This is what the Lord says: ‘Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, as where the good way is and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls’ (Jer.6:16).
By whatever matrix we use, the Church in the UK is in chronic decline. There are exceptions to the rule. There are Churches and networks here and there which are growing, some through genuine evangelism and some at the expense of other Churches. But they remain exceptions. And tragically inadequate to balance out the overwhelming implosion of indigenous British Christianity. The trends are deeply concerning both in terms of longevity and universality, and the trajectory seems fairly entrenched. In addition to the numbers game is the sense that our culture is becoming increasingly hostile to (the Christian) faith as it veers towards an increasingly intolerant secular humanism. In such a context, religion and faith are assumed to be implausible and untenable at best: unnecessary and irrelevant at best, likely dangerous and oppressive at worst. A creeping aggression lays siege to the Church.
While these symptoms of decline and the growing hostility of our culture to the faith that gave it birth are hardly controversial, the question of how we should respond is much more contentious. Everyone has an opinion, though few of those opinions have been ‘road-tested’ in the life of the local Church. And those which have are subject to hopelessly a-theological, short term, pragmatic and reactionary matrix. Such over-promising, under-delivering grandstanding is financially catastrophic, and destructive to the structures of spiritual leadership and life of the Church.
And of course, this isn’t simply an institutional issue. The Church is the people. The result of dysfunctional ways of doing Church and engaging in mission is that people end up struggling to be Christian in any meaningful sense of the word. Indeed, we end up lacking any coherent vision for Christian living and spiritual formation. The Church’s failure to disciple her people is breath-taking. But not as breath-taking as the realisation that we have so lost sight of the fact that making disciples is our fundamental mandate, that few recognise we aren’t doing it.
Having reduced ‘Church’ to a series of programmatic events, what we actually do is then train people to function within those programmes. This creates the illusion of spiritual growth, whilst actually hindering the development of genuine discipleship. This locks us into a downward spiral which, by its very nature, blinds us to the very resources that would halt our terminal decline.
