Church Growth Research Project

Invitation to Tender

January2012

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Contents

1. Introduction and project purpose…………………………………3

2. Background: Mission and the concept of Church growth……....…4

3. Proposed research strands………………………………………...6

3.1 Hypothesis testing & data analysis strand…………………6

3.2 Data availability………………………………………….....8

3.3 Church profiling…………………………………………....8

3.4 Cathedrals, church planting and amalgamation………...... 10

3.41 Cathedrals / greater or city centre churches……..10

3.42 Church planting……………………………………10

3.43 Team Ministries and United / Grouped Benefices...11

4. Literature Review………………………………………………….13

5. Project Management……………………………………………….13

6. Contract timetable…………………………………………………13

7. Instructions to tenderers………………………………………...... 14

8. Submission instructions…………………………………………….15

9. Evaluation of tenders……………………………………………….16

10. Terms and conditions……………………………………………...16

10.1 Data protection…………………………………………....16

10.2 Confidentiality……………………………………………..17

10.3 Ownership of outputs & publication rights……………….17

11. Annex A – List of references on Church Growth………………...19

1

Invitation to Tender for Church Growth Research Project

  1. Introduction and Project purpose

The National Church Institutions of the Church of England (NCIs)[1] have identified the need for a comprehensive study of the causes of church growth. This is a major research opportunity, requiring significant expertise, to advise decision makers at every level of the Church, and indeed other bodies who wish to allocate funds effectively to support the work of the Church of England.

The NCIs are making funds available for a study which it is envisaged will last for eighteen months during this funding round (2011-13), and invite researchers and research organisations to tender for a major research project to investigate factors relating to church growth within the context of the Church of England. The aim of the research is to consider which parts of the Church of England’s ministry are showing spiritual and in particular numerical growth andto research the reasons why. The research is expected to generate soundly based findings which would disseminate good practice and inform resource allocation decisions.

The research programme will contain three main strands. The first strand will involve extensive analysis of data and the second,the profiling of growing churches. The third strand will involve investigating growth patterns for cathedrals, large churches, church plants and Team Ministries / grouped benefices. The project is likely to require a multi-disciplinary research team or teams who will use a range of quantitative and qualitative methods. Research organisations are invited to tender for either the whole programme or parts of the programme.

In preparation for the current Spending Review Period, 2011-13, an Archbishops’ Task Group was created to reflect on theway in which the Church uses its resources. The work of this group, along with discussions amongst the House of Bishops led to three main themes emerging to focus the work of the Church and these were set out by the Archbishop of Canterbury in his Presidential Address to General Synod in November 2010. He stated that the Church is called –

(i)to take forward the spiritual and numerical growth of the Church of England – including the growth in its capacity to serve the whole community of this country;

(ii)to re-shape or reimagine the Church’s ministry for the century coming, so as to make sure there is a growing and sustainable Christian witness in every local community; and

(iii)to focus our resources where there is both greatest need and greatest opportunity.

These represent the priorities of the Church over the coming years and in the light of these stated priorities the NCIs have set aside funding for Research and Development in relation to Church growth.

  1. Background: the Mission of the Church and the concept of Church growth

The five marks of mission of the Anglican Communion, of which the Church of England is part, are:

  • To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom
  • To teach, baptise and nurture new believers
  • To respond to human need by loving service
  • To seek to transform unjust structures of society
  • To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.

In line with this mission purpose, it is the responsibility of the Church of England to offer, with its ecumenical partners, to every person and every community in England:

  • the proclamation of the Gospel in worship, word, sacrament and service;
  • pastoral ministry
  • access to public worship
  • witness to Christian truth at every level of public life.

The Church of England is the Established Church in England and has a legal obligation to deploy licensed ministers with the care of souls[2] over every part of the country and provide a place of worship accessible to every person.

The Church, in undertaking its mission, seeks to grow in the following interrelated ways:

  • The holiness, transformation and commitment of her members (growth in depth) - both individuals and churches.
  • Increased number of disciples of Jesus Christ (growth in numbers)
  • The fruit of social righteousness and a transformed society (growth in the outworking of our discipleship )

It is God alone who gives the growth in the church (1 Cor. 3: 5-9). So growth is not to be fulfilled for its own sake. It is only good growth when it comes through faithfulness to the gospel. Sometimes, in history, the Church has been faithful and not grown; and at other times, it has been unfaithful, but also proved to be relatively popular.

God gives His Church gifts to undertake His mission and the church needs to steward these gifts in order toshape and develop the effectiveness of the Church’s work, and thus the extent to which it is growing (in terms of any of the dimensions and concepts set out above).

The proposed research anticipated in this paper is centred on testing the outcomesresulting from the choices the Church has been making(explicitly or implicitly) in recent years. Furthermore, we are aware that the local context in which the Church is operating may also provide particular challenges or opportunities for growth, or may influence the strategy which is employed when seeking growth. The proposed programme will also seek to test such factors.

