IN 2015, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York introduced a new initiative that came to be known as Renewal and Reform (R&R). Probably the first ever comprehensive programme of its kind, R&R sought to renew the Church of England, appearing to combine organisational change (procedural and financial initiatives) with theologically conditioned objectives.
As an Anglican priest and management consultant, I found this combination of ecclesiological and organisational dimensions fascinating, and I set out, in a doctoral research project, to investigate the programme, and to understand its conception and intention to work as a programme of change for the Church. In the course of this, I spoke to 15 people at length, including bishops and other senior leaders.
The programme was composed initially of the recommendations of five task groups contained in five reports: Developing Discipleship; Resourcing the Future; Resourcing Ministerial Education; Simplification; and the Green report, as it became known, Talent Management for Future Leaders and Leadership Development for Bishops and Deans: A new approach.
Proposals were made, respectively, in relation to the development of lay discipleship; the distribution of the Church Commissioners’ funds; the recruitment and training of the clergy; reforms to perceived legal and procedural hindrances to effective mission; the training of the senior clergy, and the development of a “talent pool” to provide the future senior clergy.
All the task groups said that they took their inspiration from the General Synod’s 2010 quinquennial goals: “Contributing as the national Church to the common good; facilitating the growth of the Church; re-imagining the Church’s ministry”. The reports were approved by the Synod, and the proposals were enacted. The Green report did not require synodical approval: a procedural fact that attracted much negative comment at the time.
A further paper, Church Commissioners’ Funds and Inter-Generational Equity, setting out the basis on which the Commissioners would support additional spending on the programme, was part of the initial programme. Subsequently, the R&R programme was augmented. In 2016, the Synod’s Secretary General, William Nye, published an overview of the programme, A Vision and Narrative for Renewal and Reform. In 2017, Setting God’s People Free set out proposals for lay ministry and mission in the Church of England.
THE programme had a mixed reception, especially the Green report. Some welcomed it, but many did not. R&R was criticised for a perceived lack of theology and ecclesiology, for a perceived debt to management concepts, and for a perceived failure to engage with, or represent, the breadth of opinion and theological traditions in the Church of England. How fair were these criticisms?
One of the difficulties was a lack of clarity about what R&R was, or what it was designed to achieve. It appears to have begun as a set of loosely connected initiatives designed to encourage and enable dioceses and parishes to focus on, and implement, missionary strategies.
At the same time, it appears that a group of bishops and senior lay officers had ambitions to go further and take action that would galvanise the whole Church of England to respond to what, they believed, was a decline that increasingly and urgently threatened the Church’s survival. When the present Archbishop of Canterbury took office, they found an ally who shared this basic outlook.
By the time R&R was launched, in 2015, it had become a single programme. By 2016, it was being described as the principal response of the Church of England to the phenomenon of “decline”. This perspective was reinforced by the creation, in 2015, of a department of Renewal and Reform with dedicated staff, and the appearance, in 2017, of Setting God’s People Free, which advocated a thoroughgoing change in the practice and culture of mission and ministry at parish level.
A critical factor in the creation and approach of the programme was the high degree of urgency and frustration felt by the architects of R&R. The urgency arose from the sense that the Church of England faced a (perhaps terminal) crisis. That there was and is a crisis I do not dispute, for reasons that have been well-rehearsed, notably the dramatic reductions in church attendance and influence experienced since the 1960s. But a strong sense of crisis can be counter-productive if it leads to precipitate or poorly considered action.
THE contention of the advocates of R&R is that the matter was so urgent that it was necessary to take action without following the kind of process that might be more typical of the Church of England: that is, to act more swiftly and be less consultative than would normally be expected. At least one senior and influential figure believed that there was no time to lose, and wanted to see action and change before retiring.
