one of those huge, massive doors that it takes all your might to open. You know, the we had um registers that went back to like the 16th century. Now they should obviously have been in the archives, but they weren't. Here they were in the church safe. And so I started pouring through them and I started looking at the ones from the early 20th century, 1901, 1902, and looked at the the service figures for each week. You know, Sunday, the whatever in January, you know, 1903, Holy Communion, uh, number of communicants, one, number of attendees, one, you know, next week, two, one, you know, one, two. And I just really struck me as actually that the narrative of growth, we we take the 1970s as our kind of baseline, you know, to go back to what you were saying, Angela, about actually these ups and downs through the history of the church. I was like, gosh, right at the turn of the 20th century, here is this little um Paris church where actually it was it was well, I don't know what it was doing, whether it how faithful it was being or not, but but there it was, you know, just one or two people each week. And we have this this high watermark from which we we measure everything else and the stress that that can create. And actually, for me, reading that register was quite releasing as well. So actually, here we are as a as a group of 20 or 30 gathered around the table each week, uh, and there is something wonderful about that. So, so I guess here the question I want to ask is if we're a bit sceptical about the the rhetoric around growth, what might be a better narrative to tell?

SPEAKER_03 7:55

I feel like you should say something about your fruitfulness stuff.

SPEAKER_02 7:58

Okay, yeah, sure. And and I think um before I do, it's probably worth saying that I don't think either of us would want to say that we're not remotely interested in people having a relationship with God and encountering Jesus and uh and the sense of the importance of belonging in community, are we?

SPEAKER_03 8:19

Oh, absolutely.

History’s Ups and Downs Reframed

SPEAKER_03 8:20

I think it is unambiguously a wonderful thing when people come to faith in Christ, get baptized, become part of the church community, when we see local churches reaching out in mission in new and creative ways, and all of that in so many ways feels like part of God's kingdom. Um so that is not, for me at least, what is in question here.

SPEAKER_02 8:42

And and I think following on from that, one of my concerns about the dominance of the growth narrative is how it shapes how we perceive our neighbours. Because I think what it risks doing to us is if we're driven by an anxiety that kind of there's a gaping hole at the heart of church that needs filling with people, we end up seeing our neighbours as kind of, you know, on one level, nothing more than potential numbers that we can get in to fill that hole. Uh, and what I would want uh would be for us to approach our neighbours with different eyes and in a sense with a different agenda. Our agenda is not, I would say, primarily to get people into church. Um, our agenda, and you named it, Angela, is is the nurturing of the kingdom of God and joining it and joining with God in that work. And I think one of the things I'd want to say with that is that it's vital for my theology to say that the spirit of God is at work beyond the church. The spirit of God is at work in the world, in our neighborhoods, uh in the wider world, in ways that sometimes the church is aligned to and is part of, but a lot of the time actually, you know, the church has nothing to do with and certainly can't claim it as the as the work of the church. So I think that feels like an important foundation for me. And I guess kind of following on from that, rather than rather than numerical growth being the thing that dominates the questions that we ask, I would love to imagine ourselves into a world where we ask, where do we see the fruit of the Spirit? Where do we see those fruit that are outlined in Ephesians of love, joy, peace, uh, patience, kindness, gentleness. Um and and of course, we often see those in church, and that's wonderful. Um, but also I think we see them in the wider world around us, and that for me is evidence of the spirit's work more widely. But also, I think it asks us, uh it makes us ask a different question about what's going on in church.

SPEAKER_03 11:02

Yeah, definitely. And what I love about that fruitfulness analogy for me is kind of an implicit emphasis on discernment, because you know, if a plant bears fruit, you can see and smell and taste and touch it, but you know, there's often a process of discovering fruits, I think, and and kind of and maybe our role in a kind of fruitfulness understanding is to be attentive, uh, to discern. Um, it's, you know, there's in the Jewish tradition, I believe, there's a phrase about reading the Bible being compared to um standing under a fig tree. And um I I know someone from a former church who's a gardener who said that he's got a fig tree, and it's actually quite difficult with a fig tree to see where the figs are. You have to pull the leaves up because they often curl around the figs. So to discover fruitfulness, you have to be really carefully attentive to the plant and you have to kind of peel back. Sometimes you only get a few fruits, right? You you might not get a massive harvest, but you have to look really carefully for that. And so I guess within a kind of incarnation-centered understanding of the world in which the whole world is is um is grace-filled and and is inhabited by the spirit. Maybe our task, rather than um necessarily building, is a task of looking, is a task of discerning and being attentive to where the where the fruit is ripening.

