Peter Toon: How to Grow a Traditional Church [Repost]

Dignified & simple worship in the Anglican Way, leading to mission and ministries of compassion in the U S A

This article was originally posted on the Prayer Book Society of the USA’s website but has been removed along with a number of the other articles of the late Peter Toon. The article, retitled “Causing Traditional Churches to Grow” is still available on the Virtue Online website. I am reposting it because Dr. Toon makes a number of valid observations and suggestions in that article from which the pastors and other leaders of traditional Anglican churches might profit.

I would add to Dr. Toon’s suggestions the recommendation that church services should be kept fairly simple and should be shortened wherever possible. Most guests are not accustomed to long Prayer Book services and will experience them as tiresome and uninteresting. Streamlining the services is one way of overcoming the language barrier that the Jacobean English of the older Prayer Books creates. It also reduces the boredom factor. If the church uses the King James Bible, it may want to include in the church bulletin an insert on which is printed the lessons from a more recent Bible translation. 

 A second recommendation is that a church needs to really get know the community in which it located, what it values, what it does not, and other aspects of its culture and any subcultures, what makes the community tick. 

A third recommendation is that the church needs to get out of its building and into the community. It needs to meet people and engage with them. It needs to connect with the community in every way that it can--adopt a school, work with residents on community service projects, and do everything imaginable to make presence know and felt in the community. The last thing it needs to do is to wait for folks to come to it.

The pendulum swings this way and that. Right now the pendulum that swings at the heart of American evangelicalism is in motion away from the programmed mega-church, committed to evangelism and involved in a general dumbing down of historic Faith and discipline. It is apparently moving towards a type of church that takes seriously the public and private reading of the Bible and its application to life, the basics of the Christian Year, a recognition of the value of ordered worship, and a sense that mission is more than evangelism and includes ministries of compassion to needy people.

Importantly, the pendulum’s movement is indicating that for the first time in a long time the “evangelicals” are beginning to recognize that the basic and real purpose of “a service of worship” is simply to offer worship – as praise, thanksgiving, confession, petition and intercession, but chiefly praise – to the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. Further, to see that all genuine ministry & mission flow from and surround such holy, God-centered, corporate worship.

In the recent past, “worship services” (often like a show or a concert) have been promoted and seen too much as a means to an end – e.g., evangelism or church planting or community-building – and have appeared to be (by the evidence of the way folks dress) a special kind of leisure activity.

Now the possibilities are opening up for traditional churches to attract younger people not by gimmicks but by an obvious, serious and sincere attempt to read the Bible as God’s Word and to apply it to life’s journey, needs and questions, to engage in worship which is directed wholly towards the Father in the Name of the Son and with the Holy Spirit, and to participate in mission which takes the real needs of the world seriously. [Of course in the USA there will be the standard need for a decent building and car park with childcare etc.]

This situation provides a real and vital opportunity for Anglican churches either to be planted or for existing churches to be revived (retooled!) to catch the movement of this pendulum. Whether they will rise to the occasion is doubtful (based on what they have done in the past) but one must seek to be optimistic, as one notices how the Orthodox Churches, for example, benefit from this situation. Read More

Image Credit: Covenant Reformed Episcopal Church