Review: Dan Alger, Word and Sacrament

Dan Alger, Word and Sacrament: Ancient Traditions for Modern Church Planting. Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press, 2023. ISBN 978-1645073031, xi+323 pp, pbk $25; also audiobook, EPUB, Kindle.

This book provides a long overdue examination of church planting from an Anglican perspective. The author is a veteran church planter who, since 2016, has led ACNA’s Always Forward church planting program and has been the most visible face of Anglican church planting.

The title Word and Sacrament alludes to what Alger considers the bedrock principle for the churches being planted by Anglicans today. Like other Protestant movements, a chief motivation of the English Reformation was to make the word of God available to the laity—but unlike most, it retained the sacramental nature of the Western church.

Building on Alger’s unique experience leading church planting initiatives, the heart of the book is the detailed section on how Anglican church planters must define their vision and goals. Alger begins the section with eight focused pages explaining his longtime podcast mantra: “ecclesiology shapes missiology.” Or as he summarizes it: “before we jump into the nuts and bolts of how to plant a church, we first need to understand what kind of church we are planting.” From this he develops key insights, such as how Anglican church planters must expect growth stages and rates to differ from (non)denominations with much larger congregations.

Similarly, Chapter 5 develops an invaluable synthesis of his many arguments for the importance and process of contextualization—how planters adapt the historic faith to a local context. While clearly more worried about under- than over-contextualization, he offers arguments against both extremes.

His discussion of “Who Should Plant?” is the most powerful and practical chapter of the “How Do We Plant?” section—if not the whole book. His cases for assessment, training, and coaching should be required reading for both planters and those who prepare them. His call for each church planter to reexamine their motives for planting is one that should be incorporated into every assessment process: of his eleven “improper motivations to plant,” a few may be familiar (need a job, want to be in charge) but most are not.

Another crucial insight is that the church planter must continually balance the processes of evangelizing and forming parishioners. Alger’s Reformed perspective emphasizing Christian formation by teaching doctrine matches the dominant view within the ACNA. Alternate approaches will be familiar to clergy from other backgrounds: Anglo-Catholics might begin with the experiential and ascetical discipline of the Daily Office, while REC church planting recommends combining a Celtic response with Koinonia to address 21st century postmodernism, one of “belonging and becoming before believing.”

At times the book seems more theoretical than practical—lots of why, and not as much how. The first two chapters are about “Why Should We Plant?”— certainly an important topic for instilling a church planting culture within a diocese, but probably more detail than the average church planter needs. At the church plants I’ve visited, the laity are more concerned with answering “Why is this church plant important?”—one that explains how the plant reaches and forms people not currently being served by other churches.

Similarly, the penultimate chapter—and at 54 pages, the longest one—is “Planting in Sacred Order.” With the detailed theoretical framework, it has nuggets such as explaining how a diocese can both fund church plants and improve their odds of succeeding with those funds. But for the broader topic of how church governance impacts church planting, the heterogeneity between and even within the dioceses of the ACNA makes it impossible to come up with a single formula.

In his summary of familiar mistakes such as launching prematurely, Alger adds the crucial insight that the pre-launch period is one of deep spiritual formation as much as preparing to go live on a Sunday morning. However, after emphasizing the importance of appropriately gathering and evangelizing members, he limits his explanation to two paragraphs because “I do not have the space.”

To be fair, the book’s introduction makes clear that it’s deliberately not a substitute for training, coaching, or mentoring—because no book can be. Always Forward recommends that all ACNA planters attend their four-day church planting intensive.

In this first book, Alger has succeeded in providing a complete overview of Anglican church planting. It’s one that could be the primary book for those sponsoring church plants or others indirectly involved in the launching of new churches. For actual church planters, it provides a valuable introduction or supplement to other materials—such as podcasts, other church planting books, and of course, formal processes of training, coaching, and mentoring.

Joel W. West
Hildegard College 
Costa Mesa, California

Reprinted from Cranmer Theological Journal, vol. 1 no. 1, pp. 58-59. https://doi.org/10.62221/ctj.2024.107

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.