SPEAKER_02 12:24

Absolutely. And I think I just want to add that a bit more. I'm I'm a hopeless gardener, um, but I I am involved in one of our community gardens locally. And earlier this year I went to went on a day course on pruning fruit trees. Um and one of the fascinating things that

From Growth to Fruitfulness

SPEAKER_02 12:40

sort of rang bells for me was that the learning uh was offering me all kinds of wisdom, which actually Jesus uh embodies and articulates in particularly in John's Gospel around John 15, when he's talking about the vine and he talks about pruning. Um and one of the things that I only half knew about pruning until this course was that actually you don't want a fruit tree to just get bigger and bigger and bigger. What you have to do is you have to prune it to stop it getting too big. Because if all the energy goes into the fruit tree getting bigger, then energy doesn't go into the fruit tree creating fruit. And in a sense, you could say the point of a fig the point of a fruit tree is is to bear fruit, which I think is what Jesus is saying in the parable, which is why he talks about you know pruning the branches that don't bear fruit. It's good gardening practice. But it suggests to me that Jesus isn't most interested in numerical growth and size, he's talking about fruitfulness and what's the fruitfulness he's talking about. He's talking about love, he's talking about abiding in his love, but also uh showing that love, embodying that love within the community and and to the world around. And it just feels like it shifts the kind of the kind of lens that we look through when we're looking at church.

SPEAKER_00 14:10

Uh of course, the thing of this, it's so much harder to measure. Yes. You know, you you you can't do a statistics permission form or or you can't quantify this kind of fruitfulness or faithfulness in in the same way. And I think it's one of the difficulties for for the church, always has been perhaps what does success look like? You know, and and the only way that perhaps well the only easy way to get a handle on that is through counting numbers. But that obviously hides so much. Whereas talking about fruitfulness, what does that quite look like? It it's much harder to be able to count that in the same way.

SPEAKER_02 14:46

It is, and and in a sense, we need to we need to acknowledge that in a sense resorting to counting is a bit of a lazy shortcut. And actually, we need to attend to processes that that are more patient and slower.

SPEAKER_03 14:59

Yeah, so I think you know, returning to my fig tree idea as well with this, there's something around the the the quality of the figs and the taste of the figs. So so the so the question of fruitfulness for me is not necessarily about the number of fruits, for example, it's about it's about the their depth and their uniqueness of flavor. And and you know, there's there's something again, I'm thinking now of Jewish traditions around the reading of the Torah about, you know, every time you go to the fig tree and you and you pick a fig, it has a different and unique taste. And and it's it's referring to this process of returning to scripture every time and finding new insights. But I think it applies to fruitfulness as well. Uh, you know, it's not just about having a hundred figs is not necessarily better than having ten. It's about it's about the taste and and and the kind of unique depth of that.

SPEAKER_02 15:47

And I think with that, um picking up on your question about success, David, um part of the question is when do you when do you look? When do you measure? Um you know, the the seasonal cycles of the year suggests that if we looked at a fruit tree uh in the middle of winter uh and decided that it's not bearing fruit and decided that therefore it's a failure, uh that would that would be a ridiculous thing to do. So there's something about, again, going back to where you started, Angela, acknowledging that some of this stuff is cyclical, um, and that's okay. Acknowledging that actually within any ecosystem there's death as well as life. And surely, as Christians who believe in

Discernment and the Fig Tree

SPEAKER_02 16:30

in a God who is uh crucified and resurrected in them right at the core of our faith, death shouldn't be something that we're afraid of in this. Um, the decomposition and decay that's part of the natural cycle should should be okay. We can embrace that partly because decomposition and decay release nutrients and possibilities and new life, but also actually this sense of patience and longevity about that. And if if I can tell a bit of a story from from my context. So I've been where I'm I am as Vicar for 15 years. And for a lot of that time, the thing that we focused on most has been working with our neighbours to build community in our neighborhoods. We're in an outer state community that has uh that's very ethnically diverse. Um, and so there are real uh differences and sometimes divisions between people from different ethnic backgrounds. There's real differences and sometimes divisions across the generations, across the age spectrum. Um and and it's felt like the most important work of nurturing the kingdom of God's in my place has been about nurturing friendships and community and spaces of encounter between people who are who are very different. Um and over over the years we've seen huge fruitfulness and that sense of of love and joy and peace and patience and generosity and and um and all of those those wonderful uh fruits that um that are named in Ephesians in in our wider community, but not necessarily seen a huge amount of people uh suddenly coming to church on a Sunday morning. But one of the things that's happened recently, 15 years in, is that one or two of the people that we've worked really hard to nurture into um agency and responsibility and leadership within our wider neighborhood um have had experiences of Jesus. And and with that have have brought to our little mission or community on on the estate that we've we've nurtured over years, have brought uh insight and wisdom and life and and energy. Um and one of them who's been a natural connector locally for years, uh has brought in a whole load of friends and family into that context. Um, so that our our little Fab Church group in December last year was about six people, now it's about 27 people, you know. On the forms, uh that would look amazing in terms of numerical growth. But actually, what is missed is that that took 15 years of patient nurturing for us to get to that point. And actually, it all hangs on one person having had uh an encounter with Jesus along the way, but also years of patient nurturing and investment

