The Church of England has relaunched its website, and it looks good (fortunately with a bit less of that wishy-washy purple). But one thing has not changed: a phrase sitting just under the logo: A Christian presence in every community (or a slight variation of it). It appears in Church Commissioners’ reports, in Synod papers, in press releases, and in almost every argument currently being had about the future of the parish. It sounds unarguable. Who could be against Christian presence?

But the phrase is doing a great deal of work, and it is worth asking a few questions of it. Where did it come from? What has it been taken to mean? Does it have any theological content at all—and if so, does that content cohere with what the Church of England actually says about itself in its formularies and its ordinal? And, most importantly, does it point us towards a strategy that might reverse decline—or one that might manage it gracefully?

(The comedian David Mitchell once said, rather sceptically, that when a politician says something that no-one could disagree with, then you can be sure they are using it to smuggle in something that people will definitely disagree with! I am not quite so sceptical—but I like the question!)

My contention is that the phrase is a good one, but only if we recover the New Testament answer to the question: what is the presence of God in a community? The answer is not, in the first place, a building, or a PCC (!) or a vicar. It is a people.

1. Where did the phrase come from?

The phrase does not come from the Book of Common Prayer, the Articles, the Canons or any Measure. As far as I can trace it, it first appears in the Church’s work on inter-faith relations.

In July 2005 General Synod received Presence and Engagement: the churches’ task in a multi-Faith society (GS 1577), which launched the Presence and Engagement (P&E) programme to support parishes in areas of significant religious diversity identified by the 2001 census. The follow-up report, Staying Present and Engaging Faithfully (2009), cites paragraph 45 of the 2005 report to the effect that people of other religions can be reassured that the Church of England is still there to provide a Christian presence in every community, available to people of all faiths and none.

The context matters. The phrase was born as a reassurance to other faith communities in areas where Anglican congregations were shrinking and other communities growing: we are not leaving. It was a statement about staying, not about growing.

By 2009 the phrase had migrated to the Church Commissioners. Their 2009 Report and Accounts describe them as playing a vital role in supporting the Church of England as a Christian presence in every community by managing their assets as a long-term resource. From around 2012 it became the Commissioners’ standing description of their purpose, and at some point it became the strapline under the logo on the national website.

So within a few years the phrase had moved from inter-faith reassurance to institutional self-description, and from there to the justification of how central money is spent.

2. How is it being used now?

Today the phrase appear to function in at least three ways.

• As a brand. It is the Church’s answer to the question “What is the Church of England?” The national website explains that the Church has existed in parishes and dioceses and that it seeks to be a Christian presence in every community, up and down the land. Here it is essentially a restatement of the parish system: every inch of England lies within a parish, and every parish has a cure of souls.
• As a funding rationale. For the Commissioners, the phrase justifies distributing historic resources to poorer dioceses so that ministry can continue where local giving cannot sustain it.
• As a campaigning slogan. In the debates over parish reorganisation, clergy numbers and the redirection of central funds towards new initiatives, the phrase is regularly invoked to defend the existing pattern. If the Church is committed to presence in every community, the argument goes, then every withdrawal of a stipendiary post or closure of a building is a betrayal of that commitment.

It has also been used to push in the other direction. In February 2019 Synod was invited to renew its commitment to being a Christian presence in every community by focusing on outer estates—precisely the places the existing parish system had largely withdrawn from. And in the inter-faith context, the follow up paper GS 2063 (2017) admitted frankly that the Church faces significant challenges in its desire to be present in every community.

Read it all in Psephizo