Anglican Church Planting During Covidtide

The past 18 months have been difficult for American churches. The difficulties have been come from actual health threats due to Covid-19, but also due to associated government restrictions on society, the economy and particularly churches.

At the same time, as with other entrepreneurial endeavors, a time of disruption and uncertainty provides opportunities for new entrants. Here I highlight the success of Anglican church plants that remember that their mission is to be the church.

In the North American Anglican, I reported on four (traditional liturgy) Anglican churches planted in four states during Covidtide. Two were de novo church plants, one was a mother-daughter spinoff, and one was a replant (with a new jurisdiction, priest and worship space). Due to the format limitations of TNAA, the 7,000 word article (entitled “Church Planting in Covidtide: Moral Courage and Sacramental Witness”) was split into two parts. A reader suggested that it would be helpful to have a brief roadmap to these two postings.

The four churches highlighted were

• Christ the King (Marietta, Georgia) a parachute plant sponsored by the REC 100 ministry of the Reformed Episcopal Church.
• St. Mark the Evangelist (Waxahachie, Texas) a REC replant after the priest of an earlier Anglican church retired during Covidtide.
• St. Thomas Anglican (Fullerton, California) in the Anglican Catholic Church (one of the major Continuing Anglican jurisdictions): a spinoff of a healthy ACC parish 30 minutes away.
• Trinity Anglican (Connersville, Indiana) also planted in the ACC, reopening an historic sanctuary abandoned by the Episcopal Church after more than 150 years.

Part I introduces the challenges of Anglican church planting, discusses the REC and its REC 100 initiative, and then presents the case studies of Christ the King and St. Mark’s. Part II discusses the evangelism efforts of the Continuing church (including Continuing Forward) and the stories of St. Thomas and Trinity Anglican.

The latter article then concludes by summarizing what can be learned from these four case studies:

1. The importance of the relational model of evangelism, sometimes called the “Celtic” model.
2. The need to create a spiritually healthy church, and that healthy churches can only come from other healthy churches.
3. Learning (where possible) from previous church planting research, including the central role of an authentic and capable church planter and avoiding obvious mistakes.
4. The perhaps obvious (but still overlooked) idea that sacramental churches must be sacramental (i.e. that much more is lost with a purely virtual format).

A key question — perhaps the key question — for 21st century church planting is how to create relationships with new members. The article hints at some of the answers: it appears there is no substitute for a tireless presence in the community for the explicit purpose of creating new conversations and new relationships. Interestingly, three of these four parishes create a presence using “Theology on Tap,” invented 40 years ago to support a Catholic young adult ministry.

Of course, there have been other traditional Anglican church plants. The Forward in Faith church planting task force (which met from 2015-2019) was led by the founding vicar of Christ the Redeemer Ft. Worth and included the founding vicar of Christ Church Waco; both are traditional theology churches in the Diocese of Ft. Worth that (unlike the above four parishes) use the modern (2019 ACNA) liturgy. While Always Forward supports the broad range of churches in the ACNA, the focus of this blog remains examining Anglo-Catholic church planting.

Picture: header from The North American Anglican articles.

Updated Focus on Church Planting

This website exists to support Anglo-Catholic church planting in North America. It was launched in 2015 by the church planting task force sponsored by Forward in Faith North America. As with the FIF mission, it was intended to support Anglo-Catholic churches both in the ACNA and Continuing Anglican jurisdictions, and to provide an Anglo-Catholic perspective to supplement the Always Forward initiative of the ACNA.

While the FIFNA task force disbanded in 2019, our goal remains unchanged: to support church planting and church planters of traditional Anglican parishes. This website will continue to provide pointers and resources about the separate Anglo-Catholic church planting initiatives, including

• Efforts in ACNA dioceses, particularly those in the Diocese of Ft. Worth that provided the initial inspiration and leadership of the task force with their ongoing successes
• REC100, the church planting initiative of the Reformed Episcopal Church, which has already sponsored more than 10 new church plants across the REC since its 2018 launch
• Continuing Forward, the church planting and renewal effort of the four leading Continuing Anglican churches: the Anglican Church of America, Anglican Catholic Church, Anglican Province in America and the Diocese of the Holy Cross.

