Their job will be to “grow teams of lay and ordained leaders shaping a mission-focused church fit for the challenges of the 21stcentury.” This is the new church-speak, a strange combination of woke-ish managerialism and charismatic Christianity, and which represents an almost unreported revolution within the Church of England. [...]
These days, however, many parishes are close to collapse, exhausted by financial worries and increasingly by a shortage of suitable clergy. Many parishes in the countryside are being forced together into ever greater economies of scale; just recently Chelmsford Diocese announced that it will lose 60 clergy posts over the next 18 months. The squeeze is on. [...]
This new Church movement, known collectively as “Fresh Expressions” (or FX) has developed into a kind of para-church, operating alongside the traditional structures of the parish church but not necessarily a part of them. There are no reliable and recent figures for the growth is this new movement: officially, there were 1,109 fresh expressions chapters in 2014: a report from 2016 suggested that, by then, there was over 2,000 across the country. And big claims are made for the future of the group: “Fresh Expressions do twice as well as parish churches in attracting those under 16”, the General Synod report explains. [...]
So somebody came up with an ingenious plan. Perhaps it was the now retired Bishop Graham Cray who published what was the founding document of the FX movement, called Mission-Shaped Church, back in 2004. The plan was this: ignore the impossible-to-change structures of the Church of England, especially those lodged in the parish. Simply by-pass them. Build a para church structure, alongside the parish, and then divert resourses into that. The parish church will limp along, but eventually it will wither on the vine and FX will be there to pick up the baton. It was essential that FX was not positioned as any sort of threat to the parish or the plan would be rumbled; that’s why there was lots of talk of the “need for a mixed economy”, room for everyone etc.
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