Declining to be church? Rediscovering God’s time and action through paying careful attention to a numerically declining church

ABSTRACT

Church decline is typically seen as a problem to be solved. Many denominations have developed strategies of renewal to address the problem of numerical decline. By paying attention to a particular church in numerical decline through a theological action research project, this paper asks whether there might be different narratives to be uncovered, and particular gifts that declining churches might offer; gifts such as quietness, presence, and welcome. While recognising some of the descriptive value of the typical narrative of decline, taking the example of the life-cycle of a church model, this study shows its diagnosis to be misplaced. It challenges the model’s assumptions around aging, time and hope, and by developing the conversation with the work of Andrew Root, Rowan Williams and John Swinton it shows how a declining church actually offers a different perspective on aging, time and on God’s action in the world. The paper concludes by suggesting that a church in numerical decline is not just a problem to be solved, but an invitation to pay attention to God in the present.

KEYWORDS:

• Church decline
• life-cycle of a church
• living in the present
• youthfulness
• aging
• theological action research

Introduction

Churches across the western hemisphere are in a state of anxiety over figures of numerical decline. In response, some denominations have turned to strategies of renewal, examples being Renewal and Reform in the Church of England (Welby and Sentamu 2015), and Evangelism and Growth and ‘God for All’ in British Methodism (Hall 2019). Within these approaches decline is the problem and growth the assumed solution. This assumption of growth, most forcefully promoted by McGavran and the Church Growth Movement, continues to have tractions both in church and more academic reflection (McGavran 1970). Goodhew (2012) sought to articulate a theology of church growth, the Church Revitalisation Trust seeks to ‘help accelerate church growth by planting and revitalising churches’ (2022), and the Centre for Church Multiplication, seeks to multiply and grow churches (2020). Growth theories and assumptions have been carefully critiqued by many (Abraham 2006; Towns and McIntosh 2004). Paas directly questions whether church growth is the purpose of mission, and Guest has shown the clear ties between church growth and neo-liberal assumptions (Guest 2022, 34; Paas 2016, 111–180). The particular contribution of this paper is less about growth and more a study of the assumptions around decline. It explores descriptions of decline taking the example of the ‘life-cycle of a church’ model and brings it into conversation with the lived experience of a church in numerical decline, Oakfield’s Chapel. It will highlight problematic assumptions in descriptions of decline and offer some surprising gifts from lived practice. By engaging with the work of Andrew Root, Rowan Williams and John Swinton around aging, time and eschatology, I will argue that this local church offers important insights into living in the present, recognising God’s action in the world, and focusing on an eschatological future. I will conclude that, given these insights, declining churches are an invitation to pay attention to God, not simply a problem to be solved.

A theological action research project at Oakfield’s Chapel

This paper is based on a theological action research project in collaboration with Oakfields Chapel (pseudonym). This is one site within a larger project exploring the experience of learning in the Methodist Church in Britain.¹ Oakfields is a sub-urban local Methodist church in greater London. Its experience resonated with many churches in the UK: it has a faithful, aging membership and is in severe numerical decline. In the past it has had a membership of well over 100 and it is now 20–30 members. It has a large building which in the recent past was converted to provide additional community space in the form of a small hall and meeting rooms alongside the sanctuary.

As a theological action research project, we, the research team, were committed to paying close attention to the theology embedded in the words and actions of Oakfields Chapel. We are not trying to claim Oakfields is typical or representative of all churches in decline, but asking what a close look at a particular church in numerical decline might offer to the wider conversation. Theological action research is committed to the renewal of practice and of formal theological accounts, and does this through hearing theological voices of espoused, operant, formal and normative theological voices together, in actual conversations between researchers and the research site (Cameron et al. 2010; Watkins 2020). The University of Roehampton team worked collaboratively with a team from Oakfields Chapel at every stage of the research from planning to discerning the data and identifying the learning. The reflections in this paper are based on the learning from the conversations between the two teams reflecting on ten semi-structured interviews with members of the church. The themes of aging, gift, life-cycle, time and the present all arose in the reflector meeting, and the formal voices in the paper are introduced to help illuminate those themes.

