[ADDRESS TO THE ANGLICAN SYNOD OF GIPPSLAND, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA, 15th May, 1998]

Thank you for the privilege of being with you tonight, at the commencement of your annual Synod. It has been quite an Anglican week for me: I flew home yesterday from a four-day conference with the Canberra-Goulburn clergy. Indeed it’s an Anglican year: in a twelve month period I will have met with the Bendigo, Tasmanian and North Queensland Dioceses as well. What, you may ask, is a Baptist doing in so many Anglican contexts? That’s a good question (thanks for asking!). Well, for one thing, as you heard, my work takes me into many ecclesial situations: this year, for example, I’m meeting with the pastors of many denominations – including those from some Pentecostal groups. But another reason (can you keep a secret?): I’m one of those ‘Nonconformists on the Canterbury Trail’. I love the Anglican liturgy (I particularly like the New Zealand Anglican Prayer Book) and many aspects of your traditions (plural). Many of my heroes are/were Anglicans (William Temple and Lesslie Newbigin and Stephen Neil and Desmond Tutu come to mind: I must confess that I even enjoy reading some of the people you might describe as ‘Anglican nonconformists’ – small ‘c’ – like John Shelby Spong!. By the way, if you’re on the Internet, visit his diocesan Home Page: he even publicizes his Synod minutes there!). You can tell a person’s preferences by the church they attend on holidays: I’m more often Anglican than anything else…

Tonight we attempt the impossible task of asking ‘What does a Healthy Church Look Like?’ – in any context, rural or urban, greying or ‘Generation X’, Western or in a pre-industrial setting. Can we make some generalizations that apply across the denominations, around the world, and throughout history? I believe we can. And tomorrow morning we will interact together about these five marks of a Healthy Church…

First the bad news: most if not all the major mainline denominations in the Western world are ‘greying’ and declining numerically. Just two examples from recent news releases:

# The Anglican Church in Australia is in decline, with four in 10 parishioners older than 60 and its services failing to attract young adults, the (1998) General Synod was told. Anglican bishops and priests feel ill-equipped to deal with challenges facing their church, nearly half report high to very high levels of stress and more than one in 10 think constantly about leaving the ministry, according to research contained in the National Church Life Survey… The Archbishop of Sydney, the Most Reverend Harry Goodhew told the synod that the research had ‘alerted us to the fact that we are an ageing church and it would also appear that as far as overall numerical growth is concerned we are either static or in decline.’ Archbishop Goodhew said that ‘the church’s styles of worship appear to be inappropriate for younger people and that questions had to be raised about the selection criteria and training of church leaders.’ The Archbishop of Perth put an interesting spin on this bad news story by saying the figures showed that the Anglican Church was ‘doing a good job with older members of the population.’ He went on to say that since Jung states that people are more spiritually aware after the age of 40 the aging of the population puts the Anglican Church in an ideal position for growth as older people look for churches they can feel comfortable in!

# But the Anglican Church is not alone. A press report last month says the Uniting Church in Australia is dying. In the past five years it has lost 25,000 members, the equivalent of closing one church of 100 members every single week for five years…

# Globally, as a percentage of the world’s population, the Christian community is declining. The Lausanne Movement’s Rev. Tom Houston, quoting from the recently published ‘World Churches Handbook’ claims that the proportion of Christians in the world has declined from 30 percent in 1960 to 28 percent in 1995; and is projected to fall further to 27 percent by 2010. Christians are growing in absolute terms; but churches are getting smaller…

We can have two unsatisfactory responses to this – or maybe three. First an evangelical triumphalism that assumes the church must grow if God’s blessing us. Or a theologically facile ‘remnantism’: if we’re doing God’s will we’ll always be in a minority. Or, perhaps worse, a resigned apathy about those Jesus and Paul calls ‘the lost’.

Some healthy churches are large and growing; some are small. As for humans so for churches: the size of a church is not necessarily correlated with its health. Some people prefer to shop in supermarkets; others in boutiques. Some Christians prefer larger churches where family-members can have their faith hope and love reinforced by their peers. Others prefer to worship in a particular way with a smaller, more intimate number of people. But if a church is not renewing its membership, it will die.

So I’m going to bring you a deceptively simple solution for declining congregations: ‘resist clericalism’! Again: ‘Resist Clericalism!’ The greatest problem in the modern church is clericalism. What’s that? Put simply, it’s the idea that the ‘ordained’ clergyperson is the only church member who has the prerogative of verbalizing the faith and ministering to others and leading most major church groups. Some more bad news: around the world denominations with the best-educated clergy are declining; denominations whose churches are growing tend to have less well-educated pastors. Another generalization: denominations whose churches have shorter church services and sermons are declining (with the possible exceptions of Polish and Irish Catholicism!); growing churches tend to have longer services and sermons! (What do you make of all that? Is there a cause-effect phenomenon at work or not?)

