ANZATS Conference on Ecotheology, July 2000

Growing Organic Ministry in Rural New Zealand:
the next stage

T. Graeme Nicholas, B.Sc., B.D., M.Theol.

One of the many radical social changes in the New Zealand rural landscape over the last fifteen years is the widespread disappearance of stipended ministry. This paper will note aspects of that ‘decline’ within the Anglican and Presbyterian churches and will examine the emergence of forms of ministry from within rural communities that are not reliant on stipend or tertiary training. The Anglican experience of ‘Total Ministry’ or ‘Mutual Ministry’ will be examined, as will current developments within the New Zealand Presbyterian Church.

Ecological and Systems Thinking

This paper reflects on some developments in ministry patterns in the Anglican and Presbyterian Churches in New Zealand over the last ten years. In doing so I have found some of the language and thought-forms from ecology and from systems thinking illuminating.

The language of ecology, organic food production and permaculture provides evocative and helpful ways of seeing the world. I have been greatly influenced by the work of Bill Mollison, the founding figure of the permaculture movement. Mollison’s insight was that sustainable productivity is much greater in a diverse ecosystem such as a jungle than it is in systems designed for production such as agriculture. Permaculture is a philosophy of production that seeks to reduce dependence on inputs from outside. Indeed it understands that forms of production based on monoculture and dependence on fertiliser and heavy human activity lead to loss of productivity and loss of future potential from the land (see Mollison 1991, 1996). I found these concepts stimulating of questions about how ministry is organised in our churches.

Another set of language and learning that I have found valuable in reflecting on approaches to ministry is that of systems thinking and learning organisations. Perhaps the best known current writer in this field is Peter Senge (The Fifth Discipline, 1992). Systems thinking has a lot in common with ecology and permaculture in its commitment to focussing on the interrelationships rather than just the components of a system, and its understanding of the interdependence of all the parts of a system. Senge has outlined certain systems archetypes as a way of showing how systems work. Variants of these ‘types’ are to be found in organisations and social systems of all kinds. One such archetype in particular has helped me understand better my observations of ministry developments, Senge calls it ‘Shifting the Burden’. Senge describes this type:

A short-term “solution” is used to correct a problem, with seemingly psotive immediate results. As this correction is used more and more, more fundamental long-term corrective measures are used less and less. Over time, the capabilities for the fundamental solution may atrophy or become disabled, leading to even greater reliance on the symptomatic solution.

A special case of this ‘type’ is also described.

…outside “intervenors” try to help solve problems. The intervention attempts to ameliorate obvious problem symptoms, and does so so successfully that the people within the system never learn how to deal with the problems themselves.

It is easy to see the links with permaculture thinking; it is also very suggestive to me in understanding dynamics in ministry.

The Changing Shape of Ministry

During the last ten years we have experienced some significant changes in the shape of church ministry, especially in rural communities. One of the most noticeable is a reduction in the number of stipended clergy around the countryside. This has been a consequence of a combination of factors, rural depopulation, rural economic hardship, and a lessening appeal of the mainline churches.

Congregations are looking for new ways to carry out the functions of mission and ministry which are less reliant on local resident stipendiary ministry, and are increasingly looking for ways of sustaining and enhancing local community rather than looking to centralised expressions of church and community.

The focus of discussion is shifting from “scarce resources and restructuring,” to “congregations finding new structures and new kinds of ministry”. Worldviews with respect to the relationship between church and community are shifting, the role and nature of stipended ministry is changing, and the means of sustaining shared identity and belonging (community) are new.

To employ the language of ecology and organic production, local church, especially in rural communities, is looking to be much more like permaculture, sustainable ecologies in their own right, natural expressions of their own community life rather than dependent on additives from outside.

To illustrate the trend I have looked at changes over the last ten years in the Anglican Diocese of Dunedin (covering Otago and Southland) and in the last five years in the Presbyterian Church in south and mid Canterbury and the West Coast of the South Island.

In Otago and Southland just on a quarter of the stipended positions for ordained ministry in Anglican parishes have disappeared in the space of ten years. During this time, however, almost no congregations have ceased to worship regularly and almost no amalgamations have happened, either between parishes or between denominations.

In the areas of south and mid Canterbury and the West Coast the Presbyterian Church (and Union Churches on the West Coast) have reduced from the number of stipended parish ministry positions by just over 38%. Again, this is not a matter of fewer congregations worshipping nor amalgamations.