Turning to the life-cycle model of the church

The life-cycle model was identified by two Methodist ministers, one from the Oakfields team and one from the Roehampton team, as a helpful descriptive tool to enable discussion around decline. It is a model which comes from a body of work, principally from the Alban Institute, written between the 1980s and early 2000s (Bullard 2001; Compton 2003, 14–25; Dale 2004; Mann 2000; Rothauge 1994; Saarinen 1986). The life-cycle as laid out in most of the documentation shows a bell curve diagram and indicates five stages. Different authors use different names but they follow the same pattern of birth, growth, stability, decline and death.² While there has been much less academic interest in the life-cycle model over the last 15 years, it continues to appear in church consultancy as a tool to discuss and reflect on decline. The Methodist Church in Britain has used it in their toolkit aimed at declining churches as have others (The Methodist Church 2019; See also Dadswell 2011, 42; Henard 2018; McIntosh 2009).

The life-cycle model identifies how churches go through seasons. As Bullard comments, ‘few congregations are always thriving congregations’ (Bullard 2001, 3). The authors suggest congregations find it helpful to see their experience of decline (Bullard 2001, 3; Mann 2000, 6–7; Rothauge 1994). The life-cycle model’s description of decline resonated with the accounts in the interviews. Brenda,³ one member of the church put it starkly.

Well unfortunately of course it's dying out, it's dying off. Our numbers are decreasing constantly, not because anybody takes umbrage and hoofs it off, but basically because we're all growing so much older.

There was a feeling of inevitability about the continuing decline and later in the interview Brenda says:

Methodism as a whole doesn't seem to be attracting people. […] it's a common complaint and I don't really know what you can do about it.

The sense of helplessness named in the life-cycle model was present in Oakfields. John also expressed resignation in his reflections.

People nowadays, they want things that are one-off, say, the Easter service and that’s it. That’s transient and you need something to build on. If you’re building, you need to have a structure there that encourages it to happen. I’m thinking long and hard over many years, what the future of the church will be, and as I said, if those elements aren’t there, the young feeding through, I just see the dim side of it, I’m sorry.

John knows that the old models are not working, that people are engaging with church differently and he feels helpless to make change. His instinct is the same as the life-cycle model, to find new life through people coming from outside, particularly families (Bullard 2001, 16). This is echoed by others. Mike suggests, ‘we could try to reenergise families with children to come again’, but laments, ‘what tends to happen is that the sort of younger family members, as they grow up, they move away, because this is a very expensive place to live’. Similarly, young people do not return to Oakfields after university because as Brenda notes, ‘they can't find places to live here, we're all too expensive’.

While the description is similar, where the life-cycle model begins to depart from the experience of the church is in its diagnosis. We didn’t see what Mann identifies as the church resting on it laurels, turning to blame or focusing ‘their attention on what they can control’ (2000, 7), nor what Bullard sees as a lack of vision and intentional effort and a reliance of ‘management systems’ (2001, 21). Neither did we see what Saarinen identified as ‘distrust’ and a loss of a sense of shared ministry (1986, 13). Oakfields Chapel had made various attempts at the kinds of revitalisation and redevelopment encouraged by Mann (2000, 9–11), having both new ministers arriving, and a radical redevelopment of the church plant to provide space for the local community. According to Tom, ‘The redevelopment has meant that we’ve become less of a Sunday-only church and more of a community-based church.’ His hope was that this redevelopment would help them to ‘continue to serve the community’ and continue to be ‘a witness in the community’. Similarly, Carol’s ‘hope is that that building and those people will stay there in service for the people … Not necessarily for the people who are there now, but for the people who are going to be there in the future’. Both Carol and Tom express the faithfulness of the church and a desire for continued witness and service in the community. As Carol states, ‘Whatever is God’s will for Oakfields, that is my hope. And do what I can while I’m there.’ What both research reflector teams saw in Carol’s and Tom’s accounts were the starting points for recognising God’s agency at the heart of Oakfields.

