In the diocese of Ottawa, it started in 2020 with a two-year consultation process looking into the state of parish ministry, says the Rev. Jon Martin, rector at St. John’s Kanata and chair of the diocese’s parish development sub-committee.
“We met with people and asked them about the challenges and fears, successes, hopes,” he says. “A number of our parishes were in frightened survival mode.”
What they found was a desire for tools to get out from under the shadow of decline, he says. “A lot of folks in parishes, when they reported back, they seemed to not know what to do. Which is always interesting to me because people have been studying the topic of decline and parish development for at least decades … But I imagine that parishes, very much like individual people, when super stressed out and frightened, make more reactionary decisions than carefully thought through, responsive ones.”
Martin’s task force gave a presentation on its work at the diocesan synod in fall 2024 and plans to ramp up work visiting parishes, holding Zoom meetings and scripting and producing videos over the next year.
Now, the diocese of Ottawa has become the latest in a recent wave of regions across the Anglican Church of Canada to begin work on a program of parish development. Like the diocese of Niagara and the ecclesiastical province of British Columbia and Yukon, which have similar programs, Ottawa is aiming to provide parishes, their clergy and their lay leaders with the education and resources to streamline their decision-making, focus their vision and purposefully reach out to their communities.
So far, efforts to provide this kind of instructional programming for parishes looking for help with organization and outreach are being provided by dioceses and ecclesiastical provinces, developed independently of one another across the country. But some of the providers wonder whether there should be a more coordinated effort to make them available nationwide.
For many, says Martin, any effort at improvement requires first clearing away a pall of guilty feelings associated with decline in membership. Between demographic shifts and cultural changes, many of the factors causing decline in Canada’s major Christian denominations are not within the control of leaders or members of those faiths, especially at the parish level, he says. And when he first started telling that to people, he says, “Some people felt a little weight come off their shoulders. I think they almost took some personal ownership about the fall of the church in Canada. And we can tell them 75 per cent of that is not their fault.”
What parishes can control—and what his committee is developing a series of videos about—is how they relate to their surrounding communities and how they respond when new people do make contact. Among the diocese’s survey questions, he says, was one directed at people who had left the church either after a long membership or a brief visit; it asked why they decided not to continue. Martin says many answered that there was something about the way they were welcomed that put them off; and these responses, he says, fell into two main groups. In some cases, respondents felt those who welcomed them were uncomfortably eager to have new members to save a dwindling congregation, while in others they felt overly pressured to match the church’s existing culture and preserve the status quo.
Welcoming newcomers with hospitality based on an interest in what they’re looking for rather than what the church prescribes is thus one topic Martin intends to cover in a series of videos the diocese will be working on over the next year. Other topics may include defining a parish identity, setting up clear roles and responsibilities and crafting an annual stewardship cycle. But his plan also includes soliciting feedback from parishes on what they want to learn so his team can respond with tailor-made resources. Once a topic is covered in a video, he says, it will then be available for anyone across the country who has a similar question through the diocese’s website.
Meanwhile, in the ecclesiastical province of British Columbia and Yukon, the Rev. Marnie Peterson, rector of St. Anne’s Anglican Church-Stevenson, and several volunteers are running a modified version of a curriculum from The Episcopal Church’s College for Congregational Development. She describes the program as centred on models of congregational life that develop participants’ skills to better manage an Anglican parish.
“I think our default is that we think we just know how to do things,” she says. “But we don’t get taught facilitation or how to run meetings in seminary. So just because I’m an ordained person doesn’t mean I necessarily know how to create an effective agenda or chair a meeting, but it’s assumed that I will, because God knows we sit in a bajillion church meetings.”
Thus, the program, which she previously ran in the diocese of New Westminster, is partly directed at giving teams of lay people and clergy from around the province a foundation in business-style organizational development. The hope, Peterson says, is that after teaching those skills to groups of people from all walks of church life, instructors can send them back to their parishes with knowledge they can share with lay leaders, regular members and clergy alike. Armed with that knowledge, she says, congregations can examine the strengths, resources and needs of their community and set clear goals for which ministries they want to invest in to serve and invite in their neighbours. While one parish may find it has the volunteers and community to run a food bank, for example, another may find itself with fewer volunteers but plenty of space to partner with a local youth program for a drop-in centre.
Teams of about five from 12 parishes are participating in the inaugural two-year course, which included an initial in-person gathering in Kamloops, B.C. last September and several Zoom sessions before a concluding gathering in May in Nanaimo, B.C.
Kallee Lins, a parishioner at St. Saviour’s Pro-Cathedral in Nelson, B.C. and one of the participants in the course, says she was impressed with the degree to which it draws on organizational development principles she is familiar with from her background as an executive director of the West Kootenay Regional Arts Council. Lins (who was chosen Feb. 28 as the NDP candidate for her federal riding) says she can see how her own parish would apply the program’s methods to interview members about their ideas on how the parish can grow. For her part, she believes there’s room for growth in its communication with outsiders. If the church hopes to attract new visitors, she says, it will have to find a way to get an attractive version of its message in front of people who might be interested in eventually coming in.