These figures are representative of what is happening around the country in these two churches in areas that are predominantly rural. There are some urban examples too.

The fact is that worshipping communities from these mainline churches are choosing, in some cases well supported by their denominational authorities, to find ways of sustaining their life and mission without dependence stipended ministry. Each of these denominations has responded to this development differently, and I will look at some detail of that soon. First, however, I would like to name some of the emerging features of this new church landscape, under four headings, economic, political, social and ecclesiological.

ECONOMIC

As church communities develop forms of mission and ministry not dependent on finding stipend, allowances and housing for ordained ministry some are discovering they have newly released resources and can use their extra spending power in new ways. They now have budgets to budget with and so can ask, perhaps for the first time, questions about their mission and the relationship between their budget and their mission. Congregations are finding new meaning in their giving and their decision making. Some are showing delight in the possibilities; of changing their financial relationship with the regional and national church, of their ability to plan and support local mission initiatives, of their ability to use money to resource their own members for mission and ministry and of commitment to mission projects by the wider church.

Such economic freedom and the new possibilities it offers have the potential to re-vitalise motivation in the local church which too often has been dominated by fundraising for its own survival.

POLITICAL

Our denominations have largely organised themselves around units that support at least one stipended and ordained person. The effect of this has been that key communication and opportunities for participation in the wider church have sometimes been determined by structures of clergy deployment. Communication and representation has often been by ‘parish’, where parish means the economic unit that can support a stipended appointment. As congregations find and assert their identity as mission units of the church, and as the technology and methods of communication and participation become potentially more inclusive, different voices will be heard in the debates of the wider church, different issues will become visible, and new energy and gifts will be available.

Of course, this will not happen automatically or in an optimal way without intentional attention to these dynamics at both local level and by the wider church authorities. People in the new structures may not be heard and may not get on the mailing lists - they may be disenfranchised by not having their own stipended ministry.

New forms of participation are being invented and different people are getting access to the information flows. These people raise different and "naive" questions which stand to enrich and challenge the whole church.

SOCIAL

Society has been conditioned to recognise particular indicators that the Church is present in the community. In particular church buildings and a resident minister living in a designated house and often wearing distinctive dress have provided a very visible "branding" of the church in the community. As congregations have accepted more and more responsibility for sustaining the church’s mission without such visible signs of their life they are having to develop new ways of raising their profile in the community. What is our "shop window" in the community?

Many communities have not had their own resident paid ministry for years, or ever. However, church identity has then been linked to a dependent relationship with the church in a neighbouring town. The new situation is challenging local churches to own their own profile in their locality and to develop a distinctive sense of mission and relationship with their community.

Church buildings continue to be important signs of church life in many communities, but as local people make more choices about how they gather as church the focus in some places is less on formal buildings, and in some places the overheads of maintenance have also led to a move away from church buildings. As the church becomes less defined by and identified with buildings and appointed ministers it will find new and responsive ways of building its identity and reputation in the community.

ECCLESIOLOGICAL

A key theological question which is being raised by the trends identified here is that of where the church proper is to be found. In other words, does the real church exist in its local congregations or does the real church exist in some centralised or collectivised unit? Past practice has effectively defined what is real church according to criteria set centrally and largely related to a unit’s ability to support stipendiary ministry and some contribution to the wider church. This has worked to define local church as somehow derivative from a centralised church structure. If a congregation or group of congregations can provide a house of sufficient standard and raise a centrally determined amount of finance to support mission and ministry, then they are allowed to have ordained ministry, and only those who have ministry which meets agreed criteria of training and remuneration are treated as real church.

Identity as ‘real church’ is thus at best defined from outside and linked to provision of a particular style of ministry. This can mean that individual congregations who must share with other congregations to provide ministry are not seen as fully church by themselves. It can also mean that local church can develop a sense of passivity in mission, seeing themselves as receiving and supporting ministry rather than themselves being the ministry.

As local congregations accept the call to be ministering communities they learn a new ecclesiology and challenge the understanding of what the church is, for the whole church. Church becomes where people gather to be church and the centralised structures are seen as structures to support, connect and challenge the local church, rather than provide or define local church.

Denominational Response

How have the denominational structures responded to and promoted these changes?

Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand

The Presbyterian Church Mission Resource Team Co-directors we are noting a development in various parts of the country where the combination of geographical isolation, population decline and economic conditions means that the church can neither sustain its conventional structure of parish with minister, nor resort to any of the conventional ‘solutions’ such as amalgamation with another parish or another denomination.

Communities of people, some very small communities, continue to meet as church but are no longer able to support the basic infrastructure regarded as normal within PCANZ to qualify as fully part of the church at large. The structures either assumed or required by the Book of Order are a congregation, a Session (or Parish Council) and a Minister. Opportunity to have a minister is limited by the ability of a congregation to establish Terms of Call that are sustainable by the parish, acceptable to the Presbytery and acceptable to a minister who is called. It is very clear that this in effect means that we have many ‘vacant’ parishes who will never again have a stipended minister.

On top of this, Assembly has explicitly reserved the ministry of baptism to those ordained to word and sacrament, and limits access to ordination to those who are accepted by the National Assessment Committee and given prescribed training. Both the assessment and the training are to conform to a generic standard established by the national church.

In order to get around this apparent bar to a full church life in local communities various devices have been employed and are becoming increasingly common. These include making Lay Supply or Mission appointments, authorising elders to officiate at Holy Communion, and ordaining individuals under the Limited Local Ministry regulation (Book of Order, E-17, 2.8). As will be discussed below none of these approaches are considered adequate.

Another theme is emerging around the church which is not unrelated but is nevertheless distinct. Worshipping communities are rediscovering their mutuality in ministry and increasingly questioning the configuration of church that focuses on the ordained. This is part of a widespread movement across denominations and around the world. It can be seen as driven partly by theological concerns, partly by economic concerns and partly by the general trend of democratising of society and the questioning of professional power, control and authority.

All this has fed the development of local expressions of ministry that are based on members of the congregation being affirmed in a variety of ministries that together enable the local church to function. Recent expressions of this development can be illustrated by recent applications for departures from the rules of the church to accommodate forms of local ministry. Some examples include the need to work out acceptable forms of ministry with partner churches in union parishes.

There are, however, other reasons not to do with other denominations that suggest the need for a new path to ordination to word and sacrament. While many of the congregations in question are small and geographically distant from neighbouring ministry, they typically do wish to remain in good standing with the wider church. Indeed the national church would be negligent to loosen the bonds that hold these local churches in membership with the whole. Ordination of some members of the congregation represents very powerfully an enduring belonging of that congregation, its proclamation and its sacraments, to the wider church. The Congregation becomes a full expression of the church, not provisional or unnecessarily dependent. Ordination speaks of the catholicity of the church, and catholicity is important but fragile in isolated congregations. Ordination represents visibly and consistently that the congregation is worshipping and proclaiming the Gospel within a wider discipline.

Considerable thought is currently being given in the committees of the church to find ways to meet the growing needs for forms local ministry.

Anglican Church of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia

A significant movement has developed in the Anglican Church in this country which has its equivalent in several other parts of the world. Drawing on the writing of Roland Allen in the 1920s the movement has sought to establish forms of ministry which are both true to an Anglican understanding of church and sacrament yet are not dependent on stipendiary and seminary trained ministry.

The movement was encouraged by some key leaders of the New Zealand Anglican Church attending a conference on the work of Roland Allen held in Hawaii in the early 1980s. In the Diocese of Waiapu appropriate people in local Maori communities were ordained as priests with the support of their community to serve without stipend. The were known as ‘minita-a-iwi’ (ministers of the people).

In the late 1980s David Moxon visited the Diocese of Nevada and studied the developments there called ‘Total Ministry’ which had been pioneered by Wes Frensdorff, the bishop. David was director of Theological Education by Extension (TEE) for the Anglican Church in New Zealand. He began to share some of the Total Ministry thinking around the dioceses of New Zealand.

The TEE position developed in the early 1990s into the Distance Education and Formation Training Unit (DEFT) and the new director was Paul Dyer. Paul was the first of several New Zealand visitors to study developments in the Diocese of Northern Michigan. Paul’s study leave report became a primary reference document for developments in some dioceses in this country. The Northern Michigan approach was called ‘Mutual Ministry’ and acknowledged debt to and kinship with Navada’s Total Ministry.

Since then New Zealand dioceses have developed their own local variants of these approaches. Development has been shaped both by local decision and by national networking and conferences. Currently six of the seven pakeha (not maori) dioceses have forms of ‘Mutual Ministry.’ In November 1996 the Tikanga Pakeha Ministry Board representing all the pakeha dioceses adopted a set of guidelines for Mutual Ministry.