Pruning, Love, and True Success

SPEAKER_02 19:40

of her as a as a leader and a connector locally.

SPEAKER_03 19:45

I love that because there's this sense in which um the numerical measurement has come as a kind of it's it's almost it's a celebration um which kind of comes at the end of that story of nurturing and that story of fruitfulness. And it's made me think about why do we count? Why do we count numbers of people um who come into church and and and attendance figures and so on? What is its purpose? Is it to track our progress? I mean, surely in some ways it's if it's anyone's, it's God's progress. And and does God progress? I mean, there's a massive conversation there, but but I mean, some people would say we we count numbers of people in order to best allocate resources. And now I can I can I can well understand that, but I think we need a conversation about what are the principles by which we actually allocate resource um in our church. And I mean, in the example from from the book of Acts, you know, lots of examples from the New Testament, resources in the early church seem to me to be allocated to people and places that are in need, in in financial need of some kind. And and that was a that's a really clear kind of statement to me about how resources used. So I would argue if if resource use is our primary concern, then we should be thinking about which people and places are in need rather than allocating resource based on numerical growth.

SPEAKER_02 21:12

And there is there's a real connection there with the way economics works in the wide world, doesn't there?

SPEAKER_03 21:18

Oh yes, definitely. So we can I we can get onto that, David. I don't know if if this is the good time.

SPEAKER_00 21:24

Well, uh yeah, yeah, g go for it. Why why don't you just s say a little bit, Angela, of of that connection between uh yeah, gr thinking about growth in in the economic world and and the kind of narrative of growth in the church.

SPEAKER_03 21:38

Okay. Okay, so so I guess I I was quite interested in in this, um, particularly, you know, thinking about um so so Liz Truss, a former prime minister, is is possibly one of the most well-known proponents of growth, you know, potentially in the last decade, for example, in in British politics. And and her strapline was was growth, growth, growth. And she had a she had a particular way of publicizing a single-minded sort of focus on economic growth. But, you know, actually, mainstream political parties of the left and the right have seen economic growth as undisputedly a priority and have seen it as a universal good. But on the other side of that, um there have been economists and philosophers and various people who have who have critiqued this um this dominant narrative of economic growth. So among them would be um people like Kate Rayworth. Um so she is um an economist who's who's developed a really fascinating model for the way in which economic growth and shrinkage can impact um the health of people and the health of the planet. So so she has this idea of the ideal size of the global economy. So she's thinking about every country in the world as being like within a donut. So imagine a donut. Um it's got, if it's a ring donut, which is the kind of donut that I'm talking about, it's got a big outer ring and a small inner ring. And

Seasons, Death, and New Life

SPEAKER_03 23:10

Kate Rav's idea, beautifully simple, is that the ideal size for the world economy needs to be within the donut because if it if it exceeds that outer ring of the donut, you end up with um devastating impacts for the natural world and and for the climate. So we we see this in various ways, the impact of intensive farming, and we might want to think about how we interpret Jesus' parables of massive agricultural yields in in our contemporary context relating to that, but also the impacts on the rest of the natural world. Um and then that inner ring is the is the ring where where if you get if the economy gets smaller than that, it impacts the kind of well-being of the human community and it impacts uh our own, the like the way in which we are able to flourish. So that's a really simple idea, but an alternative to the idea that economic growth is always good.

SPEAKER_00 24:01

And it's interesting that the the parallel there, right? Because in a sense, economic growth, I mean it's still hard to count, but it's easier to count than a whole bunch of these measures or ideas about well-being and human flourishing, which are so much more complex and rely on so many other factors. But actually, is the economy growing yes or no? We can kind of look at that more simply. And again, when we come to the church, is the church growing yes or no? We can answer that quite simply with some simple accounting measures. Rather than actually that deeper work, that harder work of thinking about fruitfulness and faithfulness uh uh uh above kind of simple numerical success. So I think that that's it's a really interesting um parallel there. And perhaps the the church sometimes uh falls into the same kind of traps as economic thinking that's just about growth, growth, growth uh as well.

