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The United Reformed Church: some realities
29. The church catholic is the company of those who are ‘in Christ’. The fundamental reality of the church is therefore relatedness – relatedness to Christ, and through Christ to the holy and blessed trinity; relatedness to all who proclaim themselves to be ‘in Christ’; and relatedness to the creation which God has reconciled to himself through the work of Christ. (2 Cor 5:19) Relationship is primarily about being, not doing, and yet relationships needs tending. That is true in the church of our relationships with God, with each other and with the world of which we are an intimate part.
30. The sermon on the mount begins with ‘being’ and what one might term qualities and dispositions of the soul. The blessed are the poor in spirit, the mourning, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers and the persecuted for the Lord’s sake. However, ‘being’ is inseparable from ‘doing’, for who we are affects the way we behave. That is why Jesus then employs dynamic, transformative images – salt, light, yeast – which turn our minds inexorably to mission. That integration and balance needs to be maintained.
31. The church is the company of those who are ‘in Christ’, the space and time where God and humanity meet in Jesus Christ. That is why it offers thanksgiving, heralds good news, stands in solidarity with the poor, comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. But it finds its strength for that work in its relationship with Christ. Augustine wrote ‘You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.’ The church should be the place where people find their rest in God, as well as their inspiration for activity. Too often it looks more like the aftermath of the London marathon.
32. God has gifted the United Reformed Church with a particular history, and therefore with particular insights, as part of the church catholic. We are a church formed of four churches whose witness was a working out of the reforming traditions of the sixteenth century. We describe ourselves as ‘reformed’ as well as ‘catholic’. Our distinctiveness lies partly in that heritage, but also in our experience of being together in Christ, and becoming more fully the church he is calling us to be. That is a dynamic, exciting, on-going process. We deliberately live unity in 390 LEPs and through participation in ecumenical ventures wherever we are able. That is our calling, to be a sign to the entire Christian community both of the reality of reconciliation and of our Lord’s Prayer that all his disciples might be one.
33. We do not need to apologise for our existence. We should rather be faithful to our calling, being church in a way that knocks walls down rather than building them, rejoicing in the presence of Christ wherever he is to be found.
34. We are not committed to unity because we believe church unity to be an end in itself. This is not the world of corporate merger. It is much more important than that. The unity of the church, those who are in Christ, ‘the new creation’, is a sign of God’s will of shalom for the whole of the created order (the oikoumene), a prelude for the gathering up of all things into the unity of Christ. Unity is part of the fulfilment of God’s will, ‘on earth as it is in heaven’. That is why we are as passionately committed to the quest for justice and peace for all God’s people as we are to the ‘churchly’ ecumenical journey. We were, and are, called ‘together’ to ‘make a difference for Christ’s sake.
35. We are fortunate in our inheritance. Our forefathers and mothers in the faith designed a church which retained and safeguarded some of the most precious insights of the profoundly different traditions of Congregationalism and the Presbyterianism and the Churches of Christ. At the heart of these reformed traditions is the belief that God gives Godself to the people of God through Jesus Christ, and that the Word of God about Jesus Christ is the supreme standard by which we order our lives. Scripture is not the property of a caste within the church, be they priests, ministers, or theologians, but of all God’s people. God speaks to all, and each has an insight to bring. That is an expression of our relatedness in Christ. That is why we meet in council together. We do not do so because we enjoy each other’s company (although mostly we do). We meet together in council so that we may discern the will of God both for ourselves and God’s church. That is a fundamental principle of our spiritual life.
36. There was, however, a respectable degree of provisionality about the way in which the Basis of Union was drafted. What was important was the centrality of taking counsel together, not the number of councils that we might use to do that.
37. We have learnt a good deal over the past thirty years, and we have changed. We are no longer ‘congregationalists’ and ‘presbyterians’ and ‘members of the Churches of Christ’. Through the grace of God we have grown into unity together, and become the United Reformed Church. As we plan for God’s future we need to remember not only who we were, but who by God’s grace we are. We are still a conciliar people, but there is widespread agreement that our present pattern of councils hinders rather than enables our wishes to seek God’s will together, enjoy fellowship in Christ and express our belonging to each other.
