The Church of England has relaunched its website, and it looks good (fortunately with a bit less of that wishy-washy purple). But one thing has not changed: a phrase sitting just under the logo: A Christian presence in every community (or a slight variation of it). It appears in Church Commissioners’ reports, in Synod papers, in press releases, and in almost every argument currently being had about the future of the parish. It sounds unarguable. Who could be against Christian presence?
But the phrase is doing a great deal of work, and it is worth asking a few questions of it. Where did it come from? What has it been taken to mean? Does it have any theological content at all—and if so, does that content cohere with what the Church of England actually says about itself in its formularies and its ordinal? And, most importantly, does it point us towards a strategy that might reverse decline—or one that might manage it gracefully?
(The comedian David Mitchell once said, rather sceptically, that when a politician says something that no-one could disagree with, then you can be sure they are using it to smuggle in something that people will definitely disagree with! I am not quite so sceptical—but I like the question!)
My contention is that the phrase is a good one, but only if we recover the New Testament answer to the question: what is the presence of God in a community? The answer is not, in the first place, a building, or a PCC (!) or a vicar. It is a people.
1. Where did the phrase come from?
The phrase does not come from the Book of Common Prayer, the Articles, the Canons or any Measure. As far as I can trace it, it first appears in the Church’s work on inter-faith relations.
In July 2005 General Synod received Presence and Engagement: the churches’ task in a multi-Faith society (GS 1577), which launched the Presence and Engagement (P&E) programme to support parishes in areas of significant religious diversity identified by the 2001 census. The follow-up report, Staying Present and Engaging Faithfully (2009), cites paragraph 45 of the 2005 report to the effect that people of other religions can be reassured that the Church of England is still there to provide a Christian presence in every community, available to people of all faiths and none.
The context matters. The phrase was born as a reassurance to other faith communities in areas where Anglican congregations were shrinking and other communities growing: we are not leaving. It was a statement about staying, not about growing.
By 2009 the phrase had migrated to the Church Commissioners. Their 2009 Report and Accounts describe them as playing a vital role in supporting the Church of England as a Christian presence in every community by managing their assets as a long-term resource. From around 2012 it became the Commissioners’ standing description of their purpose, and at some point it became the strapline under the logo on the national website.
So within a few years the phrase had moved from inter-faith reassurance to institutional self-description, and from there to the justification of how central money is spent.
2. How is it being used now?
Today the phrase appear to function in at least three ways.
- As a brand. It is the Church’s answer to the question “What is the Church of England?” The national website explains that the Church has existed in parishes and dioceses and that it seeks to be a Christian presence in every community, up and down the land. Here it is essentially a restatement of the parish system: every inch of England lies within a parish, and every parish has a cure of souls.
- As a funding rationale. For the Commissioners, the phrase justifies distributing historic resources to poorer dioceses so that ministry can continue where local giving cannot sustain it.
- As a campaigning slogan. In the debates over parish reorganisation, clergy numbers and the redirection of central funds towards new initiatives, the phrase is regularly invoked to defend the existing pattern. If the Church is committed to presence in every community, the argument goes, then every withdrawal of a stipendiary post or closure of a building is a betrayal of that commitment.
It has also been used to push in the other direction. In February 2019 Synod was invited to renew its commitment to being a Christian presence in every community by focusing on outer estates—precisely the places the existing parish system had largely withdrawn from. And in the inter-faith context, the follow up paper GS 2063 (2017) admitted frankly that the Church faces significant challenges in its desire to be present in every community.
The result is that the phrase can be used to defend almost anything—the status quo, the redistribution of resources, the planting of new congregations, or the retention of buildings with no congregation at all. A phrase that can justify everything is in danger of meaning nothing.
3. What does it mean—and is there any theology in it?
Neither Synod not any committee has never formally defined the phrase. But I think we can distinguish four senses in which it has been used.
- Territorial. Presence means geographical coverage: every community lies within a parish with a church and a minister responsible for it. (There is a question here about whether simply drawing lines on a map actually achieves anything—and that appears to be the content of ‘every community lies within a parish’ for some…!)
- Institutional. Presence means the resources that sustain that coverage—stipends, housing, buildings and the central funds that support them.
- Embodied (described as “incarnational”). GS 2063 (2017), the P&E report to Synod, made maintaining a Christian presence in every community the first of its four aims for the coming quinquennium. It argued that because God’s grace is for everyone, presence matters in all communities, not only those where most people are of Christian heritage, and it described the language of presence and engagement as conveying an incarnational understanding of mission.
- Baptismal. The most substantial theological statement is GS Misc 1224, Ministry for a Christian presence in every community, produced through the Ministry Council with the House and College of Bishops and the Archbishops’ Council. It states that the whole people of God, by baptism, share in bearing Christian presence through worship, witness and service, being the Body of Christ in every and any place.
The first two senses have no theological content as such. They describe an inherited administrative pattern and the money needed to keep it going.
