Mission: Sydney faces hard truths

Jeremy Halcrow | 15 October 2008

Font size: + - | print | email to a friend

Read The Diocesan Mission – Midpoint Report: Achievements and Challenges in Becoming a Missional Diocese on the Sydney Diocesan Secretariat website.

Jeremy Halcrow’s full analysis of the mission review will be published in the November edition of Southern Cross.

Highlights of questions from the floor

• “Have we thought how we can snaffle the entrepreneurs away from AFES?” THE REV WARWICK DE JERSEY, CENTENNIAL PARK

• “Is there a chance that there can be ways for people with cross-cultural mission training [eg missionaries] to be brought in [to plant churches]?” KRISTEN YOUNG, LITHGOW

• “Can we encourage larger churches to send teams of about 10 people to help the desert areas?” THE REV DAVID O’MARA, SADLEIR

• [Speaking from personal experience of managing rapid church growth] Has thought been put into providing assistance in business management as we run increasingly complex [parish] organisations?” THE REV MICHAEL WILLIAMSON, SHELLHARBOUR CITY

Sydney parish representatives heard a blunt assessment of the progress of the Mission from Dean Phillip Jensen and other leaders at a special Synod session last night.

Yet, there was certainly good reason to rejoice.

Bishop Peter Tasker, talking to a detailed Mission progress report, pointed out the extent to which the Diocese had embraced church planting, with more than 160 new congregations started during the mission period.

On the flip side, all speakers mentioned a host of roadblocks that need to be overcome in order to turn around this Diocese, which the report says has seen “stable” church attendance, rather than the aim of rapid growth.

Speaking on the progress of ‘Policy 3 – Multiplying Ministry Workers’, the Rev Stephen Semenchuk said those involved in ministry training were “working harder than ever” as student numbers grow, but added that there were increasing capacity constraints, such as buildings.

“We need to be rejoicing that the graph is going up… we are adding but we also need to be multiplying,” he said.

Mr Jensen, the Dean of Sydney, encouraged parish representatives on the one hand to build their strategies ‘on the basis of truth’.

“We must not use phoney results or unrealistic spin. That’s just lies.”

However “we must not feed or be overwhelmed into failurism”.

“It very easy to make broad generalisations about what the Diocese is and isn’t… such as what you read on some blogs.”

Nevertheless it’s clear Dean Jensen wants to motivate parishes to work harder at reform.

Hence the Diocesan leadership is refining the Mission strategy to make clearer what is required – there was real emphasis on “missional church planting” to “desert areas” and “cross-cultural people groups” and Connect09 to empower the laity for evangelism.

As Dean Jensen put it: “We must move from professional to lay engagement by the spiritual change of heart, that will make real sacrifice for the lost, that will create a missional lifestyle for all church people and by training, equipping and deploying our ministry gifts to reach the community with the word of God.”

Astute questions, revealing answers

Despite the late hour, what followed was a lively and highly enlightening question and answer time.

In one very telling exchange, the Rev Warwick De Jersey – who himself has been involved in university ministry – pointed out that the most entrepreneurial young graduates from Moore College – those most needed for the Mission – are far more attracted to independent options such as AFES.

Archbishop Peter Jensen replied: “One needs to appreciate that we are not an attractive option for everyone… Not all our churches are sufficiently missionally-minded to attract a missionally-minded minister.”

Poorer church growth?

One noteworthy question came from a layman with what he admitted was an ‘unspellable’ Greek name.

He pointed out that if the 0.5 per cent annual attendance cited in the report was accurate, then this would actually be less than half the rate of growth maintained by the Diocese across the 1990s, based on NCLS figures.

He labelled the result “tragic” as it suggested there had been a decline in the number of conversions.

Can this be true?

As Dean Jensen himself had said earlier, using parish returns as a measure is like “comparing apples with oranges” and worse still, “pineapples with obvious lemons”. There can be no confidence that parish leaders across time and space have used the same criteria for collecting the data.

Mr Jensen explained the dilemmas for rectors and wardens: “Do we include children or teenagers? Do we count monthly regulars or only those every-weekers?”

Further: “There is a time delay between planting a church and seeing it grow or its mother church regain its numbers. Real church growth needs to be evaluated over a 10-year period and include all parishes so we are not just enthused or depressed by the transfer movement between different churches.”

But it’s certainly clear there is “still is a long way to go to bring all 270 parishes into this church-planting culture”.

For most important: “The percentage of the population [in our churches] is what we are most interested in and at this stage we are seeing no increase in the percentage of the population.”

Now that’s a real kick in the pants for our churches to get cracking with missional church planting and Connect09.

That said, this author still believes the 0.5 per cent annual growth figure is too low.

I have dug deeper and hope I may be able to give a more coherent explanation for the apparent contradiction between rapid church planting and the claim there has been poorer overall church growth in the past five years… but more of that in the next edition of Southern Cross.