We did not meet people who were ‘no longer living out the vision that God has given them’ as Bullard (2001, 15) has described the decline stage to be, but, rather, faithful people and hopeful people, who had tried new things but felt unable to reverse decline. Alice summed it up, ‘You’ve just got to have faith that it'll be okay, I think. That doesn’t mean you can just give up and just let other people do it all, you’ve got to have some sort of an input into making it okay.’

Oakfields reflector team had an instinct that they as a local church had something particular to offer, demonstrated by their research question which they had developed; ‘What is the spirituality we uniquely offer to our local community?’ They were trying to live faithfully and trust God, recognising that it was beyond them to reverse decline but aware they had something to offer. While Oakfields may be, sociologically, in decline, their responses are a reminder that while there is a faithful, praying Christian community there is something more happening, because this is not simply a sociological entity but also a theological one, one determined not just by human agency but by God’s agency. This matches with the finding from the Religious Life Vitality Project looking at the experience of aging women religious facing similarly severe decline in numbers.

Women religious are living a critical moment of paschal mystery, a radical encounter with corporate and institutional death and resurrection. The project finds religious women moving from action to a ministry of presence, witness and relationship, perceiving their presence, even in old age, as prophetic faithfulness.[…] [They are] standing, like Mary Magdalene, at the entrance to the empty tomb. Much of what was known and familiar has died, but at this moment of challenge they are hearing the voice of the Master, inviting them not to cling to the past but to follow into a future full of hope. (Sexton and Simmonds 2015, 3)

The Religious Vitality project does not expect to reverse decline, but in the midst of this decline discovers hope. Its hope through the ‘paschal mystery’ is in contrast to how the life-cycle models talks about death and resurrection. In the life-cycle model it is a last resort or a comforting thought if organisational revitalisation does not take place. In many cases resurrection is still understood in organisational terms (Dale 2004, 20–21 n3) and interpreted as resources and assets such as money, people, buildings and skills being used elsewhere to help other churches grow (Bullard 2001, 35; Rothauge 1994, 7).

The life-cycle model focuses primarily on decline as a problem to solve. There is an implicit link between youth and growth, and between aging and decline, made by mapping numerical membership onto a life-cycle.⁴ This means that one solution to decline becomes newer and younger pastors, members and programmes (Bullard 2001). Church members become characterised as resistant to change, stuck in their ways, and, focused on bureaucracy (Saarinen 1986, 13–14). There is almost no question about individuals’ faith, only a sense of needing to reawaken questions about purpose and God. Yet the conversations in Oakfield’s reveal the older members to be faithful, wise and with a prayerful faith in God. Participants identified how they were less judgemental, open to ambiguity and doubt, and less worried about change because they had seen it before. Clive stated, ‘As a new Christian [you’re] excited and things seem quite black and white. As I've got older, less and less to me seems clear cut’ and Alice comments, ‘I’m not afraid to think it through for myself.’ While narratives of decline struggle to see little value in this stage of a church’s life where even stability and consistency are seen as one small step away from complacency and decline (Mann 2000, 7), Oakfields offered a more complex reality.

Youthfulness and the gifts of aging

The tendency for churches to focus on youthfulness is picked up by the practical theologian Andrew Root (2017) in his work on faith formation. By engaging with the work of Charles Taylor, he examines how, in the second half of the twentieth century, youthfulness becomes an obsession which is no longer connected to young people but rather becomes a state of mind and a means of being our most authentic self (Root 2017, 73). In an age where being authentic is what most matters, youthfulness is the main strategy for achieving authenticity. This might explain the negating of older people and the desire for youthfulness in developing the church, but for Root the bigger problem is that youthfulness ‘drives authenticity to conceive of existence as only natural and material, flattening reality and making divine action something unbelievable’ (Root 2017, 74). What this suggests is that turning to ‘youthfulness’ to solve the problem of decline might end up making the work of God seem unbelievable and unnecessary thereby negating the work of the Spirit as the primary agent of that renewal. Narratives which see decline as wholly negative implicitly embrace the ‘idol of youthfulness’ (Root 2017, 12), displaying an almost entirely negative view of aging. It is not just that the gifts of aging might be lost by embracing youthfulness, Root warns that the agency of God and the sense of the transcendent can also become lost.