The third gestures towards theology, but “incarnational” is the wrong word for it. In Christian doctrine the incarnation is unique and unrepeatable: only the eternal Son became flesh (John 1:14), and we cannot “incarnate” since, unlike him, we have never not been “flesh”. Neither the church nor its ministers “incarnate” Christ in a community, and talk of “incarnational mission” blurs the distinction between Christ and his people. In practice the word also tends to slide into meaning simply “being there”. What the report is reaching for is better described as embodied or practical presence: Christians living, serving and worshipping in a place as witnesses to the one who was incarnate.
The fourth sense is quite different, and it is the one worth building on. In GS Misc 1224 the bearer of presence is not the building or the incumbent but the baptised people of God. That is a genuinely theological claim, and, as I will argue, a thoroughly biblical one. The difficulty is that it sits uneasily with the way the phrase is actually used in most of the Church’s debates.
4. Presence and Article XIX
The Church of England does, in fact, have an official definition of what the church is. Article XIX states:
The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.
The Latin antecedents of this speak of a coetus fidelium—a gathering, an assembly of the faithful. Following the Augsburg Confession (Article VII), this Article identifies the church by its marks—a gathered people, the Word preached, the sacraments administered.
Notice what is absent. There is nothing here about territory, buildings or the presence of an ordained minister as such (though ministry implies it). The ministry of Word and sacrament is essential, but it exists in and for a congregation of the faithful. Where there are no faithful gathered, on the terms of Article XIX there is no visible church—however fine the building and however conscientious the incumbent with fourteen parishes.
(There is an interesting push-back here, from Anthony Smith, arguing that Cranmer’s language here is not about mere congregationalism. But I don’t think there is any mistaking Cranmer’s dependance on Melanchthon here, and the understanding here sits foursquare within the Reformed Protestant tradition: the “church” is the congregation of people, and not the ecclesial hierarchy.)
This sets a sharp test for our slogan. If “a Christian presence in every community” means the territorial and institutional senses, it can be satisfied in a place where no one worships at all: the building is open; the parish has a named priest; the Commissioners’ money is flowing. But that is not the visible Church of Christ as our own formularies define it. By Article XIX, Christian presence in a community means a congregation of faithful people in that community, gathered around Word and sacrament—building or no.
That, in turn, means presence is not something that can simply be maintained. It is something organic, and has to be nurtured, fed, and grown. A congregation of the faithful only exists where people have come to faith.
This also exposes a curious blind spot. The slogan speaks of a Christian presence, but it is almost always used as though the only Christians in England were Anglicans. Article XIX does not define the Church of England; it defines the visible Church of Christ. A congregation of faithful people gathered around Word and sacrament is exactly that, whether it meets in a parish church, a Methodist chapel, a Baptist church, a Roman Catholic parish, a Pentecostal or Black-majority church, or one of the new churches meeting in a school hall or a converted (!) warehouse.
In many places, much of the recent growth in churchgoing has come in precisely these independent, Pentecostal and diaspora congregations (as the research of David Goodhew has shown). A community with a thriving free church and a dwindling parish church is not a community without Christian presence. The Church of England’s parochial responsibility for the cure of souls is real, and it is the strongest reason Anglicans think in these terms. But that responsibility does not require us to act as if other faithful congregations were not there. GS Misc 1224 itself speaks of Christian presence being borne together with our ecumenical partners, though that note is rarely heard in the debates about parish ministry within the Church of England.
5. The people of God as the temple presence of God
The New Testament has a great deal to say about the presence of God in the world, and it says it through one dominant image: the temple. In the Old Testament the tabernacle and then the temple were where God’s name dwelt, where heaven and earth met. The startling claim of the New Testament is that this presence is now located first in Jesus, and then in his people, who are his body.
Jesus as the place of presence. John’s prologue tells us that the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us (eskēnōsen, John 1:14), and the glory once seen in the tent of meeting is now seen in him. Jesus speaks of the temple of his body (John 2:19–21) and tells the Samaritan woman that the time is coming when worship will be tied neither to Gerizim nor to Jerusalem (John 4:21–24). Matthew frames his whole Gospel with presence: Jesus is Immanuel, God with us (Matt 1:23); and the risen Jesus promises to be with his disciples always (Matt 28:20); and in between, wherever two or three gather in his name, he is among them (Matt 18:20). Presence is promised to a gathered people, not a particular place.
The church as temple. Paul makes the transfer explicit. “Do you not know that you are God’s temple (naos) and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (1 Cor 3:16). The “you” is plural: it is the congregation in Corinth, with all its dysfunction, that is the dwelling place of God in that city. In 2 Cor 6:16 Paul applies the covenant promise of Lev 26:12 and Ezek 37:27—”I will live in them and walk among them”—to the ekklesia of Jesus. Ephesians 2:19–22 pictures Jew and Gentile together being built into a holy temple in the Lord, a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. And 1 Peter 2:4–5 describes believers as living stones being built into a spiritual house. It a clearly and consistently expressed concept.
Not made with hands. Stephen, quoting Isaiah 66, insists that the Most High does not dwell in houses made with hands (Acts 7:48–50), and Paul says the same to the Athenians (Acts 17:24). This is not merely anti-building polemic; it is a statement about where God has chosen to make himself known.
