Property use must be forward looking

From Insights Magazine of May 2004

Sydney Presbytery’s mission officer, the Rev. Peter Godwin, encourages congregations to look at their mission and property use.

The presbytery has completed a property survey in conjunction with the Synod’s Board of Finance and Property and its Property Resources Unit. While that is feeding into the process, presbytery secretary Peter Bentley says mission context is the key.

Mr Godwin recently completed a mission review for the presbytery. He noted that much of people’s energy was spent maintaining a structure and property system that didn’t help them engage missionally in a community which, largely, no longer saw the church as a significant place for spiritual understanding and growth.

He said he sensed that people felt themselves to be gripped by crises of identity and loyalty, membership and money, leadership and organisation, and culture and belief.

The hopes and dreams of many congregations seemed largely unattainable.

Lifestyle commitment, spiritual depth, values, passion for mission, love for the “catholic” church and readiness to volunteer had been increasingly in short supply. It had become harder to recruit children and youth leaders, church council members and committee chairpersons, secretaries and treasurers – even though people “supposedly” had more free time.

It had become harder to meet operating budgets and achieve capital funding targets, even though people “apparently” had more money to spend.

As Synod and local church networks dissolved into competition for resources and were fragmented into ideologically-driven disputes, fewer leaders sought ordination. There was little confidence that the church had created the right strategies, produced the best processes and structures or trained the best leaders.

The denominational mission funding strategy that once pooled enormous capital to generate positive change around the world couldn’t amass sufficient wealth or motivate sufficient energy to intervene in local community crises.

Most people readily agreed that “the church” should change but few people were willing to risk changing their church.

Some leaders were convinced, but the combination of cultural hostility to the traditional church’s mission, the lengthy processes of decision making in the Uniting Church and the self-interest of veteran congregational members stopped leaders from ever building momentum.

Mr Godwin thought presbytery needed to address three issues:

• identity (how do we move from understanding ourselves primarily as “attractional” to understanding ourselves as “incarnational”, to understanding church as the supporting and equipping resource for sending us all into the world as missionaries?);
• structure and organisation (in a world that’s increasingly defined by networks, rather than institutional structure, we remain largely inflexible in the ways that our congregations and faith communities work together to achieve missional objectives); and
• property (in 1992 the Assembly released a policy that said the only right ownership of property was where it helped a truly pilgrim people responding to God’s call to mission, to worship and to service; property must never be an end in itself; a congregation’s property requirements should be determined by its mission strategy).

Mr Godwin said in Sydney Presbytery there were more congregations than necessary to accommodate attendance needs and existing missional strategies. Some congregations were too small to be sustainable. Many were using property income to employ a minister and other staff resources for largely “maintenance” (attractional) ministry.

Mr Godwin has described the church as communities of people who respond to the present and coming Kingdom of God in worship, witness and service, and who are “called out” (we exist not for ourselves but to be in the world with the love, compassion, mercy, grace and peace of Jesus).

He said the Uniting Church entrusted the mission of congregations and faith communities, the use of effective structures and the allocation of property and people resources to people who could imagine a future that’s different from what we know now.

He thought the presbytery should increase the range of demographic groups connected in mission and ensure that there was some attempt at providing a connection with every demographic group of significant size within each region.

He thought presbytery should encourage the exploration of new forms of church, reduce the number of congregations and increase the average size, and reduce the number of congregational properties and increase the flexibility of the properties with strategies for more effective use.

Sydney Presbytery will continue to review property issues in the light of missional structure and purposes. It has asked congregations and faith communities to identify at least one clear focus group in the community and develop short- and long-term goals for worship, witness, service, leadership and property needs in the light of that selection.

Information gathered in that process will help in a review of property use and the provision of property and leadership resources to missional ends.

It will also help congregations and faith communities think about both their immediate and long-term futures.

Stephen Webb