Larger churches and fresh expressions: staying within or sending out?

By George Lings.

For 22 years I served in local churches. All of them were relatively large. I know, at first hand, their pressures and struggles to help the congregation keep facing outwards. For at the same time there was a high demand for quality within their life. Energy often went on handling internal issues.

Yet as I look back, I acknowledge that usually the assumption about growth was reaching out in order to draw back in and become larger. There was genuine desire that those not yet in the faith should encounter Christ, but the shape to this was attractional. As far as I can see this pattern has been all too typical of the larger churches in the UK. They attract by the quality of the teaching, worship, provision for children and teenagers and the chance to meet ‘other people like us’. It is not wrong, but effective mission to this country will take more than that. That is true both about the diversity we need to model to reach different kinds of people, and the sheer number of more mission minded churches that are needed.

One variant to getting bigger was the creating of multiple congregations. Early on this sometimes took the form of holding both a Family Service and a Morning Prayer service at another time. Since then the ‘staying in’ option has diversified in style including transitions to cell church or more recently to mid-sized communities. Multiple congregations themselves have become more diverse in style through insights of café and Messy Church thinking. Where this development of multiple options  was most healthy, each route was not just offering different services but was a congregation with its own character, leadership, curriculum, small groups and mission. It was multiplying churches but staying within.

Disadvantages could include still using the church venue and that might not be in the right place or culture for some mission tasks before us. Where they were least healthy was if the two services were but copies of one another and the motivation was more administrative dispersal than missional engagement. This kind tended not to build an identity and often failed to flourish, ending after a few years and reverting back to the one joint and overcrowded service.

Another change which was more radical became better known in the 1980s as Holy Trinity Brompton modelled a reversal of the attractional trend, with church plants ‘sent out’ under successive curates. The dynamics usually involved the rescue of a small or even closed church, and taking a large team who were already travelling in from that area and they became the instant congregation and mission force for the new church. Often these were transplants; the incoming team were larger and more dynamic than any residual Christians, so their style predominates from the start. Sometimes what began were grafts; here the incomers and those already there were in more equal partnership. Upsides included sacrificial giving away of human and financial resources, the restoration of effective churches in needy areas and returning Christians to the areas in which they lived and worked. If there was a downside it was that they could be too similar to the mother church that sent them out. In effect they imposed an existing way of being church, rather than entering a mission-shaped process to enquire what was needed in the culture or area.

A third variant was neither ‘staying in’ nor being ‘sent out’ but choosing to leave. The genesis of some
alternative worship communities (now normally called ‘emerging church’ or ‘missional communities’) had a larger element of protest. It could include rejection of what was seen as unduly modernist theology or
controlling styles within existing congregations. The growth of house based churches shared some of these concerns together with a joyful re-discovery of the domestic character of Christian community.

As we face the future, the larger churches are potential Minsters that could significantly contribute to the regional task around them. In our UK context we will need all these three approaches, but what is needed most among the larger churches is the further growth of the following attitudes:

• Generosity to give away resources, believing it is more blessed to give than to receive.
• Humility to enquire what is needed in the new place, not assume we know already.
• Trust in the people, the word and the Spirit that renounces the tendency to control.
• Confidence to let diversity flourish, as churches best multiply through a bipartite process. Within it, the gospel embodied by a church engages with context, and this leads to non-identical reproduction. The next generation of churches will have our DNA but they are not us.

Then larger churches will be rich resources for the wider Church, hubs in which resources are both concentrated and dispersed and places of blessing because they bless others.