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. 

Always Forward looks back on church planting mistakes

The Always Forward podcast is settling into a rhythm of podcasts every 1-2 weeks, and now officially has had five episodes of about one hour each.

As with the other podcasts, Thursday’s Episode 5 — inaccurately labelled “The Top 10 Mistakes Church Planters Make” — features the ACNA’s canon for church planting Rev Canon Dan Alger and Rev Shawn McCain, who are respectively planting churches in the Diocese of the South and C4SO. One is a cradle Episcopalian and Trinity School for Ministry grad, and the other a latecomer to Anglicanism and Nashotah grad.

The “10” mistakes turn out to be about 7.5 — two of the 10 are identical, and on a third they take opposite positions. In order of presentation:

1. Planting without assessment or training (Dan). Assessment allows the planter to understand his strengths and areas where he needs additional team members. Assessment is particularly recommended for married couples, to help the spouse — typically less involved in planting and the plant — to understand planting and their roles in it.
2. Pretending you have all the answers (Shawn), i.e. an inability to say “I don’t know.” The latter turns out to be a great way to identify opportunities for others to step up to responsbilities.
3. Premature launch (both Dan and Shawn), a very common mistake (and one identified by many church planting books). The pressures to launch public worship will be high, but the church needs a critical mass to sustain public worship — and to have enough people in the pews to connect with visitors — for it to work. As an alternative, the launch team can pray and even commune privately as they prepare for launch.
4. An “over-obsession” with contextualization (Shawn) or A failure to contextualize (Dan). For the former, the church should know what it is, why and not pander to the community. For the latter, the church can make major mistakes if it doesn’t understand its community. Both agree that the church must be ready to explain what (and why and how) it is to new members from the community.
5. Handing out leadership roles too quickly (Dan and Shawn). The prospective leaders need to understand and buy into the vision, and the pastor needs to size up the prospective leader before handing over responsibility. During the pre-launch and early launch phase, the emphasis needs to be on the church and not on “leading”, power or control. (Both men also argue that early one, there should also be no vestry or formal lay control with the planter reporting to the bishop and the diocesan church planting dean/canon).
6. Not communicating expectations (Shawn). If people don't do what you want, it’s often because you didn’t tell them; if you let them down, it's often because you didn’t tell them what to expect. Or as (Dan quoting) former ACNA church planting canon Alan Hawkins says, “Unmet expectations = pain.”
7. Planting a worship service, not a church (Dan). A church can be successful in terms of ASA (average Sunday attendance) and giving, but not be accomplishing the mission of the Church. 

Semimonthly ACNA planting advice

The ACNA’s Always Forward effort has inaugurated a new podcast to replace the five years of podcasts it (until last year) had posted on the Anglican 1000 website.

So far Always Forward has posted four podcasts. The first one introduces the podcast and the two hosts, both members of the Always Forward leadership team. A familiar name is Canon Dan Alger, the ACNA (and Diocese of the South) canon for church planting and a church planter in Georgia. Less familiar may be Rev. Shawn McCain, a church planter in Texas who is part of the C4SO diocese.

The second podcast, entitled “Casting The Question - Can Anyone Plant A Church?” is an example of the shorter (15 minute) format of answering a question (other questions can be emailed or submitted using the podcast web page). In this case the focus is on assessment, which Alger notes has both evaluative (how ready are you) and formative (how can you get better) elements.

The 3rd and 4th podcasts relate to a theme that Alger considers a mantra of Anglican church planting: "Church Planting lies at the intersection of ecclesiology and missiology." He attributes this to Baptist church planter Stuart Murray, author of Church Planting: Laying Foundations.

The 3rd podcast is thus a discussion of ecclesiology with Bishop Stewart Ruch, bishop of the ACNA Diocese of the Upper Midwest, while the 4th podcast is on missiology with Bishop Todd Hunter, bishop of C4SO. Each interview is about an hour, although the former has an extra 15 minutes of introduction to the podcast series. These longer interviews are promised to be posted twice a month.

For those that spend a lot of time driving (or jogging), the podcast offers a way to keep up on ACNA best practices for church planting. For those that are more visual, Always Forward is running a blog with a Cliff’s Notes summary of each podcast.