As I have suggested, the experience of the participants from Oakfields challenge this view of decline and aging. There are helpful connections with the work of James Woodward on the spirituality of older people. He expresses the need to recognise the gifts of old age and gives a different perspective.

The acceptance of our unique reality is critical to our relationship with the God who moulded, formed and named each one. It is in the uniqueness of this being that we find our place in the pattern of creation. (Woodward 2011, 92)

While Woodward is discussing older people individually the interviews from Oakfield suggest this can be read more broadly in terms of an aging church. One of the first things that the Roehampton team noticed in the data was how participants valued the prayer, calm and peace which they associated with Oakfields. Carol described how she ‘liked the quietness’ and how the worship ‘just suits [her]’. Clive described it as a ‘reflective church’ which was ‘helping people to be quiet and reflective’. Mike liked the ‘space for personal reflection’ and the ‘focus on prayer’, and Rose appreciated the peace and calm. When asked to talk further about the quietness Mike and Carol both compared it directly to the more energetic and lively forms of worship. They associate quietness with other aspects of the life of the church as well.

At the moment, we’re running music exams and [the small chapel is] the waiting room. The family sit there, but there’s a big cross and there’s post-it notes and there’s a pen and you’re invited to write your prayer on the post-it note and put it on the cross. And people want prayer and the children do say, ‘Pray for my granny’. I think that might be something, like a place to come and say your prayers and then go away again. [Carol]

And I was on duty one afternoon and someone came in off the street. She’d just started working in this area wanted to ask if she could use the church or chapel during lunch break for prayer. [Tom]

Prayer, quietness and calm are all identified as particular gifts, which are both valued by Oakfields and open to the wider community. The life-cycle accounts call for renewed vision and energy, but here there is a distinctive and quieter spirituality which Oakfields offer as a gift and service to each other and the local area.

This feeds into the theme of presence which was expressed in the interviews – the importance of the church, and particularly the building, being present and available to the local community. The Saturday morning coffee shop is described by Tom as an offering of peace and quiet to the community. He explains, ‘Hopefully it’s a home that people feel welcome to and do what they want either sit quietly or talk to someone if they’ve been lonely.’ Carol in particular placed great importance on the church being present and available rather than ‘grabbing people’ because ‘we need the numbers’. Again, Carol and Steve both showed a reflective resignation.

The information is there and they have been invited, but I think it’s just not what they’re looking for at the moment. I think we just have to accept that. I think we are making ourselves visible as we can. Yes, just being the people that we are. That’s all that we can do. [Carol]

Unless you physically say to them, ‘please don’t go’, you know, it's … No, there's nothing you can do. But you can still sort of be there. [Steve]

There are very few new people coming to the church, and some are leaving, but both Carol and Steve still see the importance of being there, being present and being available.

The life-cycle model and the accompanying narratives of decline, tend to see these things negatively, as people stuck in their ways and unwilling to embrace change to bring growth. However, Oakfields have tried many of the things which supposedly bring growth, most clearly a redevelopment of their building to provide more space for the local community, but numerical decline has continued.

The focus on decline as solely a problem to be reversed occludes the gifts and faithfulness of the church. Like Oakfields, other Methodist churches in this research have been strongly encourage by the Methodist denominational structures to make their services more attractive to young people and families. In other sites we have heard stories of people struggling through services with lively songs and youthful energy with no young families to be seen. The assumed problem of decline and the assumed solution of youthfulness can end up with a service which fails to recognise the gifts present within the community. In contrast to Saarinen’s accusation that declining churches fetishise sureness and certainty (1986, 15), these attempts of revitalisation risk fetishising youthfulness and ignoring of those who are actually present – not people focused on bureaucracy but faithful, caring Christians.

