Learning from England: Lessons in Church Growth

What makes a church grow?

If the recent polling by Gallup is any indication, there are many church leaders asking that question these days who are not too sure of the answer. Since I was a teenager in youth group back in the late 1990s, church membership has dropped alarmingly: down from 70% to 47% today. That is a lot of decline in just twenty years. Savvier writers than I have debated what’s behind it — highly publicized sex abuse scandals, historic shifts away from traditional Christian teaching on marriage and sexuality, and political polarization all surely have something to do with it. But whatever it is, church leaders today need to be very aware that complacency will not do. Those of us charged with leadership need to be active learners and prayerful penitents, seeking out what God is doing to renew his Church and humbly open to what God may also be doing to chasten and judge.

There are, of course, shelves full of books on church growth and leadership going back decades. I try to make it a habit to learn from these books, but some of them by now are a bit dated, and some could stand to be a bit more theologically and sacramentally grounded. That’s why I recently read two books that seek to learn from church growth in England, where the secularizing trends that have picked up steam in the U.S. already happened decades ago, and where the Church of England gives myriad examples that are readily translatable to the sacramental worship of the Episcopal Church. If it’s growing in the good old C of E, it’s probably something we Episcopalians can learn from. Even better, the two books — Learning from London by Jason Fout, and Northern Lights by Jason Byassee — were written by scholar-pastors, trained as theologians and with a heart for the local church. I highly recommend both.

What then can we learn from the church in Old Blighty? Read More

While this article was written primarily for readers in the Episcopal Church, I thought that readers in the Anglican Church in Canada, the Continuing Anglican Churches, and the Anglican Church in North America, and other denominations might benefit from reading the article.