Growing Good: Belonging without believing?
Growing Good: Growth, Social Action and Discipleship by Hannah Rich, in partnership with Church Urban Fund and Theos, was the culmination of three years of extensive qualitative and quantitative research, including 350 interviews in over 60 parish communities across England and new analysis of existing parish data that explored the relationship between social action, church growth and discipleship in the Church of England. The Growing Good Toolkit from Church Urban Fund helps church groups explore and implement the findings of the report.
The Growing Good report details 6 features of churches exhibiting healthy growth. In this final extract from the report, the focus is on Participation. Churches that are good at inviting people to participate in a variety of ways (including social action, but not exclusively so) create a culture in which outliers to the Christian faith can ‘belong without believing’ and find themselves naturally drawn into a faith community where relationships develop and faith can take root.
A key facet of social action is that it increases the range of ways in which individuals can participate in the church community and thus help it grow. Not only might they take part in worship, but they are enabled to contribute to the life of the church through volunteering at other activities. Through this, people grow in their discipleship and the church grows bigger, deeper and stronger. In the stories that they tell of participation in worship, central to their experience of the church community, interviewees often connect belonging with active participation through, for example, being asked to take part in the offertory or help serve coffee after the service.
The Church Growth Research Programme found that strong lay leadership is connected with growth (Note 1). The lack of lay involvement is also correlated within decline, whether this is because the congregation aren’t willing to get involved or because they aren’t permitted to do so. This shows that a culture of permission giving between clergy and laity is important, but so is an approach to discipleship that encourages the laity to see involvement in social action and worship as part of their faith.
Growth arises not only from empowering and inviting lay people to participate in all aspects of church life, but also from helping them to view it as essential for their discipleship. Social action is instrumental in this in that expands the ways in which lay people can become involved in church life.
In interviews, volunteers often articulate their reasons for becoming involved in a particular social action project or activity as beginning with the fact that they were asked to take part, rather with than the moment their theological thinking crystallised and they understood the Christian importance of doing it. For some, this is in the form of a congregational invitation – for example, a mention in the church notices that more volunteers were wanted – while for others, it is a personal invitation. This is not to say that they do not have a faith motivation underpinning their involvement, but rather that being asked was a significant catalyst for them.
One individual who had been part of the congregation for many years emphasised the importance of personal invitation in them getting involved in a new social action project:
When [the vicar] arrived, he saw in me someone who is quite open, rather vocal and he thought it would work. He asked me to be involved and I said yes, it’s exactly what I like doing. I like to be proactive and help with doing what Jesus said, which is be wherever people need you. It seemed to me that’s what this project was about.
Being asked to take part can also be a marker of someone’s belonging and recognition as part of the church community, especially if the role they have been invited to take on fits with their gifts as an individual. Not only is this a practical expression of their value within the community, but it is also a significant point for many people’s discipleship journey.
There are parallels here with the way Jesus asked his disciples to follow him. The original journey of discipleship began with a simple invitation, not with the expectation of fully formed theology or profession of belief or even a full understanding of who Jesus was. They were disciples because they had begun following and spending time with Jesus, quite literally without knowing the end of the story. As one interviewee put it, it is possible to be growing in discipleship and “learning the traits of the kingdom” through practical actions “before knowing in full that you are following the king of the kingdom”.
Social action can provide the context for this invitation. One individual who had recently taken on a position of lay leadership said:
That’s another thing [this church] does, they put you in areas that might interest you and ask if you’d like to do things. They’ll help you. You just feel needed, you feel welcome and you feel worthwhile coming. But also personally it helps.
The story of the feeding of the 5,000 connects invitation, participation and the valorisation of individual gifts, and might thus be a model for social action and discipleship in the church today. When Jesus asks his disciples to feed the five thousand, it is the invitation they then extend to the little boy to share his lunch that facilitates the miracle of feeding.
Similarly, we might suggest that the church grows when those who are already part of it invite others to join in the act of loving their community. In the biblical account of this miracle, there is also an implication that the disciples themselves did not have enough to feed the crowd. Inviting others to join them was a necessity, just as inviting others to join us in social action is necessary to fulfil the purpose of the church.
Discipleship is deepened when people find in social action a new way of expressing their gifts and their faith, even when they have been part of the church for a long time. In one case study parish, the church secured funding to offer packed lunches to the families attending the breakfast club during the school holidays. Recognising that the existing holiday club volunteers were already stretched, the vicar invited the Mothers’ Union to help with making the sandwiches. This was acknowledged as a way they might be able to contribute to the holiday club, drawing on their prior experience of preparing buffets for church events. Most of them were elderly and had previously felt that this limited their capacity to get involved.
Initially, some of them expressed resentment about the fact that the families were given two meals for free and they were described as reluctant to interact with the holiday club guests. Over time, however, instead of sitting in the side room making sandwiches and putting bags of fruit together, they began to leave the door open so they could see the families. Some of the women slowly started to go out and meet the families, sharing hot drinks and conversation with them. By the end of the first summer, they asked if they could be involved again at the October half-term holiday club.
