St Clement’s Busby was a very small branch church congregation on the edge of a huge new housing development in a predominantly working class area in south-western Sydney. As the freshly appointed curate, I was given the task of pastoring the congregation and equipping it to reach out into the new area.
It sounded straightforward enough, but where should I start? Should I do a letterbox drop, Scripture lessons in schools, an article in the local paper, a youth group?
We started from the premise that God gives each congregation the resources necessary for them to be an expression of the body of Christ. We decided we would start with what we already had. There were seven of us. We worked hard on the Sunday services and, although two or three members were uncomfortable with some of the changes (such as the music), they went along with things for the greater good of seeing new people enjoy church and, hopefully, become Christians. That took great maturity on their part. Our aim was for our Sunday meeting to be an encounter with God—with and through his word and each other. We began to include in the service testimonies, book reviews, musical items, questions and feedback on the sermons, and other things that gave expression to our faith and our concerns.
Judy and I visited the members, and they began to visit us. Hospitality was, and is, a very big part of our ministry. It’s wearing at times, but it’s essential to the role of the pastor. Building up relationships and trust was a long process, but we slowly started to see St Clement’s members as a team, and the congregation began to express their faith in me as their pastor. Looking back, this was the single most important strategy we embarked upon, because it was a demonstration of Christ’s love. It enabled us to talk about ideas and plans, and to develop a sense of corporate mission in an informal, non-threatening way. It meant that everyone could have some input and, when we did start moving into a new area, people had thought the issue through and were onside. It also gave me the chance to find out how people felt about the changes and to modify or explain what we were doing.
While visitation and hospitality were the driving strategy, a couple in the congregation pointed out that prayer had to be the undergirding of the ministry. Judy and I began meeting with them weekly to pray. We didn’t want to put pressure on people to attend a prayer meeting out of a sense of obligation or duty, but as people started to become interested in what we were doing, the prayer group grew, and only God knows the full impact this is having.
I started visiting all the baptism contacts of the past couple of years. I introduced myself as the new Anglican minister in the area and gave them a handout about the church. Any family that invited me in received a second visit. Since I was also teaching Scripture, I did the same thing with the families of my Scripture kids.
We produced a leaflet and started to letterbox drop the area. Using the same leaflet, I doorknocked the houses where people had just moved in. All of the positive contacts (those who invited me in) went on the mailing list for family services and special activities.
Around this time, we picked up a family or two through transfer growth and were able to start experimenting with Christianity Explained, which we initially did with church families. This enabled the Christians to consolidate their beliefs, and helped us to identify those who weren’t converted. We then used the course for baptism preparation. We’ve had quite a number of people join us through this contact, and we’re now developing a small team who will train others.
Early on, we started an outreach home fellowship group, inviting along some of our contacts. This didn’t really work. We found that, in our area, people seemed happier to come to church because church was less intense and threatening than an intimate gathering. It was all the more reason to make our Sunday meetings quality time.
One of the things our congregation aims to do is consolidate as we go along. We try to work as a unit, rather than relying upon the ministries of one or two people. We stress the use of different parts and functions in order to act as a body. In fact, we made consolidation our primary aim in 1991. We started training eight people in Christianity Explained, worked hard on our home fellowship groups and trained people to plan and lead services, as well as taking part in services in other ways. This year, four members are doing the Moore College correspondence course. We run a monthly men’s breakfast—not as an outreach, but to build a sense of team support among the Christian men. We also give an open invitation to squash on Saturdays, to which both members and outside contacts come. It’s a non-threatening way to build relationships and have a bit of fun.
Last year, one of the women decided to start a playgroup in her home, and a few others got together with her to plan it. In essence, it was an outreach group with activities for children; it wasn’t just a babysitting exercise. We told our neighbours and friends, and, again, contacted our baptism couples. The mums get a chance to sit around and chat over a cuppa, and each week, there is a session on cooking, craft or issues such as children’s sleeping problems. Around once a month, there is some spiritual topic of conversation—usually a talk given by one of the women, although I am occasionally invited to give it. This group has been going for about a year, and there have been some very good contacts. We’re now wrestling with the question of how to build upon these.