While the members of Oakfields have accepted decline, this is not the acceptance of their fate lamented by the life-cycle model, but a trust that ultimately it is in God’s hands. Woodward recognises acceptance as an important aspect of the spirituality of older people.

It is in coming to an acceptance of ourselves as weak and sinful, limited and constantly failing, that we reach openness to One who wants nothing more than the gift of ourselves as we are. It is God who will become our strength, will fill our emptiness and bring healing to our sinfulness, who will lead us through a sense of our vulnerability to a wellspring of wisdom, empathy and compassion. (Woodward 2011, 90)

What Woodward’s observation suggests is that rather than trying to bring about something new and youthful, it is in recognising the gifts that are present – in this case, their quietness, presence, and welcome – combined with the acceptance of decline and finitude that they can engage with and serve their community. These gifts sensitise them to God and to others. While these gifts may not be the means to renewal and the church may well have to close, Oakfields Chapel does indeed have a spirituality which it uniquely offers to its local community.

Living in the present moment

Recognising the gifts present in the community is an invitation to inhabit the present moment. Rowan Williams reflects on the importance of the present moment in his book Christ on Trial where he explores Jesus’ trial narratives in the four gospels. While looking at Mark’s account Williams asks,

What is the ‘present moment’ of the Church’s life like? Well it is all too like the response of the disciples in Jesus’ lifetime. How very tempting then, to turn our emotional energy and imagination towards a ‘better’ Church, away from the embarrassing present moment. Nonetheless, it is here, in Jesus crucified and in the struggling and the failing community, that the coming of the Human One in glory is made visible to the world. (Williams 2002, 19)

Williams points out that although there is an account of hope in Mark’s gospel, what is referred to is not the second coming, nor the resurrection, but Jesus’ death and the community of the Church. It is, paradoxically, in the telling of the ‘hopeless’ stories that the life and hope of Jesus is encountered. What becomes apparent in the light of this call to be in the uncomfortable present is that this is exactly where the life-cycle model struggles to be. When the church is growing the life-cycle model draws attention to what the church is growing towards, when the church reaches stability the life-cycle model is concerned about avoiding stagnation and rediscovering the energy of youth, and in decline the life-cycle model’s call is to action to reinvigorate. Inbuilt within the life-cycle model is an inherent dissatisfaction with the present and an unhealthy anxiety about maintaining growth. The primary tools are vision and strategy; renewing the vision of what the church is called to be and strategic planning of how to get there. In contrast, Oakfields Chapel had come to accept who it was, and to begin to embrace the gifts it had. The tools of vision and strategy encourage a certain kind of hopeful view of the future, a growing church, but it is not automatically an eschatological future. William’s notes,

Perhaps the hardest thing of all for the Christian is precisely this bearing with the present moment, not pretending that it is necessarily good or happy, but simply acknowledging that it is here [..] that God is to be met, whether for joy or for terror. (Williams 2002, 20)

Williams warns against a desire to live in an idealised future, but instead to live now, in the present, where God is to be met. To do this he suggests the practice of contemplation. He notes that in contemplation being in the present moment is difficult because the mind is always drawn into another moment and another time. But he points out the answer is not to draw yourself into a place of abstraction – of piety – but to pay ‘patient attention to where you are and what is going on within you’ (Williams 2002, 21). Oakfields Chapel reveals that in paying careful attention to an actual church in numerical decline a different reality is seen. As we identified the gifts and spirituality present in Oakfields in the reflector meeting, we saw the ways it opened up the church’s attention to the work of the God and encouraging the attentiveness Williams talks of. It is all too easy to take these gifts and immediately begin to strategise how they might be used to develop growth, but this is to miss the point. The challenge is to notice how these gifts provide further opportunities to be in the present moment and recognise the work of God with the church and community.

