Every Church makes structural changes from time to time. But not every Church gets a moment like 2012. That was the year the Church in Wales published the Harries Report, officially known as the Church in Wales Review. Commissioned by the Bench of Bishops and chaired by Lord Harries of Pentregarth, the Report sought to address growing signs of institutional strain: clergy shortages, declining morale, aging congregations, and a growing disconnect from younger generations.

Its key recommendation was sweeping in scope: to restructure the Church’s pastoral life by replacing traditional parishes with larger, more collaborative ‘Ministry Areas.’ The Report imagined a Church retooled for mission—leaner, more flexible, and better positioned for 21st-century Wales.

Thirteen years later, Ministry Areas are embedded in every diocese in the Church in Wales. But they remain very much a work in progress. Some aspects of the Harries Report have flourished, while others—like promised administrative centres or greater democratic participation—have faded quietly into the background or have been rejected. We’ve traded parishes for partnerships, but have we traded maintenance for mission? The question isn’t whether Ministry Areas were the right answer to institutional decline, but whether they have the theological oxygen to thrive.

To ask this isn’t necessarily to deny the Report’s strategic strengths or critique Ministry Areas in principle. These structures are now part of our ecclesial landscape, and they demand our collective effort. If you’re in the middle of the ocean, its foolish to refuse to sail a ship because you don’t like how it was constructed. But if we want them to be more than administrative conveniences—if we want them to be vessels of grace—then we must do the theological work the Harries Report never began. Now, as the 2024 Diocesan Learning Community Report reveals both the promise and problems of Ministry Areas, the questions are no longer academic. We urgently need to answer: What is the Church for? And how do these structures serve that purpose?

Where’s the Ecclesiology?

I first read the Harries Report just after arriving in Wales to oversee the formation of stipendiary clergy. At the time, Ministry Areas were still being piloted. Rereading the Report now, two things stand out. First, many of the Report’s fifty recommendations remain incomplete. But second—and more important—the theological foundations of the whole enterprise are remarkably underdeveloped.

Most church reviews of this scale begin with some kind of theological framing: a reminder of what the Church is, what it’s for, and what principles should shape its life. These preambles help ground the practical in scripture and tradition. The Harries Report, however, offers only a brief nod to the idea of koinonia—shared life in communion with God—before concluding with a statement that comes closest to articulating an ecclesiology, describing the Church as “an institution persisting through space and time, better able to share the Gospel, and to draw people into our common life, that life of God made present in Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Except for one other very similar definition of the Church in the Report’s conclusion, ecclesiology is subsequently almost entirely forgotten. The absence of theological depth is really quite striking. Consider the following in a 15,000-word report on the future structure and ministry of a Church:

• The Eucharist is mentioned once.
• Salvation appears only in vague abstraction.
• The Body of Christ is confined to a supplemental annex, which also contains the only mention of the Kingdom of God.
• Baptism, curiously, isn’t referenced at all.
• Communion, as in koinonia, also never appears, except in the title ‘“Anglican Communion”.
• Likewise, there’s no consideration of the formation of believers, nor any sense of how communities might be shaped by prayer, sacrament, or discipleship.
• Even Scripture is only explicitly quoted twice and implicitly referenced less than five times.

To point this out isn’t theological pedantry—it’s to indicate the ecclesiological vacuum at the centre of the Report. Structures without theology may provide useful scaffolding, but they can’t bring the Church to life.

What follows is an attempt to name what the Harries Report left unsaid so that, even now, we can begin to lay firmer theological foundations beneath what we’ve built. It may feel like working backwards, but if we want renewal, this work is essential.

Ecclesiology as Function

Another way of framing the Harries Report is to say that, for all its initial invocation of koinonia, it ultimately presents an ecclesiology defined by function rather than communion. The Church is cast as something that must be made more efficient, more adaptable, more strategically aligned. The emphasis falls squarely on structures and processes: redeploying clergy, upskilling lay volunteers, consolidating parishes. All of this is presented with the best of intentions—but with minimal reference to the Church’s underlying identity. It also never stops to ask why the Church has come to be in its parlous state, except perhaps to lay all the blame on an obsolete parochial system.

Instead of the Church as the Body of Christ or the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, we find metaphors drawn from management theory: systems, teams, networks, and delivery mechanisms. The Church, in this model, is envisioned as a compassionate and competent service provider: a kind of spiritual NHS. When we adopt that framework too fully, the Church risks becoming more of a platform for religious programming than a place where heaven and earth meet.

The Christian tradition has always insisted that the Church is more than what it does. Its deepest identity lies not in function but in communion—a participation in the divine life through Word, sacrament, and shared community. The Church isn’t a means to an end, but a mystery to be inhabited, a people to be formed, a sign of God’s kingdom to be manifested in our common life. The Report is almost completely silent on how its proposals will enable the Church to fulfil this vocation better. If we neglect that fundamental calling, we may find ourselves with systems that work, but without a vision that inspires or transforms.

Training Instead of Formation

This same functional ethos carries through into the Report’s treatment of formation. Both clergy and laity are treated as operatives to be trained, assessed, and deployed, with the focus on acquiring skills like leadership, admin, and conflict resolution. These matter, of course, but the vision they serve feels narrow and utilitarian. Formation is framed as a route to efficiency, not a path into holiness.

What’s missing is any real sense of formation as life shared in—and as—the Body of Christ. Core practices like prayer, Scripture, sacraments, and shared discernment hardly get a mention. Most strikingly, there’s no reference to baptism—the starting point of Christian life and the basis for our shared vocation. Without it, the koinonia invoked early is nothing more than a slogan. This isn’t just a missing detail; it’s like tuning an instrument without knowing what tune it’s meant to play—or even what music is. Technique alone can’t replace purpose.

Formation, in the Christian tradition, isn’t merely instructional or role-specific. It’s about being conformed to Christ, shaped by grace into a people who embody the gospel. Formation is as essential for the person worshipping in the pews as it is for the lay minister preparing to lead Morning Prayer or the priest presiding at the Eucharist. When formation is reduced to functionality, it loses its theological depth. And when it omits baptism as its starting point, it fails to affirm the radical inclusivity of the Church’s vocation—a community of the baptised, participating in the life of God and sent into the world.

What this reveals, I think, is not only a service-provider model of Church, but a residual, perhaps even unconscious, legacy of Establishment thinking: the Church as a benign institution doing good for society, rather than as the Body of Christ witnessing to God’s transformative love. Tellingly, the Report is keener to sustain the Church’s “contribution to the life of the nation” than to develop more meaningful ways of forming people in the Christina faith. In this way, the Report’s ‘radical’ vision turns out to be structurally bold but culturally old-fashioned. Its call to action is organisational, not eschatological. Its outlook is corporate and managerial—far from a biblical, Christ-shaped understanding of what the Church is and what it’s for.

Read it all at Mark Clavier @ Substack