The R&R architects were also influenced by how difficult it is to get anything done. This has two dimensions. The first is the structure of the Church of England, in which, despite much centralisation in the past 100 years, the centre has limited power over the parts. The national Church itself is composed of many centres of power: Lambeth, the Synod, the Commissioners, and so forth. We should probably read the refusal from the centre to continue to “subsidise decline”, and the decision to allocate the Commissioners’ funds to supporting growth, as an instance of the centre making use of the levers that it had available.
The second aspect is the political sensitivity of the Church of England with its well-established parties: Evangelicals, liberals, Catholics. R&R architects admit that they pushed their agenda through the Synod, but argue that they were compelled to do so, and as quickly as they could, by the structural and political difficulties involved in getting agreement on change.
The frustration felt extends to perceived inadequacies in the leadership provided by the Bishops as a collective. One person who was interviewed (a bishop) told me that the House of Bishops provided dysfunctional leadership. This bishop argued vehemently that the bishops nodded through measures without much real engagement, and then ignored or even opposed the measures later. Haste and frustration seem to have contributed to organisational and ecclesiological deficiencies in the programme.
R&R does not appear to have been directed by any particular theoretical approach, neither ecclesiological nor organisational. In organisational terms, it seems to be most indebted to classical or “machine” theories, developed from a set of initiatives, rather than from any systemic appreciation of the situation. Setting God’s People Free went further, and addressed the question of culture change, but it was an outlier in the programme as a whole.
One of those interviewed used language reminiscent of the concept of complex adaptive systems, with talk of building on instances of growth and effectiveness. The overwhelming sense, however, is of initiatives welded into a programme in the classical manner associated with the organisational concept of bureaucracy. Such programmes are unlikely to achieve the kind of systemic or cultural change of the kind that it seems likely that the Church of England requires, and that many of R&R’s advocates sought.
THE programme was not supported by significant theological material. There were some attempts to fill this gap, including pieces by Canon Sam Wells and the Revd Dr Jeremy Worthen. Although they were good pieces in themselves, they arrived after the programme was established, and they did not provide a comprehensive theological rationale for the programme.
There was little by way of explicit ecclesiology until Setting God’s People Free, which, again, had much more to offer than the earlier reports. It provided a strong and helpful ecclesiological account of the Church and its mission, drawing on Trinitarian concepts and an emphasis on the mission of God. It did not, however, address the particular nature of the Church of England.
In R&R as a whole, the Church of England was characterised as a body that needed urgently to turn its efforts towards its chief vocation: mission. There was some mention of “the common good”, but the primary emphasis was on numerical and spiritual growth. It seems also that it is numerical growth that was the chief focus; so “evangelism” was often preferred to “mission”, especially in the interviews that I undertook. One of those interviewed, an architect of R&R, frankly advocated this position.
To put this in organisational terms, the programme did not offer an adequate account of the identity of the Church of England — certainly not one that embraced its identity as community, organisation, and national institution. In theological terms, there was no articulation of the particular vocation and character of the Church of England as an embodied and culturally distinct manifestation of the Body of Christ in England.
In the absence of these accounts, there is little chance that the programme could offer a convincing narrative about what the Church of England was to become, and it did not do so.
THERE was another significant omission. In organisational terms, the programme was not based on a clear or deep understanding of why the Church of England has the problems that it has, nor of the nature of the environment in which the Church of England operates. In theological terms, the programme did not seem in any clear way orientated towards hearing what God might be saying through the circumstances in which the Church of England finds itself.
Instead, it leapt straight from problem (decline in numbers) to solution (growth in numbers). This makes it likely, to put it organisationally, that the programme will have treated symptoms rather than causes. Overall, there was apparently little attention paid to the notion or practice of discerning God’s future for the Church of England as a distinct manifestation of God’s Church. The focus was entirely on getting things done.
These deficiencies create several risks. In particular, the absence of a narrative about what the Church of England will become was problematic, because such narratives engage supporters with change while offering reassurance. The absence of an understanding of, and clear narrative about, how change will both preserve identity and be consistent with the traditions and vocation of the Church of England, and offer an effective solution to threats and difficulties, was likely to undermine the change process.