We are finding that, in our area, we have to establish long-term relationships. Some people have regular contact with us for a year or so before they turn up at church or ask about baptism. Even the Christianity Explained course, which goes for six sessions, is often really only an introduction for people—a chance to get to know us and what we are on about.
I’ve just achieved a major personal breakthrough at St Clement’s: I don’t rush straight to the service register after church each Sunday to check the attendance figures. That’s not because we’ve reached capacity—far from it! Three years of hard work by the congregation has seen us reach the dizzy heights of about 35 adults a week and almost as many ankle-biters. No, I’ve stopped doing it because it can be too depressing. It’s not right that when a dose of the flu keeps a family from church, I should end up depressed. I also found that I was being driven by a fear of impending failure rather than a zeal for the gospel. This led me to drive people rather than lead them. For this same reason, we try not to put any pressure on people to attend activities. All too often there is a tendency to organize an activity and then push the button marked ‘obligation’ to get people to attend. Our attitude is that, if it’s helpful, people will usually come. If people don’t come, then it may not be an appropriate activity.
So what have I learned from our experiences?
- You need a team. Usually, when people talk about team ministry, they mean a ‘staff’ team. That doesn’t strike me as necessarily biblical. Here we have a team ministry, but I am the only vocational team member. The congregation, and more particularly, the small church committee, is the team. We make ministry decisions together, and all take responsibility. Too many people I meet have had bad experiences involving clergy with ‘Vision’, who run things their way with the attitude of “If you don’t like it, you can leave”. How many times have you heard a pastor refer to the congregation as ‘them’ rather than ‘us’—as if he were not a part of it? It’s an indication of a lack of love and identification; people have become mere objects of ministry.
- You need to pastor your leaders. Judy and I try to spend a lot of time with the leaders, and not always to talk about business. My aim is to visit every leader at least once in three months on a ‘non-business’ basis. I keep track of my visits. Often they work out to be more frequent because most of these leaders have become good friends. People are motivated for service by a sense of community and caring, not by pushing the ‘commitment’ or ‘guilt’ buttons. Surely the biblical motivation for good works is responding to God’s love for us. One of the ways this love is shown is through God’s people—through our care and concern for each other. We work hard at developing this sense of community through our monthly men’s breakfasts, picnics, family nights and getting together in someone’s house for the State of Origin football.
- Work with the available leaders. “It amazes me that God has messed up so badly in not giving the ‘working class’ churches any leadership”: this is a constant refrain in many quarters. What it implies is that there is no middle-class, articulate, organizationally minded or professional brand of leadership—no one who can chair a meeting or function under the rules of a committee meeting or plan a houseparty for 60 people. That does not mean that there is no leadership within the congregation; it just means that there’s no leadership of the type we are willing to recognize. Every group will have its leaders. The problem with so many middle-class clergy (and non-middle-class clergy who have been pruned to fit the mould) is that they fail to recognize different styles and approaches to leadership. They end up suppressing the ‘native’ leadership because it might seem too ‘fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants’ or merely intuitive. Importing leaders because of this blinkered approach can be a great trap, and may drive the local leadership underground. At St Clement’s, we work on the principle that the congregation to which we belong is God’s, and he will equip it. If he wants a certain ministry, he’ll provide us with those gifts. My role is to train and encourage people in the use of those gifts.
We Busbybodies don’t have all the answers. We’re still not even sure what the questions are. What we’re doing may sound great, but I can still feel down because we’re not growing as quickly as I want, and there are so many hassles and struggles. After three years, we are not a big congregation, or even a medium-sized one. Last Sunday, I came home from church, wondering whether it was all worth it. The next day, there was a note under the door from one of the newer families (who had no idea how I was feeling), saying how much they appreciated being part of the congregation and how they valued our ministry. That put me on cloud nine. Up one moment, down the next; the agony and the ecstasy—that’s church planting.