SPEAKER_02 24:51

And as you were saying earlier, Angela, that that easier way of thinking in a way impacts the way decisions are made then as well, doesn't it? Just as in neoliberal economics, you kind of you invest in the businesses that look like they're doing really well. Um so in the life of the church, we have seen a sense of of investment in the things that look like they're successful, the things that look like they've got the strategy for numerical growth and and therefore they need ploughing in more money because that's the way we're gonna save the Church of England. And and it just it doesn't it doesn't account for the possibility that the spirit might be doing something different.

SPEAKER_03 25:38

Yeah, absolutely, and and fundamentally, you know, in when we're trying to apply this to the church, I mean ac actually it it it is God who gives the growth, right? And it and it's also God that kind of produces flourishing and so I think and fruitfulness in in various ways. I think we we we don't have perhaps the control over the process that I think on a deep level we would like to have. And I think perhaps that is where some of our anxiety comes from. That actually, you know, it it's it's um it's difficult to predict or control, you know, what

Fifteen Years of Patient Community

SPEAKER_03 26:10

what happens within the church because it is God's mission ultimately.

SPEAKER_00 26:14

Such an interesting idea. We we long for that control in all sorts of ways, in all sorts of other areas of life as well. We long for that control which is beyond us. I I want to kind of bring things um to a close perhaps by asking one final question. If we're thinking about um church in terms of faithfulness and fruitfulness rather than uh numerical growth, what is the role of the priest or the or the vicar in in this kind of vision for what it means to be the church and for the church to be faithful?

SPEAKER_02 26:48

So I think one of the things that we're trying to tease out a bit is, and and it's going back a step just for a moment, is that what if the gift of the church to the world right now is to be an unanxious presence in a deeply anxious world? You know, what if what if the the particular treasure, uh, however fragile and in in the clay jar kind of image that we can offer to our neighbours, uh to the structures and and politics of our society, is that is that do not worry that Jesus is saying. Um and if that if that is what God is calling the church to, which I passionately believe it is, then I think the role of the priest within that is to is to model that unanxious presence within the church community, to be the person that is not driven by are the numbers going up or are they going down and what are we going to do about it and and look at the gaping hole in the finances or the roof or whatever. But to model a presence that is confident that even and especially in the smallness and the fragility of church life, of our relationships with each other, that God is in those places because that for me is a profoundly uh evangelical gospel message that God is in the in the crucifixions, that God is in the smallness, that God is in the um the passion of suffering and the passion of love with each other. And actually, if the priest is the person that can point to that and in some ways model that and in some ways hold a space for other people to encounter that, that feels like a primary calling for me.

SPEAKER_03 28:45

Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with that, and I think it probably resonates quite well with my kind of the words that popped into my mind as you asked the question, which was about priests being facilitators of a discerning community. Um, I guess one of my real passions is about the church as a discerning community. Um, and in my view, as the body of Christ, locally and on a wider scale, you know, we have a calling, we have a vocation. And in my view, the very crux of our ministry and mission is to understand what actually is our calling from God and to be discerning, to be attentive to our context and to listen for what the Spirit is saying. And for me, we have lots of big decisions to make, you know, on scales great and small. So, you know, how do we allocate our resources? How do we, where do we focus our energies and our attention? Um, you know, there are so many different priorities and various pressures and needs competing for our time. But if we are able to discern our calling and remind ourselves of that and remain faithful to it, in my view, that will guide us in our decision making and in what we focus on.

Why We Count and Resource

SPEAKER_03 30:00

in what decisions we prioritize. And I think for me, vocation is a uh is the is a true guide um as opposed to focusing on um the kind of pressures of the wider system or our existential anxiety as a church.

SPEAKER_00 30:19

So something about the priest is the non-action presence and the the priest is the one who helps uh a community in their communal discernment you find finding the fruit discovering it uh perhaps even uh already being formed outside of the walls of the church yeah absolutely I think that's a great place to to bring things to an end so I just want to say thank you very much uh Angela and Al for helping us look beyond growth thank you thank you you've been listening to Reflections on Ordained Ministry a collaboration between Ridley Hall and Ely Diocese hosted by David Newton produced by Matt Cooper and funded by the National Church of England