Who will save the parish church?

Could HTB church planters and Save The Parish actually be on the same side?

Hello! Several years ago, I began researching a long magazine feature about the future of the parish. Prompted by the conflict between HTB-style church planters and Save The Parish traditionalists, I wanted to explore whether this ancient model of church - grouping believers together by geography - still worked in 21st-century post-Christian Britain. And then an American Christian magazine commissioned this with a twist - could I use this intensely English conversation as a lens to view the American context. They don’t have a millennium-old network of parishes of course, but across the Atlantic too there are currents shifting and a growing interest in how churches should or could be embedded in geographic communities.

Unfortunately, various other things came up, editors came and went, and the piece has got kind of stuck in limbo. So as a sneak preview of what I hope will still one day see the full light of day, here’s a version of it from last year. It’s for paying subscribers only, but if you have not yet acquired this hallowed status you can do so very easily at the cost of just £5 by clicking below:

At the turn of the 20th century, a group of evangelicals in north Oxford were frustrated. They had been invigorated by the resurgence of Bible-believing Protestant faith in the Church of England over the past half-century, and yet none of their local parish churches reflected this, either lost in “Popish” ritualism or marooned in middle of the road apathy.

And so they did something about it. They persuaded the Bishop of Oxford to carve out land from the districts of two non-evangelical churches, raised funds and build themselves a new church, christened St Andrew’s. For over a century it was a flag-bearer for Bible-preaching gospel ministry in the northern suburbs of Oxford. And in the early years of the 21st century, they did it all over again.

Just across the invisible parish boundaries, a new housing project called Cutteslowe had grown up in the postwar years. A deprived area full of poorer families and struggling pensioners, it technically belonged to a nearby affluent village’s parish. But the villagers ignored Cutteslowe and in return Cutteslowe people never darkened the doors of what was supposedly their church too.

Instead, the sharp-elbowed evangelicals at St Andrew’s started their own church – Cutteslowe Connected. It met first in a community centre, and then a school, and was led for years not by an ordained Anglican priest but a lay pastor. Slowly, through intensive outreach in the housing project – youth work, a community food larder, family support – it began to attract the unchurched of Cutteslowe to come, worship and study the Bible. Eventually, a vicar was appointed by St Andrew’s to lead Cutteslowe Connected and it was given the bishop’s blessing too, despite flagrantly trespassing parish boundaries.

I tell you this story because it is the story of my church. But, more importantly, because it tells the story of the modern – and the ancient – Church of England. For evangelical Anglicans the tale of St Andrew’s and Cutteslowe Connected are a triumph; a heartening example of how creative church planting can break out of the ossified straitjacket of C of E rules and breathe new life into a dying denomination.

But for many others, it is a calamity. For more High Church traditionalist Anglicans, what has happened in north Oxford over the last century is a story of reckless power-hungry evangelicals riding roughshod over cherished institutions.

And in recent years this simmering tension has burst out into open conflict between the two factions. On one side are those who cherish the ancient Anglican parish system. On the other are those who are happy to experiment with any church structure if it might win new disciples. At the heart of their seething row is a question: what counts as a local church? What should a parish church look like today? What is the right way to build communities of believers in a post-Christian nation?

Some argue the inherited Anglican patrimony remains the best and, perhaps, the only way to faithfully build God’s kingdom in England, the same today as it always has been. Others are keen to move beyond narrow legalistic concerns about boundaries, sacraments and rules to imagine a new way to do church for a new England. But out of the crucible of this disagreement, some see signs of hope for mission and ministry in neighbourhoods up and down England, and even beyond.