Dear friends, 

There is a price for maintaining success. 

There was a seminal moment at the New Wine summer festival in 2013 when Justin Welby (the newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury) made his way back to the New Wine festivals he had attended incognito for years. He got on the main stage, and said ‘the trouble with New Wineskins is they get older.’

Now, first of all, if you’ll excuse me being quite impolite, the trouble with New Wineskins is that they get older. I’m looking around. I look in the mirror. It’s a bit frightening. That may seem shocking and rude, but I’m afraid it’s true, and it is the pattern of all renewal in the Church. As they get older, they accumulate bits and pieces that attach to them; they get baggage… New Wine has done much; has been a great channel of the grace of God; has changed and trained two generations of leaders. But we are in a time of revolution, and we need another revolution in the Church. What it looks like, I do not know, but I want to be in it. What it feels like is Jesus-centred, fire-filled, peace-proclaiming, disciple-creating, and the Church word for this revolution is revival.

Justin Welby in 2013, [read more here]

He was effectively asking the poignant question: ‘If you’ve been offering the same spiritual beverage for 25 years can it really be ‘New Wine’?’ 

Choruses, conferences and courses – When does a Movement become a Monument?

It was a question that reverberated through the tent meeting, but did little to stop charismatics in the UK doing the same things and offering the same ‘beverages’ for the next six years. The only thing that broke the format of ‘choruses, conferences and courses’ was Covid-19. That is apart from a seemingly prescient Mike PIlavachi announcing that God had told him to stop the vastly influential festival ‘Soul Survivor’ just before the pandemic broke out.

Soul Survivor had been a youth spin-off from New Wine, a festival that also grew out of the Anglican church St Andrew’s Chorleywood where Mike Pilavachi had been a youth worker. At its peak it attracted 25,000 teens and young adults a year. But stopping Soul Survivor just led to a plethora of rival youth conferences vying to take its place. The Anglican link though has been broken and with it the steady stream of young people from all denominational backgrounds who found themselves heading into Church of England ministry through Soul Survivor. Retrospectively you wonder if the ‘prescience’ was trustees/funders forcing him to shut it down as the whispers that crescendoed into a cacophony of accusations in 2023 became too much to bear.  

We have to talk about money. Because we have to be able to answer one key question: Who are you yoked to in ministry? 

Choruses:

There is a lot that has been written about the impact of money on the Christian music scene – including on contemporary worship. When big record labels get a say in what gets promoted, pushed and produced they become the theological gatekeepers of our age. More theology is caught as we sing than taught as we listen. So just 5 or 6 Western churches become our marketable musical therapy factories, and we all sing along to their comforting tune. A movement that began with three chords and a rainbow guitar strap becomes a marketing machine. 

We’ll come back to music later in the book. But there are other yokings that go on. 

Conferences

As festivals get more expensive than the gate price can bring in they too become a machine in need of sustaining. One approach is that industrial level charities with turnovers ten times bigger than the festival are invited to sponsor events in return for advertising space/time. The payback is promotion: Punters signing up as entry level donors for their charity. But this has to firstly cover the overheads of sponsoring the event, the fundraisers’ salaries and other charity overheads, and then hopefully supporting the charity a little from any surplus. For the charities however this is a once a year opportunity at a captive audience and for their well remunerated fundraisers it’s a no-brainer. Once hooked the hope is that the punters will i) move up their giving pyramid, ii) influence others to do the same and iii) ultimately leave endowments or iv) trigger a high-end donor to outgive everyone else there. (But if the industrial level charity has overheads of 40% and has an executive on $0.5 million a year, you have to wonder where all those monthly pledges are going).

On the other hand all this can be carefully curated so that chosen charities align well with the event organisers’ priorities. Indeed just as when you watch Saturday night TV or a major sports broadcast sometimes the adverts can be more inspiring than the planned programme. 

But the punters are in little doubt they are sitting through a commercial. 

We move from:

 Worship – Teaching – Ministry 

to

Worship – Advert – Worship – Advert | Appeal – Teaching – Ministry…

…with worship carefully curtailed to make sure there is time for the adverts and appeals. 

All this is to cover the expense / needs of the festival goers.

The show must go on.

Even in the once ‘new wineskins’ have been stretched out of shape.

Courses

Back in the late 1990s a question that was beginning to stir in missiologist and retired bishop Simon Barrington-Ward, who Sandy Millar had sent me to visit in Cambridge. Bishop Simon midwifed me into the Church of England. I was singing the praises of the Alpha Course to him, when he paused and said, ‘yes, but really Richard, what comes next?’ 

Alpha’s UK peak was probably 1998. By then many other missiologists were asking, ‘What’s next’. Few were predicting the reality: Alpha and more Alpha. 

By the 21st Century Alpha was an enormous enterprise. A movement had become a machine. It had more employees than some dioceses, a turnover of £12 million a year and an international presence based on the assumption that a course designed for the upper middle-class sensibilities of the luxurious London district of Knightsbridge was marketable from Zurich to Zimbabwe. Like some of its spiritual cousins running conferences, publishing houses, or worship music labels it found it was a machine that needed sustaining by marketing. A key question was how long until it became a monument to something God was doing in the past? To echo Justin Welby again: the trouble with new wineskins is they grow old. 

Yet in the meantime the minister ‘down the road’ at Westminster Chapel, RT Kendall, was prophetically warning in his 2004 classic book ‘The Anointing’ that the enemy of the next revival was likely to be the protagonists of the last one.

Could it be that the 1990s generation who had experienced the good and bad of the Toronto Blessing, but missed out on their expected world revival, have carried on propagating what they knew worked a bit, at the expense of what could have been far better?  