We are aware that there a number of ways of seeking and expressing church growth[3]. For example,

  1. Contextual – reflecting the interests and concerns of its environment. So, growth (e.g. in rural churches) will have a distinctive feel from that found in urban and suburban contexts. Thus the key concern is close attention to the context in which the particular church finds itself.
  2. Mechanistic – more likely to see the church as an organisation, and will have aims, objectives, outcomes, strategies, goals, etc. Tends to be more rational, and focuses on immediate effectiveness. Here the main concern is with the effectiveness of the church.
  3. Organic – sees the church as ‘a gathering of strangers’ in need of salvation from alienation; knits together and grows disparate threads of communities, transforming and empowering neighbourhoods. An organic approach to seeking growth would be to focus on the communal development of the congregation.
  4. Symbolic – the church conveys a meaning, saying something about the purposes of God in a wider community; what the symbols signify to outsiders. The church has meaning and significance beyond the congregation. The key focus for this approach is on the identity or ‘personality’ of a particular church and how this is perceived by those outside of the church.

Each of these four modes of growth has significance, and each will have an impact on numerical growth over different periods of time. For example, attention to the contextual and organic will usually result in slow and steady numerical growth. Mechanistic growth can be easily engineered in a variety of contexts – but can be alienating, especially if it takes little account of the symbolic aspects of church that might engender growth. In many approaches to evangelism, and to overt practices in church growth, approaches rooted in the mechanistic way of viewing growthoften tend to be the most popular –partly because they appear to yield the most immediate results. So our attention to the breadth, depth and types of growth would suggest that a more holistic andnuanced approach to church growth needs to be considered in our research. Here, we are mindful of the biblical tradition, including the parable of the sower (Mark 4: 3-9, etc.). Some church growth can only take place when the soil has been transformed, and this may take considerable time – but is an essential, worthy and fruitful ministry within the context of mission and evangelism.

We understand that a range of factors sometimes contribute to church growth: social, demographic, and cultural, for example. There are many studies – historical and contemporary – that link church growth to social class, and to other factors such as urbanization. We are acutely aware that a recipe or formula for growth in one place does not necessarily translate easily to the soil or context of another place. We will therefore be careful to test any general hypotheses emerging out of any research. One of the aspects of church growth this research will alsotest, is the extent to which numerical growth in the present is indicative of long-term projections of health. It does not follow that these easily correlate.

So, in studying church growth it is important to hold on to a holistic definitions of growth which includes growth in depth, width and reach, and a serious attention to cultural, historical and demographic factors. However, the main focus of this research is nonetheless on numerical growth, not simply because it is (in theory) easier to measure, but because this is alwaysa priority of the Church. In our current age there are particular challenges, Sunday Attendance in the Church of England has decreased by 26.8% over the last 20 years. This is a decrease of over 300,000 people.The national trend in all age weekly church attendance across all of the dioceses in the Church of England shows a ten year change of -11.3%, an actual decline of 143,000.A strategic response to the decline is essential. Thus a key interest is exploring the extent to which interventions by the church at various levels and the way in which the church allocates resources affects the (numerical) growth of the church. (We are more than conscious that this is a ‘mechanistic’ way of thinking, however, the research will be balanced by appropriate attention to the concerns raised above by the contextual, organic and symbolic expressions of growth.)

  1. Proposed Research strands

As set out at the start of the paper, the research programme will have three main strands (although there is likely to be cross-over between them). Bids are invited from researchers or research organisations to carry out all or some of the strandsdetailed below.

3.1Hypothesis testing and data analysis (Strand 1)

The central institutions of the Church of England collect a range of data annually from parishes, cathedrals and dioceses. Further, other sources of data are also available. The nature of this data is discussed more detail in section 3.2 below. The data can be collated into a relatively large data set covering a range of variables over a number of years, however this task will require significant time and effort by the researchers. Whilst various discrete pieces of analysis have been undertaken in the past there have been few attempts to carry out a detailed multi-variable analysis of the data set to explore the issue of church growth. A key strand of this research will be to carry out an analysis of the data already available and in particular to test a range of hypotheses around factors and interventions relating to church growth.

Examples of potential hypotheses for testing through data analysis are set out below:

Mission Strategy
  • Occasional offices[4] lead to growth in attendance.
  • Pitching to different congregations within a locality (e.g. by offering worship and gathering opportunities at a different time in the week / location / with a different liturgy) generates growth.
  • Growth rates are lower in team ministries than in single parish benefices[5].
  • Growth rates are inversely correlated with the number of churches grouped into a benefice.
  • Leaving a church building leads to growth.
/ Deployment / leadership
  • Growth happens to a greater extent when parishes are led by full time paid clergy.
  • The length of time that the minister in charge of a church is not correlated with growth.
  • There is a glass ceiling[6] whereby it is difficult for a church to grow beyond a certain number without additional clergy / staff.
  • On average there is a significant numerical decline within or post a clergy vacancy.
  • Leadership training programmes for clergylead to growth.
  • The appointment of new incumbent leads to growth.
  • Churches with younger incumbents on average have significantly better growth trends.
  • The relationship between clergy acting as sole practitioners in benefices and growth.
  • The effect of Self Supporting Ministers (SSM) on growth.