This draws attention to another problem of the life-cycle model of church: it fails to recognise the people who make up the church. The church is treated as an entity in itself and the people are missed. The focus is on the vision and identity of the church, but not the particularities of the people who make it up. They become those who serve and fulfil the vision, rather than the ones through whom and by whom the vision is discerned. For all the talk of energy and the connections made to the Spirit in the life-cycle accounts, the lack of attention given to recognising each other as gifts from God to be cherished is telling. Afterall, it was through hearing the individual stories from the participants that a different story of Oakfields began to emerge. John Taylor sees the recognising of one another in the present as precisely the work of the Spirit (Taylor 1980, 18–19). This point is powerfully illustrated by Eugene Peterson in his memoir, The Pastor. He shares his story of not getting drawn into running his church like a business (2012, 112), or seeing his congregation as ‘problems to be fixed, but mysteries to be honoured and revered’ (2012, 137). He describes how he resisted being drawn into programmes and fresh goals, and instead learned to be a pastor who focused on prayer, worship and being present with people. Focusing on decline as a problem can easily draw churches and individuals away from the present moment where God acts; away from the gifts that God has given and from the people God has gathered.

Time and God’s action

The practical theologian John Swinton, through his research on disability and dementia, also notices this problem of not being present. For Swinton this is a result of what he calls, ‘the tyranny of the clock’ (Swinton 2017, 21). With the invention of the clock arose a completely different relationship to time. He describes how early clocks were invented by monks to alert them as to when to pray.

Monks were not expected to be punctual, they were expected to be faithful […] one is punctual because the system requires one to be. Faithfulness relates to one’s desire to please God through one’s routine and practices of worship. (Swinton 2017, 26)

Being able to count time so clearly means time goes from being a gift from God, to being something which is controlled and possessed by human beings (and, in turn, controls and possesses human beings!). Swinton draws on the work of Kosuke Koyama, Three Mile an Hour God (2015), and explains how Koyama identifies that, ‘In his earthly experience, Jesus, who is God, who is love, walked at three miles per hour’ (Swinton 2017, 68). Swinton notes how words that have been used for those with disabilities, such as ‘handicapped’ and ‘retarded’, all have their origin in not being able to keep up (Swinton 2017, 39–48). In a world which continually moves faster than God, Swinton suggests that those with disabilities are actually a gift to the community and help Christians to slow down and to be present. Andrew Root, in another book, The Congregation in a Secular Age, also reflects on time and speed. While Root agrees with Swinton that the Church is no longer the time keeper as it was in the Middle Ages, he points out that simply slowing down fails because it effectively tries to live in a different time rather than recognising the present moment (Root 2021, 179–182). For Root, the reason that Swinton’s suggestion is effective is not simply that it slows human beings down, but that it brings them into reciprocal relationship with the other, which in turns opens them up to divine action (Root 2021, 210–211). Where the race to keep up focuses people on resources to be gathered and strategies to be enacted, the relationship with the other opens them up to encounter the divine and invites them to participation in God’s action.⁵ The life-cycle model’s solution to church decline, in a world wedded to the clock, is to speed up and to find the ways to keep growing; but following Swinton’s argument, decline can be seen as an invitation to be present, to receive time as a gift and to recognise divine action.

An addiction to moving fast means that sights get set on a future which is not an eschatological future – God’s future gifted to humanity. What Williams, Peterson, and Swinton all demonstrate is that God’s future is not found by reaching further or moving faster, but by being in the unsatisfactory and embarrassing present, because that is where God is and that is the pace God is moving at. Those who cause people to slow down are not to be discarded, but to be cherished as those who help others to recognise God’s action among them. Oakfields and its numerical decline is not simply a problem to be solved, but a community where the Spirit is active, where God’s present, despite its discomfort, can be experienced. It is through this attention to the present and God’s present action that people can be drawn into a truly eschatological future and hope.

