Crafting a vision for Anglican church planting

In working on church planting in the past month, I was brought back to the earlier “vision” questions. Many church planters feel it is essential that their ecclesial hierarchy must articulate why church planting is essential to the overall diocese and national church. To summarize the reasons that I’ve heard, the planters both want to know that they are supported by their church — and also that no matter what the pressures, church planting will be treated as essential rather than (say) a luxury that gets cut when times are tough.

Articulating such a vision — particularly for Anglo-Catholics — was a major goal of the Forward in Faith North America church planting task force. Below is a summary of previous FiFNA and other Anglican arguments in favor of church planting.

Church Planting: Not Just for Evangelicals

First, in November 2015, Fr. Lawrence Bausch (President of FiFNA) posted a column entitled “Anglo-Catholics as Evangelistic Church Planters.” He listed five reasons why church planting is (or should be) important to Anglo-Catholics today:

1. While many existing clergy were hired to be “chaplains to the faithful,” the “Mission to the unchurched as largely overlooked.”
2. Because much of recent church planting has come from the Evangelical wing, a typical church plant is perceived as “as something most Anglo-Catholics would hardly recognize as church, most significantly in the use of language which defines worship as music, and where the actual celebration of the Eucharist becomes almost a sidebar to the music.”
3. Many Anglo-Catholics have an “understandable focus on simply preserving what we have. Many of our people are in parishes which perceive themselves to be ‘too small’ to consider Church Planting, and struggle to keep what they have.”

From this, Fr. Bausch concluded about the task force and its mission

This ministry in support of the spread of the Gospel and the growth of the Church is crucial not only for Anglo-Catholics, but for the broader Apostolic and Conciliar Church.

Committing to Spreading the Faith

The following February, task force president Fr. Chris Culpepper called for “Committing to Spreading the Faith”. After reciting the mysteries of the divine liturgy, Fr. Culpepper asked

Is not our charge, then, to make this experience available to everyone, everywhere, at all times? Yet, my experience of catholic-minded clergy in the Anglican tradition of my generation is that there is a strong gravitational pull exercise their priestly ministry where all of the accouterments in worship, and otherwise, already exist.… [O]n the rare occasion when I do find that individual who has contemplated church-planting, he lacks the confidence, support, and/or skill set necessary to achieve the task.

From this, he laid down a series of questions (as challenges) to Anglo-Catholics. Here are jsut a few: 

It seems, therefore, that we who call ourselves Anglo-Catholics, have some critical concerns to address. Can we clearly articulate who we are? Can we do that in a way that reaches this present generation? … Are we willing to make the sacrifices necessary for a start-up enterprise; that is, breaking out of our own comfort zone and even wandering in the desert for a season, doing without some of the things we’re used to having in worship, to win the right for future generations to experience the beauty of holiness in worship? 

As a sequel, in May 2016 Fr. Culpepper offered additional observations with “On Planting an Anglo-Catholic Parish.”  And in his July 2016 address to the annual FiFNA conference, he called on Anglo-Catholics to reach out and explain the faith to former Anglicans, other Christians and the unchurched.

Why We Plant

In October 2017, Fr. Lee Nelson (also a task force member) offered his own perspective on the reason for planting. In an essay entitled “Why we Plant: Churches Planting Churches,” he said:

In the United States, we live in the largest mission field in the Western Hemisphere. There are roughly 120 million unreached Americans. A lack of church planting, as much as cultural forces, has brought us to this point. Population has expanded, and the number of churches has remained relatively stable. It is our conviction at Christ Church that The Lord is calling us to be part of a movement of churches planting churches. It is our belief that as long as there are unchurched people in our city, there is a need for more churches, not less. We also know from the research that new churches make more disciples than older ones. Churches under three years old make three times the disciples as churches fifteen years old or older.

He called on faithful Anglicans to not only plant new churches, but also to plant churches that plant other churches.

Video Testimonials

In one of the final actions of the task force, Forward in Faith North America released three videos on the importance of church planting and Anglo-Catholic church planters:

1. In the first video, Fr. Culpepper was interviewed by Bp. Keith Ackerman (now assisting bishop in the Diocese of Ft. Worth).
2. In the second video, Fr. Culpepper talked about challenges and pitfalls of an Anglican church planter.
3. In the final video, Bp. Ackerman calls on parishes to both offer the timeless faith, while adapting themselves to the needs of their respective communities.

The REC’s Call to Arms

The Reformed Episcopal Church is a high church (largely 1928 prayer book) grouping of dioceses within the ACNA. Its church planters (and planted churches) have drawn  of course a jurisdiction within the ACNA, but the REC church plants (and planters) have drawn upon both REC and ACNA church planting resources

In 2017, in his address to the REC’s triennial General Council, Presiding Bishop Ray Sutton called on his churches to support what was termed the REC-100 church planting initiative. As Bp. Sutton later said:

God the Holy Spirit is the living missionary God dwelling in us by faith in Jesus Christ. We have a compulsion to testify and spread the gospel. We may not always obey the Lord’s prompting to spread the good news, but it’s there. And it’s time for it to be reawakened and fulfilled among all Western Anglicans who have lost their sense of the reality of the living missionary God in them.

Postscript: A Word from the ACNA

I’ve previously noted that the ACNA’s church planting initiatives are oriented towards planting evangelical churches.  Still, the Always Forward organization is the largest Anglican church planting organization in North America, and the primary resource available to most of the ACNA.

The head of Always Forward, Fr. Dan Alger, earlier this year published his first book, Word & Sacrament: Ancient Traditions for Modern Church Planting. It summarizes the perspective of both Always Forward and his own personal experience.

The first section of the book is entitled “Why should we plant?” Its placement and length (47 pages out of less than 300 pages) testifies to the importance that Fr. Alger places on this topic. In the opening chapter, he writes

It is an unfortunate truth that many within Anglican circles do not understand the purpose or the practice of church planting, or why it is essential to continue to plant churches. Our emphasis on the ancient sometimes lulls us into celebrating the depth of our roots while forgetting about the new green leaves that are required for continual life and reproduction. 

…

Church planting should not be foreign to Anglicans. This gospel work should not be left up to our faithful brothers and sisters in mission-minded, non-denominational, Presbyterian, Assemblies of God, or Baptist traditions. We have a lot to offer this work. With its high view of the church and its missional roots, church planting should be natural to the Anglican church. When properly engaged, the relationship of Anglicanism and church planting is symbiotic, as Anglicanism brings depth to church planting and church planting brings life to Anglicanism. We should strive to live out what is built into our heritage.

In Chapter 2, he offers answers to 6 common objections to church planting

1. Church Planters Compromise Their Anglican Identity
2. Planting is Only for Low-Church Evangelicals
3. We Need to Focus on Strengthening the Churches We Already Have Before Starting New Ones
4. We Have Enough Churches Already
5. There is Already a Church in That Area
6. We Should Only Plant When Convenient, Fully Funded and Risk-Free

Continuing Forward

Among North American Anglicans (outside TEC), what is missing is the Continuing church. In 2019, the Continuing Forward task force was formed to promote renewal and church planting, but the group has not yet issued a specific vision for church planting (nor have the leaders of its three constituent provinces). If (when) such a vision is issued, it will be updated here.