For years the bills would come into our home. I would open them with the same surprise and fear that people wanted money for the services that I had used. Then I would place the bills on a pile in the hope that the money would come in sometime soon and that I may at a future date remember to pay the bills.

Then the reminders would come, I would have to scrabble around, find the money and make the embarrassing call. Every month doing the same thing. Every month hoping that something would change. But unsurprisingly nothing did change.

Then someone introduced me to the idea that I could pay all the bills in one go in advance. I simply calculate how much the bills totalled the average month, place that amount of money in a different account at the start of the month, then set up direct debits for every bill. Since then, the bills have been paid on time and I have worried less.

The same action produced the same result. A changed action produced a different result.

Since WW1 the Church of England has declined by about 1% every year. There are some exceptions to this, but with the current trajectory the Church of England could have all but disappeared in the next few decades. Even the best projections for the recruitment of clergy are in fact a plan for decline¹.

The Church of England has a tag line of “a christian presence in every community”. Yet despite decades of writing, reflection and calls to actions, we do the same things in the same places. We put on services, run by priests in church buildings. We seem unable to accept that we are no longer able to provide this even though the cost is huge and the operational requirements overwhelming. We do the same things we have always done, potentially endangering the collapse of the whole organisation. Yet we expect the results to be different.

If we want a different outcome, we have to change the actions.

We have to go back to the core things that we have been called to. Making disciples who make disciples. It’s not about services, or buildings or priests. Until we get back to making disciples, we can’t expect the church to grow. Jesus has given us a job, to make disciples, then he will do what he has promised – to grow the church.

Lets change the action then hopefully we will see a different future emerge.

1. There were about 7230 anglican full time paid parish clergy in 2018 . This was a ratio of 1 clergy to 7742 population. Based on the most optimistic deployment levels for 2031/5 there would be 7610 clergy at ratio of 1 clergy to 8641 population. Therefore even thought a recruitment increase of +50% is being talked about, even the most optimistic number are a real terms reduction. ↩