There was just this sense that for years, they’d been told they couldn’t do anything because they were too old, but now they could.
Together with the vicar, they developed a way of creatively transforming their sandwich making into an act of worship, rendering it almost liturgical in nature. The vicar printed sheets of paper with the words of Hebrews 13:2 – “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing so some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.” – along with a short blessing that they could say together as they prepared the packed lunches.
The Mothers’ Union now feels that they’ve got a role in one of our biggest ministries, which is breakfast club. We’ve just turned sandwich making into an act of worship with prayer. It’s two hours a week, but it’s become something important. The act of service of preparing lunches has here become a key act of worship taking people deeper in their long-held faith and strengthening their sense of belonging to a church community that many of them have been part of for decades.
This is an easily replicable way of making a simple, practical contribution to the social action of the church into a fundamentally spiritual act, gently integrating worship with service of the community. This ‘liturgy of sandwich making’ is an example of how church social action can avoid the risk of becoming “bland volunteerism”, against which we might caution (Note 2). Integrating simple acts of prayer and worship within social action can negate this.
We heard from several volunteers who do not profess a faith themselves but who acknowledge the value of the volunteer team praying together at the start of a session, particularly in the context of food banks. They articulate this not just as a spiritual act for those who shared the Christian faith, but also as an expression of care for each other as a team. One individual noted, for example, how inspiring they found it when people remembered others’ prayer requests from a previous week and asked how the situation has changed, seeing this as a sign of genuine compassion.
In the age of austerity, an increasing number of food bank volunteers have no religious faith, and are seemingly motivated by political ideology rather than theology (Note 3), but this should not be seen as reason for the church to shy away from demonstrating faith amongst its volunteers. There is a diverse range of reasons why people volunteer in church-based social action, not all explicitly theological, and these often evolve in the process. Participation in social action has the capacity to change the volunteer profoundly.
We heard numerous testimonies of people whose attitudes to others had shifted towards compassion, even where they approached social action with paternalistic or arrogant attitudes. For some, participation in social action is their first personal encounter with the reality that poverty and deprivation exist in their community.
Volunteering at food bank has opened up a whole new world which I knew existed but never met.
For civil society, the benefits of volunteering for wellbeing are well recognised. Participation can combat isolation, engender a sense of belonging to a community and is also beneficial to mental health. The act of being involved in something can be as much a catalyst for transformation as the initiative itself (Note 4).
Within the church, we observe that this extends to spiritual wellbeing and discipleship. The second of the two greatest commandments given by Jesus in the gospels – to love your neighbour as yourself – was cited numerous times by research participants as a reason for the church to do social action, as an expression of love towards its neighbours. In this phrase, the ‘as’ is often seen as a quantifier: we are being asked to love our neighbours ‘as much’ as we love ourselves. However, it might also be seen as an expression of the simultaneity of the two actions – the process of learning to love yourself and to love God as you engage in loving others.
Participation in social action in whatever form can be transformative for individual wellbeing and discipleship, thus growing the health and strength of the church collectively. Our capacity to demonstrate love to those around us is important not only for our own discipleship, but also for how others are drawn to faith and thus how the church grows.
The sociologist of religion Peter Berger coined the concept of plausibility structures, the sociocultural conditions of belief systems that render the beliefs plausible (Note 5). The existence and strength of these structures are what makes it more or less likely that someone who doesn’t hold a particular belief system might be convinced of its value and validity. They also help us filter out ideas that are unreasonable or unbelievable within a particular worldview.
Whilst Berger’s original concept focused on these structures primarily as something cognitive or intellectual, there is perhaps a practical dimension as well. We might consider the social action of the church as forming part of the plausibility structures of Christianity in as much as it reflects the goodness of the Christian God as expressed in the gospel. If people recognise the church, both locally and nationally, as a place where good things happen, then it increases the plausibility that the belief systems behind it are also good.
The ‘goodness’ of the church as an institution is seen in its local incarnation. Community outreach renders plausible the goodness of the God who inspires it and a faith that compels individuals to serve others is more plausible than one that doesn’t.
The opposite is also painfully true; a church that malfunctions serves as an implausibility structure or a hindrance to the gospel, as evidenced by the effects of various safeguarding scandals within the church. As Lesslie Newbigin wrote, “the only possible hermeneutic of the gospel is a congregation which believes it” (Note 6).
In other words, people may be attracted to the church as a community before they are attracted to or convinced by the Christian message. Throughout the research, we have heard stories of people coming to church initially because they were interested in volunteering, then discovering and joining the community of faith as a result: people both give and receive within the church community, but the giving can sometimes come first.