38. There are reasons for that. A decline in numbers means that greater burdens fall on fewer people. At the same time, we know that we need to be church not only locally, but regionally and nationally, for the local church only makes theological sense as an expression of the church catholic. At present we express our local belonging through Church Meeting, our regional belonging through our district councils and synods, and our national belonging through the Assembly and its on-going work through its officers and committees.
39. (a) The local church
This is the focus of discipleship and witness for the vast majority of members and adherents of the United Reformed Church. That is as it should be. We are Christians where we are, equipped saints, making a difference for Christ’s sake to the communities in which we work, play and live. Our 1691 local churches should be centres of kingdom activity. In our understanding of church, it is the gathered community of saints which comes first. Ministry follows, to help equip those saints for their ministry in the world. It is our observation that we sometimes seem to have inverted that order. Our deployment policies make it seem as if churches need to be grouped together with no other reason than to make a viable job for a minister. However difficult it is in practice, we wish to affirm that theologically the church precedes ministry. We rejoice in the spiritual vibrancy and missionary engagement (both social and evangelistic) which marks many of our congregations.
40. However, we also have serious questions about local church life. Our membership has more than halved since 1972, but the number of local churches has declined by only 10%. Our financial analysis shows that at least £19.8m a year (and maybe more) is spent on utility services and support of buildings. That is equivalent to the Mission & Ministry Fund, and a huge burden. We want the church to ponder its stewardship, to ask if this is what God would have us do with our wealth for Christ’s sake. England and Wales (the history is rather different in Scotland) still suffer from the competitive church and chapel building of the nineteenth century. We do not need the plant that we have to do what we need to do. We ask local Christian communities to question seriously whether their mission would be better accomplished by uniting with a nearby United Reformed Church or an ecumenical partner.
41. We hear from the Moderators stories of some ministers who want to do anything rather than be ministers in local pastorates. Whilst we know this applies only to a minority, we are concerned at what this tells us about ministry, and what it reveals about the nature of the local church. We believe that the local church should be a focus of kingdom activity, a community courageously gathered under the Word, developing counter-cultural living for Christ’s sake. It should be a community where individual disciples are supported and equipped for their ministry in the world. Ministry there should be challenging and fulfilling. However, we still hear of churches that regard a minister as their private chaplain, or that refuse determinedly to engage with the complexities of mission in post-Christendom. Some ministers are in the difficult position of knowing that the secular institutions which they encounter and work with are much closer to the kingdom of God than the congregations to which they minister. Equally, some ministers are ‘trapped’ in the service of the church, bewildered by change, spiritually exhausted, yet unable to seek employment elsewhere because of the manse system. Others are strained and stretched by the complexity of living on the edge between viability and implosion on the shifting border between Christian spirituality and post-Christian culture. In our view this is probably a greater source of stress in the ministry than the reality of multiple pastorates. There is clearly a huge agenda here in terms of discipleship, support of ministers and the development of discipleship. We begin to scratch the surface (but no more) in what we say about spirituality. We do, however, underline its importance for future thinking.
42. The Life and Witness Committee were asked to consider the structures of the local church and to report to the 2006 Assembly. The fact that no more is said about the structure of the local church in this report does not mean that it is unimportant. Indeed, we have made it clear that we regard this entire process as an attempt to shift power and authority closer to the ground, and to enable our 1691 local churches to be centres of difference-making for Christ’s sake.
43. (b) being the church regionally
Regional structures exist for two reasons. They are there to lend identity to the United Reformed Church in the affairs of the region, and in the case of our two national Synods, the nation. That is important both in addressing governmental structures and in collaborating with our ecumenical partners. They also exist to provide specialist services to local churches. Those services are varied. They presently range from specialist trust advice to youth leadership training and lay training.
44. We are presently church regionally in district council and synod. There has been widespread agreement since the ‘Catch the Vision’ process began that there should be one level of council between the Assembly and the local church. The paper ‘Towards New Synods’ sets out the proposal that that layer of council should be the ‘new Synod’.
