By Professor John Bryson
Department of Strategy and International Business, University of Birmingham
The COVID-19 pandemic, and subsequent lockdown measures, led to unprecedented adaptations by individuals and communities including places of worship, their clergy, and congregations across the UK.
Across the UK, Anglican churches are the oldest surviving organisations with the longest adaptation histories. Nearly every village, town and city across the UK has an Anglican church building at its centre. Since 679, the UK population has grown dramatically, but more recently there has been a continuing decline in church attendance resulting in significant over-provision of church buildings. There is an on-going restructuring challenge facing the Church of England that will impact on all communities. This challenge takes two forms – repurposing church buildings that are no longer required combined with facilitating sustainable church growth. The latter is an applied exercise in responsible and sustainable growth that reflects an on-going process of place-based embeddedness. This type of embeddedness will play a central role in the UK government’s strategy to level-up people and places to ensure that opportunities are spread more equally.
The Diocese of Worcester is engaged in an ongoing restructuring process intended to enable churches to grow in health and sustainability by:
- “Inspiring local church communities to be ambitious in generating appropriately local resources”.
- Providing training.
- “Adopting leadership models … enabling local church communities to be adaptive, and to grow”.
- “Promoting wise stewardship that ensures financial stability”.
The Diocese is currently recruiting ‘Mission Accompaniers’ who will provide a combination of experience and expertise to support this change process.
When considering sustainable church growth, there is much that could be taken from the business and management literature. This literature suggests that there is more than one pathway toward healthy and sustainable growth, with each pathway reflecting complex interactions between an organisation, people, and place.
In the same way, there will be multiple alternative place-based solutions to levelling-up regions with no one place following the same path as any other place. Within the Church of England, churches are situated within parishes that have a clearly defined geography. A successful and sustainable church must build upon the local assets existing within a parish as part of an on-going process of “adaptive embeddedness, resulting in new resource configurations through fluid iterations of structural, emotional, and circumstantial embeddedness” (Salder and Bryson, 2019: 806).
Adaptive embeddedness is the process by which an organisation adjusts to place-based alterations, involving continued investments of time and resources in maintaining and creating place-based relationships. For the Mission Accompaniers, a core challenge is managing the tensions between different forms of embeddedness. On the one hand, there is emotional embeddedness which is based around some form of attachment between people, place, and some form of organisation. This form of embeddedness may result in tensions between individuals with emotional attachments. On the other hand, there is structural embeddedness that reflects critical place-based relationships that are essential for the continued health of an organisation in place.
There is another form of embeddedness that will be important for the Mission Accompaniers. Circumstantial embeddedness is focussed on identifying, developing, and maintaining direct and indirect operationally important relationships based on geographical proximity.
For each parish in the Diocese of Worcester this is about knowing the patch/parish, building on the assets available in the parish and investing in creating new local relationship configurations that would create a sustainable and healthy church community. For those involved, it is important to remember that this is not a ‘task and finish’ process but one requiring continued investment of time and effort in processes of adaptive embeddedness.
There are perhaps wider lessons to learn from this process. The Missions Accompaniers are intended to encourage a local dialogue that supports and encourages healthy and sustainable churches. This approach is a solution to highly localised place-based challenges and opportunities. Perhaps, the UK government’s levelling-up policy agenda could learn from this initiative. Thus, every town, city and region across the UK should be given the opportunity to work with a network of levelling-up accompaniers who would encourage and support sustainable and inclusive local responsible inclusive prosperity.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Birmingham.