Surely they knew with each passing year that the courses – conference – choruses mix was a pale reflection of ‘the coming world revival’ that had been promised in 1989? 

Or has the question of when the machine would become a monument to a faded glory been ignored. 

Many of these charismatic icons – courses, conferences and choruses – owe their origins to men who have had an anointing used by God to reboot the church. These men began a ministry that became a movement. But inevitably those movements mechanise as they fight for air space, funding and profile. They can so easily become a monument to a past glory/man that we are too entwined with to disentangle from. 

Yet it’s one thing to be yoked with a wealthy funder who shares your values. And it is one thing to propagate a course, conference or chorus style that you really believe in and know still works. But what happens when you get yoked to a national church whose vacillating values you (no longer) share?

Backing Justin: Queen Anne’s Bounty

While the same spiritual beverage continued to be offered in the networks, right from the early days of his episcopacy the Archbishop was making seismic waves in the institutional church. He was still seen in those days as ‘someone we should back whatever he does’. At least that’s how Nicky Gumbel put it from the platform of the Albert Hall at HTB’s loss-leader Leadership Conference. This rally call to back ‘Justin’ was echoed by other networks. The early Welby-era was a golden age for charismatics in the institution.

Under Archbishop Justin Welby, tens of millions of pounds of central and diocesan Church of England funds would be released to start identikit HTB style network churches around the country. Funding and training would be provided through the Gregory Centre for Church Multiplication led by one time HTB associate vicar Ric Thorpe and by the new ‘St Mellitus College’, a vicar factory that let students continue to serve in their network church for the bulk of their training. Bishops were appointed, persuaded or funded into getting with the programme. A church planting movement had been unleashed on the C of E.  

Church Multiplication

The results were staggering. Potential growth in network churches soon outstripped even HTB’s £12 million a year budget and negotiations were made to get more church planting curates funded by the central Church of England. While HTB paid in just £250,000 a year into diocesan funds, dozens of curates were centrally funded on stipend-housing-pension packages, to serve and learn at the multisite London campus and take their franchise around the country. 

When bright eyed planters arrived at a new location they received funding for 3-5 years. This might mean up to 5 staff members (vicar, associate, operations, worship, youth children’s worker) and building improvements that could reach further millions of pounds of funding. The revolution had begun, but so had the countdown to replace the funding. It took a new breed of self-confident clergy to imagine they could grow a church in 3-5 years sufficiently to continue to fund all those roles. Not many had taken an honest assessment of how often you need a nearby church/churches to implode to achieve the rapid growth the model demanded. 

As the planting spiraled other movements/churches were welcomed as the protagonists of planting looked to broaden their appeal.  This was key to gain legitimacy with the bureaucratic ‘checks and balances that be’ within the C of E and keep the cash flowing. Funding spread to New Wine churches, Conservative CoMission/Re:New churches and any central/catholic churches who could be persuaded to join in, most notably St Martin’s in the Fields with their HeartEdge project. All were equally happy to take Queen Anne’s Bounty. 

The Price of the Piper

For evangelicals in the CoE a massive shift has occurred in the funding model. In the early 2000s most medium/large evangelical churches were autonomous self-funding churches, net contributors to their diocese, happily on the edge,  and often with ‘patronage’ vested in evangelical agencies who would help appoint new vicars when there was a vacancy. Patronage was the legacy of earlier church planters like Charles Simeon who established or bought many now famous churches in such a way that trustees should be able to ensure evangelical succession whatever the theological whim of the Diocese or national church. Simeon’s legacy includes: St Aldate’s Oxford, Trinity Cheltenham, Christ Church Clifton and Christ Church Winchester – fruit that has lasted centuries. But for a relatively small amount of seed money many established parishes have given over their autonomy for start-up salary grants or the chance to become a resource church, and purpose planted resource churches are beholden to their diocese in a way that would make Charles Simeon squirm. Expect future job adverts for City Centre Resource Churches to read between the lines: ‘Wanted, tame evangelical-ish minister, who likes dressing down and guitar music, to fit into our diocesan ‘strategy’ and values, and be nice to the bishop.’ How many will leave a legacy that lasts to a second or third generation?  

Meanwhile in a national church desperate not to dissolve, opportunities abound for charismatics with some track record of success. A form of charismatic practice has become a new normal in the CoE as ‘tame evangelical-ish’ prelates proliferate. But as with funding, the price of promotion is aligning yourself to an institution that is a machine not a movement. Some can rise above that. Others unwittingly validate the joke that a consecration is the spiritual removal of a backbone by fellow bishops. For many though even an elusive promise of preferment means that happens several stages earlier. A million little career choices not to be ‘dangerously radical’. A million ways to conform to church not to Christ. And while most who may not even gain the whole (ecclesiastical) world, many are prepared to run the gambit of forfeiting their soul. 

Churches are now yoked to dioceses and the national church in a new way.

Charismatics have never had so much favour, opportunities or preferment. Never had so much money being thrown their way in stipends, grants, church plants… Never had so many institutions of their own that need to be sustained. They’ve accumulated conferences, courses, bishops and archbishops and got baggage by the bucket load.

But what will be the cost, and what has been the cost already?

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Next week: Losing My Religion? “Look to the rock you were hewn from”… theological roots we are in danger of upending.

Want to read more?

Previous Posts in this series: Foreword | introduction | Remember The Baby | The Bathwater Needs Flushing | Driven to Distraction by Success

HTB Network Thesis in 30 Parts: Featuring: Origins | Renewal | Success Culture | Managerialism | Theology | Trajectories.