In several case studies, participants spoke about how their journey of faith had begun with seeing the social action of the church. In terms of Grace Davie’s paradigm of believing and belonging, we might suggest these people sought to belong to something and put that into practice through social action prior to believing fully (Note 7).
One case study parish is involved in supporting refugees and asylum seekers both within and beyond their community through coordinating aid trips to Calais. In doing so, the church has become well known locally as a collection point and attracted local media attention for its work. People who first heard about the church through this have joined the congregation and come to faith:
I saw a Facebook post about this church. It was about the collection for the refugee aid trips. I just thought, “This is a church that’s actually living out the gospel. I have to go and see what’s happening”. So we did and we never left.
This individual had limited prior experience of the Christian faith, but had not been part of a worshipping community for over twenty years. Several other people who had recently joined this church from little or no church background spoke about how they had been drawn to the church – to this church in particular – because of hearing about the good work it was doing.
In this community and elsewhere, many individuals without any experience of church or Christianity still understood the centrality of loving our neighbours to the Christian faith and were interested by a community they perceived as putting that into practice. While these individuals are clearly intrigued by the idea of faith to a degree, they are not necessarily people who would have responded to an invitation to an evangelistic event or course as their first interaction with the church. Instead, they are inherently attracted by the goodness of the church’s practical faith in the community and by the power of the invitation to join in.
This speaks to the gift-oriented aspect of humanity, modelling the church as a community that needs help and support itself, rather than being self-sufficient. One individual described their congregation thus:
Being involved in the community, it’s almost as if that’s how people get involved in sharing what takes place, it’s just a great form of mission. You get involved with things, matters of justice and helping build community, and there’s just something inherently good about it that attracts people.
When the church is engaged in social action, it looks most like what people outside it expect it to be and this integrity is attractive to them. The social action tradition is often the element of church life that those who do not belong to recognise when the liturgical or theological dimensions are either harder to comprehend or simply less attractive to them.
In John 13:35 (NIV), Jesus makes the link between social action and discipleship clear when he says that, “by this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
Growth and discipleship because of social action stems as much from the church’s reputation for action as it does from the action itself. The church grows when it is known for the good that it does and provides opportunities for others to join in with it and therefore to encounter the God behind it all.
Case Study
Fifty-seven-year-old T (Teresa) is unemployed. She struggled to put food on the table, and often went hungry. She began volunteering at the foodbank in August, and shops at the social supermarket. Through this, she has come to faith.
“A while ago, I stopped eating. I didn’t have that much food in my house. I’m not going to go asking people for food. Then, I saw about the food bank. I’m unemployed and I asked if I could volunteer. I came in August and I have never left.
I love the comfort I get here. I can talk to them and they’re not judging me. It’s nice helping other people. It occupies my time. When I come here, I feel fulfilled. If I weren’t here, I’d be making myself sleep, especially on miserable days like today. It’s saved me, personally.
I shop at the social supermarket. There’s tinned stuff, fresh vegetables and lots and lots of bread and eggs and often toiletries. You can make a few decent meals out of what you can get for £3.
It means I won’t go hungry. I have enough to last. I have shopped this week and so I can give a can of corn to my neighbour. That’s a lovely feeling. It makes me feel happy. I feel valued and appreciated. I’m lucky, very lucky. I’ve got more than a lot of people.
I was brought up as a Catholic, but I didn’t go to church from where I was 13. I knew there was a God, but I didn’t know who he was. Here, I know what I believe. I’ve got more than I bargained for. Now, I would describe myself as contented. I haven’t got no money, or a tablet, or a phone. I’m in debt, but do you know what, I’m contented. The Big J [Jesus] has plans for me.”
Reprinted with kind permission from Growing Good: Growth, Social Action and Discipleship in the Church of England, Theos and Church Urban Fund 2021
Notes: 1: Church Growth Research Programme, From Anecdote to Evidence; 2: Samuel Wells with Russell Rook and David Barclay, For Good: The Church…p. 49; 3: Andrew Williams et al., ‘Contested space…’ p. 2301; 4: David Boyle, The Grammar of Change: Big Local neighbourhoods in action (Local Trust, 2017), available online at: localtrust.org.uk/insights/essays/ the-grammar-of-change-an-essay-by-david-boyle/; 5: Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Doubleday, 1969); 6: Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1989); 7: Grace Davie, Religion in Britain Since 1945: Believing Without Belonging (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1994).
The Growing Good Toolkit is a FREE six session course helping churches explore the connection between social action, discipleship and growth. Through six flexible, interactive small group sessions, we explore how our churches can be faithful and fruitful in our local communities.
Questions to consider:
· What opportunities are there for people in the community to get (more) involved in your church’s social action?
· Does your church regularly invite people to join in social action, both those inside and outside the congregation?
· How might you develop the practice of invitation around your social action?
Hannah Rich is a senior researcher at Theos. She previously worked for a social innovation think tank and a learning disability charity. She has an MSc in Inequalities and Social Science for the London School of Economics.