According to the Roman Catholic theologian Hans Kung the church throughout its history has experienced six major paradigm shifts. The first was the idea of taking the gospel to non-Jews. Another of course was the Protestant Reformation – where ‘the Bible was put into the hands of ordinary Christians.’ I believe we need another paradigm shift where we ‘give ministry back to ordinary Christians…’

The church exists for five main purposes:

1. WORSHIP

In our New Testament lesson we heard the story of the church in Antioch. While they were worshipping God spoke to them. Has your synod ever had a minute like that? ‘While we were at Eucharist, or later moving motions, and notices of motion… God spoke to us, and this was the message… (laughter!!!). Now why should this be strange? And how did it happen? Now, pardon me again for my simplicity here (I hope it’s simplicity the other side of complexity rather than this side of complexity): God probably spoke through a prophet. Is there any church here that has commissioned the prophets in your congregation (maybe 3% of your people, according to church growth guru Der. Peter Wagner)? (More laughter). The New Testament churches knew who their prophets were: we don’t. Why don’t we have prophets today? Simple: we think we don’t need them, because we’ve got constitutions to regulate our behavior and creeds to tell us what we believe. Prophets convey God’s truth to us in our particular situation – not in addition to Scripture or tradition, but to clarify those ‘canons’ of God’s revelation. It’s a pity we don’t know who our prophets are these days, because we’re missing out on a great deal of divine insight as a result. The real reason we don’t want prophets, of course, is that whereas pastors comfort the disturbed, prophets disturb the comfortable, and we don’t want to be disturbed. We’d rather things stay the same. Who was it said ‘Ecclesiastical idiocy is voting for change but hoping things stay as they are’?

Back to worship. There are five kinds of worship experienced by God’s people throughout history and in the church today: reflective (eg. Taize), reverential (the Catholic and Orthodox churches), expository (churches in the Puritan tradition like the Baptists and Presbyterians), relational (small groups and house churches) and festival-type worship (charismatic/pentecostal churches). Each of these is important, because each helps us to relate to a different aspect of who God is for us. All of these together helps us ‘praise God’s holy Name with all that is within us’ as Psalm 103 puts it. What are the implications of all this for your churches?

The marks of authentic worship? First, the worship of our secular vocations is enriched/informed by our worship ‘in church’. Second, whatever our liturgical preference, we are often ‘lost in wonder, love and praise’ before our great and wonderful God. And third, we worship with ‘all that is within us’: the child in us is joyful, or charismatic; our minds seek God’s truth through God’s Word (in Scripture, in preaching and in other forms of God’s communication of truth to us); we relate meaningfully to others in the context of worship, and so on…

The worship of the church at Antioch is described interestingly: while they were ‘serving the Lord and fasting’. Now, there’s an interesting approach to worship: when we praise God together we ‘serve’ God. We are pleasing, honoring, adoring God. How can you do that, really, in just an hour-and-a-quarter?

2. COMMUNITY

Notice that the church at Antioch cared about others in need. Their love for their fellow-Christians was not simply a matter of institutional concern or even prayer: they took up a special offering and sent it to their hungry sisters and brothers in Jerusalem.

‘They’ll know we are Christians by our love’… Will they? What do the squabbling between churches, or the pedaphilia activity of some priests, or the divisions among us say to the world? Jesus prayed that we may be one: the fact that a Baptist feels so welcome here among Anglicans has its own special significance.

Our love must be shown in deeds not just in words. Two suggestions: why not make every meeting of your church a time for interaction and prayer for one another? At a Parish Council meeting, take the first 45 minutes to go around the group sharing life-experiences. Then pray for one another. Another suggestion: make the ‘passing of the peace’ more meaningful and less impersonal. Sometimes we could agree to pray for one other person every day the following week, and instead of the customary ‘The peace of the Lord be with you… and with you’ we say: ‘As I pray for you this week what would you like me to pray about? It’s amazing how serious praying in twos and threes will happen after the benediction in churches that are healthy – where people decide to share one another’s burdens and joys together, as the Scripture encourages us to do.