45. The increasing power of Synods has been an important feature of the United Reformed Church’s history. There are good reasons for that:
46. The shaping of the United Reformed Church Act meant that Synods would inevitably grow in power, and grow unequally because property values vary across the country. Each Synod is financially and legally autonomous. Assembly has no control over the way Synods use their resources. Most have chosen to use their resources to employ people. That has co-incided with both the development of parallel systems of training and increasing specialisation in ministry and services.
47. Training needs have changed during our history. The theological college system which we inherited in 1972 was supplemented by the emergence of regional training structures in the 1980s and, more recently, increased emphases on continuing ministerial education, lay training and TLS. Rather than consider how we might re-deploy our resources with each of these developments, we have employed more and more people to train a church which is now half the size it was in 1972.
48. We have also observed a steady growth of specialisation. First there were trainers of various hues, then mission enablers and development officers. We do not doubt that this brings benefits, but we also worry that the implied message of specialisation is that local churches and ministers are incapable of (eg) training their own elders and worship leaders.
49. We believe that the time has come for us to reconsider what resources and specialist skills should be available to local churches at regional level. The ‘down-side’ of the shift of power to Synods has been the unwittingly fostering of a culture of ‘creeping diocesanism’, which is in danger of turning us into thirteen churches rather than one. Inevitably, given the financial and property base of Synodical power, there is serious inequality between Synods. We have made encouraging progress in addressing this through Resource Sharing.
50. We are now church in a very different world to 1972 .Then 12 Synods were staffed by 12 Moderators with varying levels of PA support. Now our 13 Synods need c. 91 full and part-time employees to sustain themselves (excluding Moderators and Synod Clerks (some of whom are full-time, some part-time, some spare-time). Running Synods currently requires an expenditure budget of £4m. We seriously question the viability of that level of expenditure.
51. We therefore believe the time has come to assert anew that we are one church in thirteen Synods and three nations, albeit expressed in thirteen distinctive, contextual ways. Our corporate life needs to be lived in such a way that we are accountable to each other under God for the ways in which we use our resources. We believe that each synod should enjoy the same level and quality of provision, and that each should be staffed similarly. We must therefore find ways to ensure that each Synod is resourced adequately and capable of delivering common programmes. We hope that this might also end the inequalities of payment and conditions between the employees of the various Synods. We therefore recommend that these services be co-ordinated across the church, with the proviso that the special needs of the two national synods may need to be separately addressed.
52. (c) being church in the United Kingdom
The General Assembly is the prime expression of our national life in the United Kingdom. The Moderator of the General Assembly is elected to lead the church, and under her / his guidance and authority, Mission Council carries out the work of Assembly between Assemblies. That work is devolved to the paid staff of the Assembly who are based principally but not exclusively at Church House. Being church in the United Kingdom allows us to interact with government and appropriate institutions, and also to co-operate with ecumenical partners.
53. Already staff who work for the Assembly programmes are pondering how their work might fit into ‘Catch the Vision’. We cannot predict what will come of future discussions about the way programmes are formulated and delivered, but we can signal what an example of this might mean. It could, for example, mean dividing the work at Church House into three main areas – support, church servicing (ie. all that makes the Church operate internally) and mission (ie. all that the church does externally).
54.The employment of the staff of Assembly presents a complex picture because the work of Assembly staff is divided between Church House, the Windermere Centre, Westminster College, and some Assembly wide training programmes. 72 staff work in Church House, (8 ministers and 63 lay staff, 5 of whom work part-time. About 104 work in Synods (including Moderators and YCWTs, but excluding Synod Clerks and Treasurers); we envisage rationalisation for a more efficient and effective use of staff. This must be addressed during 2005/6.
55. All of this needs to be achieved against the background of a falling roll of members (although with an increased body of adherents), and a waning commitment to the Mission & Ministry fund. We need either to increase giving by £1m pa by 2007 – an extra 25p per member per week, or an extra 16p per week per member and adherent – or cut the budget by a similar amount.
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Executive summary, recommendations and resolutionsEXPLANATORY PAPERS:
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