Lampstands in the cities. Revelation offers a particularly vivid version of this. In Rev 1:12–20 John sees the risen Christ walking among seven golden lampstands—temple furniture—and is told that the lampstands are the seven ekklesiae. The presence of God in Ephesus, Smyrna or Laodicea is not a building but a congregation (despite much stained glass iconography), and Christ is present among them. But the warning to Ephesus is sobering: if they do not repent and recover their first love, Christ will come and remove their lampstand from its place (Rev 2:5). Presence is not guaranteed by history or infrastructure. It depends on faithful witness.
The trajectory culminates in Rev 21:3, where the dwelling (skēnē) of God is with humanity, and 21:22, where the city has no temple because the Lord God and the Lamb are its temple. Between the incarnation and the new creation, the temple presence of God in the world is the people of God.
6. A priestly people
The temple image comes with a corollary: if the people are the temple, the people are (paradoxically) also the priesthood. 1 Peter moves straight from living stones to “a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (2:5), and then applies the covenant identity of Exod 19:6 to the whole church: “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people”—with a purpose, “that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light” (2:9, emphasis added!). Revelation says the same: Christ has made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father (Rev 1:6; 5:10; compare 20:6).
Two features stand out. First, the New Testament never uses hiereus (priest) of an individual Christian minister. The priesthood belongs to Christ (Hebrews) and, derivatively, to the whole people. Second, this priesthood is missional. The priestly people exist to make God known to the nations, which is exactly what Israel’s priestly vocation was meant to be. Paul can describe his own apostolic work in priestly language—ministering the gospel so that the offering of the Gentiles may be acceptable (Rom 15:16)—and calls every believer to offer their whole embodied life as worship (Rom 12:1).
The Church of England has written this into its ordinal. The introduction common to the Common Worship ordination services begins not with the ordained but with the whole Church. God calls his people to follow Christ and forms them into a royal priesthood to declare his wonderful deeds, drawing directly on 1 Peter 2:9. Only then does it speak of particular ministries, given within that priestly people to serve, equip and build it up. GS Misc 1224 explicitly takes these opening paragraphs as its starting point.
This is the theological key that unlocks the slogan. If the people of God are the temple and the priesthood, then “a Christian presence in every community” means baptised believers living, worshipping and witnessing in every community. The ordained minister’s task is not to be that presence on everyone else’s behalf, but to equip the saints for the work of ministry, so that the body of Christ is built up (Eph 4:11–12). A model in which presence equals “vicar plus building” quietly reverses this order; the people become the clientele of the priest, rather than the priest serving the priesthood of the people. (This is one reason why Anglicans in other parts of the world prefer the terminology of “presbyter” rather than “priest”. Perhaps we should do the same.)
7. What this means for strategy
If we take Article XIX, the New Testament temple theology and our own ordinal seriously, then the question is not whether the Church of England should aspire to be a Christian presence in every community. It should. The question is what we mean by presence. Several implications follow.
- Presence is people, not plant. The primary measure of presence in a community is whether there are believers there who worship, pray and witness. A building is a tool for that presence, often a precious one; a stipendiary minister is a gift to it. But neither is it. Where there is a building and a vicar but no congregation, we have the infrastructure of presence without the substance.
- Presence must be grown, not just maintained. Since a congregation of the faithful only exists where people come to faith, a strategy for presence is, at its heart, a strategy for evangelism and discipleship. The slogan was born as a reassurance that we are “still there”. But in many communities, if nothing changes, we will not be there for much longer. As with any other living organism, the only sustainable presence is a growing one.
- Clergy as equippers of a priestly people. Rather than spreading clergy ever more thinly so that every parish has a nominal share of a vicar, we should ask how ordained ministry can most effectively form and release lay disciples who are themselves Christian presence in their streets, schools and workplaces.
- New congregations are presence. Under Article XIX, planting a new congregation in an estate or new housing development where there is currently no worshipping community is not a threat to the parish principle—it is the most direct way of creating Christian presence where there is none. The same is true of revitalising congregations that have dwindled.
- Presence is ecumenical. A strategy for Christian presence should start by asking where faithful congregations of any denomination already exist, and where none do. That may mean partnering with, supporting or even deferring to other churches in some places, while focusing Anglican planting and renewal on communities with no gathered Christian community at all. Duplicating provision while whole estates and villages have none is hard to justify on any reading of the slogan.
- The lampstand can be removed. Revelation’s warning cuts in both directions. It challenges those who think presence is secured by inherited structures. But it also challenges those who would abandon places too easily. Christ walks among the lampstands, and he calls struggling congregations to repent and recover their first love, not simply to close.
Reading back over what I have written, much of it seems very obvious. But I am not sure I have found these obvious observations within the C of E literature that uses this language!
The phrase “a Christian presence in every community” deserves to be more than a strapline or a funding rationale. Read in the light of Scripture and our own formularies, it is a call for every community in England to have a congregation of faithful people in it—people who are the temple of God and a royal priesthood, declaring his wonderful deeds, whatever their denomination.
That is not a call to preserve what we have. It is a call to share faith, and invite others to discover it for themselves.