A month or two back in our church – Syndal Baptist – the senior pastor asked us to take up a special offering to help one of your Gippsland farmers, who’d run out of feed for his cattle. He needed $1000 to take a truck elsewhere in Victoria to get a load of hay: and the bank would not extend his credit to do that. It was a joy to hear that the offering plates at the church doors that Sunday morning saw more than $1000 given for that worthwhile purpose. That’s what they did at Antioch. It’s what happens all the time in healthy churches…

3. FORMATION

Spiritual formation is the process whereby the Word of God applied by the Spirit of God makes us more like the Son of God. The aim of our Christian lives is to become more like Jesus. And that does not necessarily happen by ‘going to church’. Keith Miller in one of his books talks about a man who occupied every office in his church except the pastoral ministry, and after listing to thousands of sermons and attending hundreds of committee meetings confessed one day that he didn’t know God! You mean it’s possible to be a ‘good church member’ and not know God? Sure. Can you be ‘religious’ and not know God? Yes. You can sit through Sunday after Sunday of church services and not grow in your faith? Yes – happens everywhere all the time…

So what does it mean to be ‘formed into Christ’. Well, the process is fairly simply stated: your one aim in life is to become the person God intended you to be. We are not on the planet by accident. All sorts of wonderful potential lies within each of us. And Jesus is the ‘model’ the ‘image’ of what God is like. As we hear – really hear, hear with our hearts and wills as well as our minds – the Word of God, whether through our reading of Scripture, or through preaching, or through the life of someone who models godliness for us, we are changed. But we must hear with ‘all that is within us – our minds, hearts, wills. We must want to be changed.

That is why, in the story of the church at Antioch, the apostles ‘taught’ the people intensively for a year. It is wonderful when someone develops such a hunger for this sort of ‘teaching’ that the Sunday homily becomes, for them, a very thin diet. They want more, so they read, they listen to teaching tapes, they attend Alpha courses, they go away for prayer retreats… and over time, they become more like Jesus!

4. MISSION

Last week I was reading some back copies of the preachers’ journal ‘The Expository Times’ and came across this story: A company of tourists had completed their guided tour of Westminster Abbey (last time I was there we had to evacuate the place as someone had left an unattended briefcase in a passageway). As they stood in the narthex before leaving that magnificent building, the verger who had been conducting them asked ‘Have any of you any questions about anything I have not told you?’ To his enquiry a little old lady from the United States responded, ‘Any souls been saved here lately?’

Now I believe that’s a good question, albeit expressed in old-fashioned language. Anyone been ‘saved’ lately in your church?

This is the church’s ‘mission’ – saving, rescuing people from whatever inhibits their living the ‘abundant life’ Jesus promised. It is doing in our world what Jesus did in his. It’s all about asking ‘what do people in our community really need for their well-being that we can provide? And if you were to make a list of these needs they would come under three ‘missional’ headings (see Matthew 23:23): justice, mercy, and evangelism. Justice is all about the right use of power; injustice is the wrong use of power. So who in our community is the victim of others’ abuse of power? In this Synod I note you have an agenda item about aboriginal reconciliation: that’s all about justice. As Walter Brueggeman says, ‘justice is all about what belongs to whom and returning it to them’.

But being concerned for justice is not enough; we then ask ‘What kind of resource can I be for others in terms of mercy/compassion’? What do they need that I can give – in practical terms or by way of emotional support?

But that’s not enough either. The ultimate question for each of us is ‘how do I relate to the God of the living and the dead? The God who put me here, and gives me the next couple of cubic inches of air I breathe, and to whom I will one day give an account of my life as Judge of all the earth? That’s the ‘evangelism’ question, and it addresses what Jesus and St. Paul calls our ‘lostness’.

In the church at Antioch they were concerned for all three of these ‘mission dimensions’. Note the list of the church’s leaders in Acts 13:1-3: it was as multicultural as you could get in that society. The church was undoubtedly making a statement with this national diversity in a world as racist as ours still is. That’s a justice issue. Compassion? They were concerned for the hungry. And they did their evangelism very effectively: ‘many became believers and turned to the Lord’ (Acts 11:21).

Finally: notice something very important about

5. LEADERSHIP TRAINING.

The two key leaders of the Antioch church were, after just one year, able to ‘leave them to it’ and set off for a missionary journey. Remember my point about clericalism? Paul and Barnabas had such an intentionality about training others, that they ‘did themselves out of a job’, replaced themselves with others. That’s the goal of pastoral leaders: so to train others that the church ministers to itself! The key functional test of a healthy church is that it is training people for leadership.

I was asked a few years ago to speak to a gathering which opened the Synod of the Uniting Church in another State. I said ‘You know, I will guarantee that the most important question you could be discussing this week, has never been on your agenda!’ They looked puzzled. Then I said, ‘The most important question is: “If the devil were to destroy the Uniting Church in Australia (pardon my fundamentalism at this point!) how would the devil do that? And what measures can we take to stop the devil doing that?”‘ Well, one thing the devil wants the church to do is get so involved with its organizational structures that it suffers from ‘constitutional constipation’, eccleastical arterial sclerosis… Not very healthy at all…

So remember: the church is not essentially about moving motions or paper across the face of the earth, important as those institutional mechanisms may be. The five tests of a healthy church: the worship test, the community test, the formation test, and mission test and the leadership test. May your churches be truly healthy and may God bless your deliberations during this synod.

Rowland Croucher

May 1998.