We welcome any questions, suggestions, corrections or other ideas. Please feel free to email the webmaster. 

FiFNA videos about Anglo-Catholic church planting

The Forward in Faith (North America) task force has not had a face to face meeting recently. However, we do have some resources to share with Anglo-Catholic church planters, wherever they might be.

As part of its continuing education program, FiFNA recorded three videos about Anglican church planting with two members of the FiFNA council. Fr. Chris Culpepper is the founding president of this task force, while Bp. Keith Ackerman is the retired diocesan bishop of Quincy. Both are rectors of ACNA parishes in the Diocese of Ft. Worth.

This is not the first time that Fr. Culpepper has recorded a video about Anglican church planting: he previously spoke about his church planting experience at the 2016 FiFNA annual assembly.

“Anglo Catholic Church Planting”: Fr. Culpepper and Bp. Ackerman

In this 32 minute video, Bp. Ackerman asks Fr. Culpepper about the challenges and opportunities of planting a new Anglican church in the catholic tradition of the undivided church.

Fr. Culpepper recounts his own church planting experience in the Diocese, first in Ft. Worth and later helping to start two missions in college towns south of Dallas. As the church prepared to offer regular Sunday morning service, the first question was how do you prepare to offer a healthy church for prospective members to attend? 

He next discusses how to create a vibrant parish. One aspect is how a new parish — meeting in shopping center with limited resources — ramps up to offer worship in a form that is recognizably Anglo-Catholic. Another is how to attract and organize the resources needed by the new parish in a way that is understood by parishioners with business experience.

He also discusses how Anglican church planters can learn from church planters in other traditions, including advice from experience church planting coaches and written memoirs. Finally, he discusses the traits, attitudes and behaviors that help improve the odds of success for a church planting team.

“Fr. Culpepper continues the discussion on church planting”

The previous video is continued with a 42-minute video by Fr. Culpepper discussing the challenges and pitfalls that Anglo-Catholic church planters face — both inside their parish, and in their relationship to the mission field. As in the first video, he argues that church planters must put the Great Commandment (love thy neighbor) ahead of the Great Commission (making disciples of all nations).

“The Missional Church”: Bp. Ackerman

This 37 minute video concludes the FIF video series. In it, Bp. Ackerman asks how a new Anglo-Catholic church can offer both the timeless historic faith, and at the same time a distinct mission and ministry to its local community.

Anglican Distinctives of Church Planting

Dan Alger, ACNA Church Planting Canon
Source; Always-Forward.com

This week Anglican Forward posted podcasts from the first round of sessions from their annual conference, both to the Always Forward 2018 website and their podcast.

As noted before, Always Forward is dedicated to planting ACNA churches; as with the rest of ACNA, the emphasis has been on Evangelical rather than Anglo-Catholic churches. As such, Anglo-Catholics reading their past advice have often needed to make as much adaptation or modification as they would for Methodist, Baptist or even non-denominational church planting advice.

However, of the first four sessions posted, the recommendations in the opening session by Canon Dan Alger were ones applicable to any Anglican church planter without modification. Because it’s such a clear statement, I thought I'd summarize [with my own observations] here in this blog; however, I recommend the audio to any Anglican church planter.

The point of his talk was that Anglican church planters sometime forget the Anglican part of their church planting goals. [Although he didn’t mention it, this ties directly to what we in California are calling “Anglican distinctives” — aspect of the Anglican expression of Christianity that make an Anglican church different from other churches.]