Mutual Ministry is described in the guidelines as, “…a way of thinking and of ordering ministry that seeks to locate responsibility for the mission and ministry of the church in the local worshipping community.”

Mutual Ministry is characterised by eight foundations.

Congregational choice for this approach.

The primary ecclesial relationship is between the diocese and the congregation.
Educational focus on baptism as the mandate and foundation of mission and ministry; ministry is the responsibility of all the baptised.
Identify local mission and what is needed to support it.
Identify individuals who have the confidence of the congregation to support their mission; people for specific ministries to support the mission.
Authorise ministries; some by local recognition, some by episcopal licence, some by ordination.
Develop and encourage mutuality in ministry; no individual substituting for the responsibility of the whole; all ministry in a matrix of ministries.
Education, support and oversight provided by some extension of the episcopate through appointment of stipended and trained enablers.

Conclusions

We now have a decade of development of a particular direction in ministry to reflect on and learn from. The directions in ministry that are reviewed here can be seen as a constructive response both to social and economic necessity and to the discovery that a stipendiary clergy based church results in a diminishment of local church ‘capacity.’ To return to the ecological permaculture metaphor, as local church is released from dependence on imported energy and manure and is encouraged to discover its own fertility and diversity so its production of healthy fruits is enhanced in a sustainable way. Or to use Senge’s systems archetype, once the local church stops seeing the symptom relief of the outside problem solver (clergy) its own capacity begins to grow.

I am convinced that, for all there are mixed reports on how particular expressions of these local ministries are going, the church as a whole is being enriched by the questions and insights they are raising. It is not just that the church now has an evolving new methodology; a way of being active in the world that is quite distinct from patterns that have prevailed for over a thousand years. We are faced with a fresh ecclesiology, a renewed demand for learning growth to support local people in being the church, and even a new epistemology which validates learning and theology developed in the local church rather than in the centralised and official church.

However, in order that these developments continue to contribute learning to the church, I believe that we need to focus on some important questions they have already raised. These include questions of identity, catholicity, ecumenicity and capacity building. In all of these the issue is that the churches have become lazy (or have allowed capacity to atrophy).

Identity, in terms of public profile and in terms of articulating the tradition has been left largely to stipendiary clergy. How might the church of the future know itself and present itself without focussing on the clergy?

Catholicity speaks of the way in which the local is also an expression of the whole. The easy and common way of representing that has been by a structure around the person of the stipended ordained minister/priest. How might the church of the future focus its catholicity when ordination speaks as much of local credibility as it does of centralised authority, and when a the ordained ministry is both pluralised in each community and set in relationship with other ministries?

Ecumenicity is the way in which particular expressions of catholicity sit alongside one another and work within one household. The churches have spent the last fifty or so years developing ways of relating based on structures of ministry that are now rapidly becoming obsolete and a liability. Much ecumenical ‘understanding’ has been at this structural level. As we learn to relate to new structures we will need to revisit our explanations and theology.

This paper has proposed that the new approaches to local ministry do build capacity. However, the challenge to the church is now to help build that capacity intentionally through appropriate resourcing of those in forms of local ministry. This resourcing will need to include capability in all aspects of mission and ministry including theological reflection, biblical interpretation, and pastoral relationships.

If the questions and issues being raised by new forms of ministry are welcomed by the churches then we may indeed be seeing the seeds of a new way of being church that is sustainable and productive.

References

The Book of Order: Rules and Forms of Procedure of The Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand, (1996) Office of the Assembly Executive Secretary, Wellington.

Mollison, Bill (1994) Introduction to Permaculture, Tagari, Tyalgum Australia (2nd Edition).

Mollison, Bill (1996) Travels in Dreams: An Autobiography, Tagari, Tyalgum Australia.

Senge, Peter M. (1992) The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Random House Australia, NSW.

The Reverend T. Graeme Nicholas is an organisation development consultant in Christchurch, New Zealand working with churches and other organisations. He is a priest in the Anglican Church and has previously been Diocesan Ministry Educator for the Diocese of Dunedin and part of the national mission resourcing team for the Presbyterian Church. He has been involved in helping shape forms of local ministry for at least the last sixteen years.

Growing Organic Ministry in Rural New Zealand:the next stage