This was reinforced by the lack of wider participation in the development of the narrative about the future. These factors together were bound to create a lack of “ownership”, a sense that important aspects of identity were being disregarded, and, almost certainly, resistance. It is certainly possible to read such movements as Save the Parish as, in part, the result of deficiencies in R&R’s conception and process.
WHAT has happened to R&R since, and what success has it had? My doctoral research did not set out to answer these questions; so I can offer only a few thoughts, with caution.
The programme itself was formally ended in 2021, and its activities and at least some of its personnel were assigned to the current Vision and Strategy process. A document reviewing the progress and achievements of R&R, Renewal and Reform: A summary of progress and impact, was published in 2021.
According to this account, the programme successfully achieved many of its objectives: it increased the numbers of clergy; provided leadership training for 90 per cent of bishops and deans; directed money towards lowest-income communities; created 100 new worshipping communities; and so forth. The sum of £148 million has been spent through Strategic Development Funding: that is, on special projects intended to increase the Church’s capacity for mission, mostly with young people or in deprived contexts.
This clearly represents a great deal of work, and, on the face of it, in the terms of the programme, significant achievement. In addition, the publication of Kingdom Calling, in 2020, added greater depth to the characterisation of the nature and calling of the Church, and some consideration of the nature of the world in which the Church is now operating.
It is worth noting that very few organisational-change programmes are conceived perfectly. Even those that have obvious deficiencies can be more or less successful in achieving their aims, but the achievement of particular objectives can be misleading. A programme that is not rooted in an adequate understanding of the organisation and its challenges can succeed in aspects of what it set out to do, and still fail in creating the right future for the organisation. Equally, programmes may prove successful in reaching some of their specific objectives without achieving the overall transformation desired.
The aims of R&R were not, in any case, completely clear. It appears that its chief concern was to achieve an increase in the numbers of those attending church (whether in new or traditional forms of church), and this has not happened. Attendance figures have continued their downward trend. At the same time, though, it may be fair to say that it is too early to judge the success of the programme in those terms, as the reversal of such a long-term trend seems likely to take many years to achieve, anyway.
Another possible reading is to say that the programme’s limitations are effectively acknowledged by the fact that a new strategy is now in place, but, on the other hand, organisations routinely end one strategy and begin another. My belief is that R&R’s principal achievement was in “breaking the ice” and in getting important issues fully on the table, and encouraging new and more creative approaches to the Church’s mission. The value of this should not be underestimated.
Nevertheless, it seems clear that if a programme is to be conceived and implemented in a way that achieves the right outcome for the Church of England, it must be built on adequate ecclesiological and organisational foundations.
In these terms, I am strongly critical of R&R. This does not, however, mean that I am against a co-ordinated attempt to address “decline” and chart the way to a better future. A more systemic process, drawing on a much more developed, integrated, and theologically shaped engagement with management ideas and practices should be advocated for. The Vision and Strategy process has, I hope, learned, or will learn, these lessons.
The Church of England should develop, first, a diagnosis of its current situation; second, an understanding of what God might be saying through the circumstances in which the Church finds itself; third, a comprehensive account of the purpose and vocation of the Church of England; and, fourth, a narrative about how these elements are brought into conversation with one another and suggest a vision for the Church of England’s future.
Furthermore, this work should be undertaken in a way that widely and deeply engages and consults the range of the Church of England’s adherents. Another way of looking at this is to say that what is required is an explicit process of prayer and discernment in which the whole Body of Christ is engaged and involved. Organisational activity is a significant part of how the work of prayer and discernment is enacted. It is better to go slower and get it right than faster and keep getting it wrong. It would require a careful, disciplined, patient, and determined effort.
The Revd Dr Keith Elford is a management consultant, Priest-in-Charge of West Byfleet and New Haw, and visiting scholar in leadership learning and consultancy at Sarum College, Salisbury.