This, again, is the paschal mystery. In talking about life cycles it is important to note that life, death and resurrection are at the heart of the Christian faith. It is no surprise then that, in the theological sources which I have drawn from in this paper, the cross and Easter have been important loci. Williams ties being present in the failing and fragile community of the Church with the crucifixion of Jesus. The death of Jesus, for Williams, is something to recognise in the present, but in doing so it becomes an eschatological present; the future return of Jesus is wrapped up and revealed in the present suffering of Jesus. In the life-cycle model, death is to be avoided if possible, and resurrection is the backup; in these theological accounts death and resurrection are at the very heart of the being church.

Declining to be church?

In this paper, I have suggested that the common narratives of decline, like the one seen in the life-cycle model, are based in a misplaced theology where decline is seen as a problem of aging, a lack of energy and something to be solved. Paying close attention to a specific church in numerical decline, Oakfield Chapel, and the themes of youthfulness, the present moment and eschatological hope that it has drawn attention to, suggests decline might, surprisingly, offer a more helpful and hopeful gift, one of calling churches into the present moment where God is met. So, I return to the papers ambiguous title to ask, who is declining to be church? By failing to live in the present moment I am suggesting it might be narratives of decline and the life-cycle model which are declining to be church. The ‘declining’ church, much like those with disabilities in Swinton’s writing, becomes an invitation to be present, to recognise God at work and to become more truly God’s church.

Of course, it is possible to be a church in decline and not embrace God in the present, perhaps leading to the kind of bureaucratic church the life-cycle model identifies, but Oakfields Chapel shows that other narratives are available, possible and perhaps more likely. By paying close attention to the particular and granular in the life of Oakfield chapel, another narrative has emerged, one with a more solid theological and practice-based grounding. I am not saying that a church must be in numerical decline to recognise God’s presence; it is always possible. But it is a reminder that life in Christ is found in dying to oneself; in death and resurrection. In his foreword to Mann’s Can our church live?, Anthony Pappas makes exactly these points when he talks about the need to, ‘live with the issues’, and ‘give the Spirit time’ (Pappas 2000, vii). Mann herself talks about relinquishing our own work to the transforming fire of the Spirit of God (Mann 2000, 115). The problem is that these practices, which encourage churches to recognise each other and discern God in the present, are talked about in the life-cycle accounts, but they are not placed at the heart of the life-cycle approach or the common narratives of decline.

Churches in numerical decline, like Oakfields, are a reminder of the need to pay close attention to the present and offer an opportunity to recognise dependence on God. They draw attention to Jesus’ call to die and therefore paradoxically live in God’s present and his eschatological future, not an idealised one. I do not know what this means for Oakfields church, but I am convinced that the Spirit is at work there and that Oakfields has unique gifts which its members offer to each other and the local community. They indicate that it is through embracing the work of Christ in the present that the future is embraced. This is not a guarantee of church growth or that Oakfields will still be present in 50 years’ time, but a call to be faithful and attentive in the present moment to what God is doing, becoming aware of the eschatological future where all things are renewed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Susanna Wesley Foundation.

Notes on contributors

James Butler

James Butler is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Roehampton, London, and MA lecturer at the Church Mission Society, Oxford. He is experienced in theological action research methods, and part of the steering committee of the Theology and Action Research Network (TARN). His research interests are around mission ecclesiology, discipleship, learning, and pioneering. He completed his PhD at Durham University exploring the mission ecclesiology of missional communities.

Notes

1 The Methodist Learning Project ran at the University of Roehampton from 2017 to 2021. The PI is Dr Clare Watkins and the project was funded by the Susanna Wesley Foundation. (https://susannawesleyfoundation.org/) Ethical approval was given by the University of Roehampton ethics committee, HUM 17/ 024.

2 Discussion around church growth has sought to broaden the meaning of ‘growth’ to go beyond numerical growth, however in the life-cycle model growth tends to refer to number of people attending and is the way growth, and indeed decline, is used through this paper.

3 All participants' names are pseudonyms.

4 This connection is made explicit by Compton in a blog post (2006).

5 Root particularly explores this in relation to children, but his account resonates with Swinton’s account of being in community with those who have disabilities and those with dementia (Root 2021, 231–242).