“I think we need to attend to that relationship pipeline even before people set foot in the church,” she says. Having just joined the Anglican church a few years ago herself, she believes better communication through social media, podcasting and other online avenues is one way her parish could more effectively strike up relationships with people.
Similarly, the diocese of Niagara has a parish development model that invites congregations to look at three aspects of a healthy missional culture and consider how they can align with them, says Emily Hill, the region’s parish development missioner. Those three aspects are: what a missional culture looks like; how to put it into practice; and how to adapt it to life in the neighbourhood. Students discuss, among other things, ideas for one or two projects they could work on to put the mission of the gospels into motion, and how they can partner with their community neighbours to do that. To date, about 75 per cent of parishes in the diocese have gone through the process, she says.
“Some parishes have run with it and found it really life giving.”
Like the British Columbia and Yukon program, Niagara’s efforts are aimed at engaging more than just the “usual suspects,” as Hill calls them—the core group of clergy and lay leaders in many parishes who often make most of the decisions. Instead, she says, she hopes to promote a sense among all members that their church and the direction it takes belong to them.
“I’ve realized that people care about what they help create,” Hill says. “And so having everybody participate at the ground level with the [mission action planning] process [means] more buy-in as they’re trying to live into the initiatives.”
While each of the regional efforts surveyed for this story has seen significant demand for its training and materials, parish development resources are not available in all regions across the Canadian church. This prompts some of the providers to wonder whether there is a way to avoid duplicating effort and share more efficiently.
Andrew Stephens-Rennie is one of the volunteers helping run the British Columbia and Yukon school with Peterson and a member of the Council of General Synod. He says he sees little evidence of that work at the national level.
“We do a lot of stuff about structures, we do a lot of stuff about liturgy and justice, and all of that stuff is important,” he says. “One of the things that amazes me, maybe confounds me, is that as a church we haven’t seen the need to really come together around equipping existing communities to dig deeper as well as say we still need to plant seedlings.”
Martin agrees. “[Decline] is a coffee-hour crisis conversation in a lot of our parishes,” he says. “I wonder if a part of us knows subconsciously that to find answers for this will mean facing things that are unsettling, uncomfortable and terrifying for us.” If the church as a whole wants to change its trajectory, he says, it needs to make efforts at congregational development that work with God’s plans for the world. Martin believes it must have a better reason for doing that outreach than just maintaining its numbers. It must have a way of teaching entire congregations how to effectively be outward-facing, interested in their neighbours and responsive to their neighbours’ needs, he says. It must teach them to find the work God is already doing in their communities and join in.
“What if the reason we don’t chase answers is, we’re more afraid of what we’re going to lose by changing and being faithful to the next generation than of the slow decline itself?” he asks. “‘We tried our best.’ Well, did we? Or did we in fact give in to the fear of what it might ask of us?”
According to one veteran of national church affairs, the ability of General Synod, the church’s national body, to aid in that kind of work turns on two questions: How would General Synod do it? And what would it cost?
In the early 1990s—a time the international Anglican Communion had declared “the Decade of Evangelism”—now-retired dean Peter Elliott was director of a former department of General Synod called Ministries in Church and Society. The department had staff responsible for a variety of elements of church life, he says, including congregational development, for which they would develop resources and then travel from parish to parish.
Elliott jokes that it was like selling “the latest, greatest dish soap” and compares the model to door-to-door sales: “Do steps one through five, gosh darn, you’re going to have people lined up outside your church.”
Unfortunately, the Decade of Evangelism wasn’t enough to prevent the demographic and cultural shifts that resulted in mainline congregations losing many of their adherents. Today, he says, a much smaller General Synod is not focussed on or staffed for the kind of work it took to run the 1990s version of that program, says Elliott, who, more recently, has been a member of a primatial committee tasked with imagining a future for the national Anglican Church and new forms for its governance structures.
Specifying that he was not commenting on behalf of that commission, Elliott says the role of signal-boosting materials and programs like the ones the dioceses of Niagara, British Columbia and Yukon and Ottawa are using would fall well within the functions of convening, connecting and communicating the primate’s commission identified as core to General Synod’s work.
Archdeacon Alan Perry, general secretary of General Synod, told the Journal in an email the church also did significant work in this area from about 2004 to 2016. “This was in an era when we had significantly more staff with both the time and the expertise to do that work. At this time there is no capacity to engage this work on a national level,” he wrote.
There’s a way the church could revisit that work today, but it would require significant effort, says Elliot: creating some kind of online platform parishes could search for the resources they need, along with a campaign to communicate the platform’s utility to the country. That would take a change in General Synod’s priorities, he says. “It would take the General Synod and Church House staff to say, ‘our core function is to serve dioceses and parishes in their ministries, proclaiming the gospel.” By contrast, in his view, General Synod’s recent priorities have centred on its role as the Anglican Church of Canada’s outward-facing representative to the Anglican Communion, on its relationships with its ecumenical and full-communion partners and on political social-justice causes.
Another option, he says, would be to simply put a list up online with some information about parish development programs so there is something for clergy or lay leaders to find if they go looking for ideas. While Elliott is careful to note he doesn’t know how much work that would take from a technological perspective, he says he’s drawn to the idea of at least sharing the resources in some minimum-cost way.