Alger listed 7 distinctives:

1. Ecclesiology drives Missiology. Churches are not created as a tool for mission. Our ecclesiology is anchored to tradition: those before us should have a say, as with the “Great cloud of witnesses” [Hebrews 12:1].† We are defined include Episcopal oversight, two sacraments [not counting five minor sacraments], the 39 Articles.
2. Understanding the prayer book definition of what we believe. A fixed liturgy is both constraining and empowering.
3. Submission [obedience] to authority. While church planters have an element of “rebels, pirates and prophets,” this is sometimes accompanied by the sins of pride and ambition. Some entrepreneurial church planters like the lack of accountability of leading a new independent church, but of course every [priest] has a bishop.
4. Pursue personal and corporate holiness. Most church planting conferences talk about strategy, methods, mechanics, budgeting. [Instead, the planter must make holiness — both his own and that of his flock — the top priority.] “We don’t need more large unholy churches”; the emphasis on growth often leads to covering up sin to achieve growth 
5. Worship centric. Worship is something we do with others, not a tool to get people in the door.
6. Word and sacrament. Preach the faith to the lost, have standards for those who are to be baptized and share communion with us, and long for them to join our family at the Lord’s table.
7. A planter is not alone, not a rogue. Hopefully we will have missional church planting dioceses, where church planting happens because — not in spite of — the diocese. But there will always be frictions; neighboring rectors may complain because you planted to close to their church [something probably all of us have seen] .

Two of his concluding money quotes:

Anglicanism is more than a style of worship. When you are planting a church, you are not planting a worship service: you are planting a church.

We are not cool and trendy, because that’s not who we are. We are actually really ancient and old, and  there's a truth that goes way beyond any of this fluffy stuff that exists right now in our culture. 

I certainly want to commend Cn Alger both for his experience, but so clearly communicating it for the benefit of other Anglican church planters. I recommend the podcast to anyone planting or considering planting an Anglo-Catholic church.

PS: † As an Anglo-Catholic, I was disappointed that this point didn't make explicit reference to GK Chesteron’s most famous line, from Orthodoxy:

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. 

Overcoming consumerism in American Christianity

One of the issues that every new church plant faces is how to attract attention and visibility for their new church. On one hand, this means using modern media (such as web sites, social media, podcasts, videocasts) to get the word out. On the other hand, it can lead to a focus on tailoring the “product” to satisfy “customers” rather than offer the prospective converts the Good News of the risen Christ.

This latter point was the culmination of a commentary last week on the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. The commentary seeks to explain where this American Christian consumer mentality came from, with the end of parishioners naturally being assigned to a specific parish

Which Henry Caused the Reformation

by Carl R. Trueman

10.31.17

…
In fact, I would argue that the single greatest enabler of the modern world’s attitude to religion is not some sixteenth-century Reformer…Henry Ford, not Henry VIII, is the guilty man. The Reformation may have familiarized the world with the concept of religious choice, but that choice became a reality for most people only with the advent of cheap and easy means of private transportation. It was the arrival of the internal combustion engine, and then the mass-produced automobile, that really changed everything. It altered our relationship to time, to geographical space, and to our communities and all that is contained therein. It was the motor car that truly freed people from the constraints of having to worship within walking distance of their home. The motor car made churches into choices, competing for customers in the marketplace of Sunday recreations. It turned us all, Protestant and Catholic alike, into consumerist Congregationalists.

To be fair, this change may have been enabled by Henry Ford, but not one that he oversaw. Instead, the the growth of American consumerism in church — as in the rest of society — would likely be traced through is explosion in the postwar era.

Some of this is due to cars, which were in scarce supply during the Depression and World War II, but become plentiful after the war (and Ford’s 1947 death). But the postwar era and television also brought a new tools of the  mass media – the great American selling machine that sells us soap, dreams of happiness, and even presidents. This trend of the 1950s and 1960s was captured by the TV show “Mad Men” and the book The Selling of the President.

Most Anglo-Catholic church planters seem to understand this dilemma. On the one hand, we have to reach prospective members — whether Anglican, Christian, fallen away or the unbaptized — and have a conversation with them about the triune God, faith and salvation. On the other hand, a church that exists only to put on programs — to attract new members — at best has put the cart before the horse and at the worst has forgotten the teaching and discipling components of the Great Commission.

Various studies and consultants have emphasized the need for the church to be real, honest and authentic, particularly with the Millennial generation. If we really mean it — consistently manifesting the vertical and horizontal fellowship of Matthew 12:29-31 — we may be able to overcome their cynicism that churches (and the Church) are just another organization trying to attract interest and revenues to line its own pockets..