The final list will depend on the availability of data and will be agreed following further discussions with the NCIs.It will also be important to investigate and take account of context variables. These will need to be included as control variables when testing other hypotheses and it would also be useful to report differential growth rates by context factors controlling for other factors in order to provide hard evidence on whether certain aspects of context provides an advantage or disadvantage.

Examples of key context variables are set out below:

  • Urban, suburban or rural setting
  • Changes in parish population
  • Levels of deprivation
  • Churchmanship[7]
  • Demographic make-up
  • Initial size of church membership
  • Age profile of church membership
  • The level of ‘competition’ for church membership in an area
  • Presence of church school

A range of appropriate statistical techniques (including multivariate analysis) should be used to explore the existing data sets held at a national and diocesan level. The tenderer should set out clearly how they plan to approach the analysis of the data set including which quantitative techniques they propose to use.

3.2Data availability

A range of data is available centrally covering: attendance, membership, occasional offices, participation, numbers and profile of clergy and other licensed ministers, church schools, cathedrals, geography, congregation demographics, finance (including giving), public attitudes and general population data. However data coverage is not complete.

Further, the Church of England has a parish structure with around 13,000 parishes. Within each parish there may be more than one church. Parishes are grouped into around 7,500 benefices and each benefice may have one or more parishes. Attendance (and finance) data is held at the parish level, with roughly 80% coverage. Around 85% of parish figures refer to one church. Clergy data is held at benefice level. Around 70% of benefices have one parish. Just over 50% of benefices have one parish and one church. Each year there could be upwards of 50 changes where parish data could refer to a different area or different churches, or benefices could refer to a different set of churches. This data structure thus creates challenges for analysis at the level of individual churches or parishes.

Across the categories listed above there is also considerable variation in terms of: the length of time for which data is available; the frequency with which the data is collected; the level of detail at which the data is available; the coverage of data; and its quality. Furthermore, the available data is spread across a number of different sources and in some cases will require a fair amount of preparation.

An initial task for the research team would be toprepare and collate the data in order to create a combined data set containing the variables required for analysis.The NCI’s Research and Statistics Team will collate the data and provide the research team with the key data sets as well as quality assuring the data, though the research team appointed to carry out the data analysis work will be required to carry out a significant amount of work to prepare the data sets for analysis.

In terms of measures of church growth attendance (Sunday and weekly) and ‘membership’ figures (electoral roll) are the key variables of interest. However, there are also other potential measures including involvement in church life, financial giving to the church by members and the like.

One of the outcomes of this research is that the results of this work should help shape data collection, the annual return, in the future. For example, if particular factors prove significant in explaining growth then the church may wish to collect data on those factors as part of future annual data collection exercises.

3.3Church profiling (Strand 2)

The second strand of the research is to undertake a profiling of a sample of growing churches (c150-200) along with a comparison group of randomly selected churches. This profiling would involve both looking at trends in the data for those churches and carrying out qualitative research to explore in greater depth what has been driving (or preventing) growth for those churches. The profiling work should involve a comprehensive investigation into the wide range of factors which might encourage or prevent growth.However, this strand would also enable a range of specific factors which have been identified as potentially being important in explaining growth (but for which data is not currently available at an aggregate level, thus preventing those factors from being tested as part of the data analysis strand), to be explored.

Some specific factors that should be explored as part of the comprehensive church profiling work include:

  • The importance of effective leadership for encouraging growth
  • The impact of collaborative leadership strategies
  • The effect of well developed and effective lay leadership on growth[8]
  • The impact on growth of the employment of youth / children’s workers and strategies for youth and children’s work
  • Whether particular types of lay staff have had an impact on growth.
  • The system of parish share in operation within a particular diocese and any impact that this may have on growth or decline
  • Diocesan support strategies and resourcing decisions – in particular whether specific diocesan interventions had impacted on growth within a parish.
  • The extent to which a Community engagement model of mission has lead to growth.
  • Whether active engagement with Mission Action Planning leads to growth.
  • The existence of a small group network and whether this leads to growth.
  • What is effective in terms of encouraging lay discipleship.
  • The impact of Evangelistic Courses.
  • Use of Fresh Expressions / Messy Church.
  • The use of Bishops Mission Orders[9].
  • The effectiveness of Back to Church Sunday and similar guest services.
  • The effect of deploying Interim Ministers.

This list is not definitive and other issues may be highlighted by the churches in the sample.