IT IS unlikely to come as news to anyone reading this that the Church of Scotland has a problem with an ageing and shrinking membership, and fewer people in the pews on Sunday mornings.

This has been the trend for more than 60 years, with the Church both nationally and locally (with a few notable exceptions) seemingly powerless to resist a rising tide of secularism. The ever-growing list of church unions, linkages and closures, and the measures to deal with the looming shortage of ministers, both bear witness to a pattern of managed decline.

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“ We have got many remarkable people in our congregation. Everybody has a ministry and they are all different, but I really believe that’s the way forward.

Now, however, there are early signs of the Church fighting back on several fronts. The Fresh Expressions movement is producing hundreds of new groups changing conceptions of what church looks like, while the Pioneer Ministry programme (see page 39) is taking the church out to the people where they are, rather than expecting them to come to the church.

The third new innovation to have come into being over the last few years is also partly about exploring how the church can get out of its buildings and meet the community.

But where Path of Renewal, an initiative of the Panel on Review and Reform, is different is that it is explicitly about nurturing discipleship among the Church’s existing members, with the hope that they will go out and create more disciples.

“Generally, what we have been doing in church in the last 30 years hasn’t been effective in terms of maintaining and growing the church,” says the Rev David Clarkson, minister of Monkton and Prestwick North Church. “We have been quite involved in our community in the last five or six years, but numbers are continuing to go down, and this was an opportunity to reflect on that and to try to work out what we could do differently.”

The Rev Monika Redman, of Dunfermline: St Leonard’s, says: “I’m fairly new back into the presbytery, after four years in New Zealand, so when it was first mentioned I thought it was too soon for me. But then

I was at the General Assembly in 2015 and heard it spoken about by the Panel during their report, and it dawned on me that this would be an ideal opportunity to give us a new purpose, a focus and a narrative for our work.”

And the Rev Alan Hamilton of Bearsden: Killermont says: “Path of Renewal is not about chucking out the local church but it’s about renewing it from the ground up, and that very much fitted in with the way my own congregation was seeing the need to respond to changes in our community and beyond.

“It just fitted with the way we wanted to go. We’re very committed to being a church locally, but also very clear that existing patterns of ministry need to be reviewed regularly in the light of changing circumstances; and certainly as minister

I was very keen that the members of the congregation were encouraged and empowered to become leaders.”

These are three of 23 congregations, from a variety of settings and the full length of Scotland from Dumfries to Orkney, which last year embarked on a three-year pilot scheme in which ministers and congregations undergo a training and mentoring process aimed at discovering how to become missional churches in their communities. The ministers of each of these congregations meet for overnight training three times a year and are mentored individually and in learning communities based on geographical areas.

The churches taking part have been offered funding to employ someone for a day a week – usually on either pastoral or clerical assistance, but in one case facilitating a building programme. This frees up the minister to spend time on Path of Renewal.

Resources have also been written for study within Path of Renewal groups, kirk sessions and congregations.

The pilot had originally been planned for just 20 congregations, but it was expanded due to the level of interest. A further 15 congregations, which had also applied to take part, are on a less intensively resourced process.

While the specifics vary from church to church, each has been encouraged to identify a small group of potential leaders either from among the congregation or folk on the fringes of church who will lead a culture change in the entire church: firstly within their own congregations, and then being willing to assist other congregations as they consider their own changing cultural contexts.

The project co-ordinator is the Rev Liz Crumlish, who stepped down from parish ministry in Ayr to take on the role. She is responsible for organising the training conferences and overseeing the team of facilitators working with ministers. She says: “Jesus had 12 disciples, but he also had the three who were the inner core. We’re asking ministers to look at that model, and think about who they are going to spend time investing in.

“What we realised very early on is that one of the things we have let go in the Church of Scotland is the real discipleship of people. We get folk in and then we relax. We are not nurturing people and neither are we investing in growing spiritual leaders.

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“ What we realised very early on is that one of the things we have let go in the Church of Scotland is the real discipleship of people. We get folk in and then we relax. We are not nurturing people and neither are we investing in growing spiritual leaders.

“So as well as asking congregations to look at what’s happening in their churches, we are asking them to look at the folk, particularly on the fringes of the church, that with a bit of investment might consider leadership.”

The pilot programme began in early 2016, and the first year has been largely spent on discernment: on exploring the theology of discipleship and how that can apply to each church’s own context.

How exactly that looks is up to the church. In Dunfermline: St Leonard’s the Kirk Session has agreed to devote half of each meeting to exploring Path of Renewal. Monika says: “It’s gone out from there through the congregation, and from there we have developed a wee group that’s exploring a more missional way of understanding church membership, and hopefully a bit more about the context to the work to which God has called us outside the church.”

David says: “It has been interesting. It’s slower than I had imagined, but we have got a group up and running now, who are working on it and taking it forward. That took about six months but what we have found is the group have really begun to bond, to get to know each other a lot better and that has been very positive.

“It’s essentially a discipleship group and so now we are beginning to work on how we develop it and how do we include other people in it.”

“It isn’t about doing more, about trying harder,” adds Alan. “In some ways it’s about listening, stopping, being still. That’s kind of counter intuitive, but if it’s something my congregation and I can learn to do together we will have learned something very valuable.”

Everyone involved emphasises that Path of Renewal is not a programme in which everyone goes through the same process with the same target in mind. Each church is putting together a bespoke process based on their own situation.

The tag line has become: A movement not a programme.

Liz says: “We needed to step back and think about where God is already at work in our communities. We really believe in missio dei – that God is already involved in mission and invites us to join in.”

This lack of a defined structure is both Path of Renewal’s unique selling point and one of its challenges. “Path of Renewal is wonderful and also a nightmare,” says Monika, “Because it doesn’t actually specify very much. It’s about giving permission for an exploration process.

It would be so much easier if we had an off-the-shelf programme that guaranteed success, but that’s not what this is about.’

“In the past what we have tried to do is buy a programme, where we know if we do

‘this’ we’ll get ‘that’,” says David. “The Path of Renewal is not like that – there are no guaranteed outcomes and it’ll be different for each congregation.”

Whatever it looks like, though, everyone agrees that it is about encouraging and unleashing the gifts and talents of the members. “This is something congregations need to do,” says Alan.

“It’s no longer viable or acceptable that one woman or one man seems to do everything and has a very dominant role in a very diverse church – diverse in its views, diverse in its needs, diverse in its understanding. You can’t just have one person doing what ministers have already done. And that’s the version of ministry that is being rejected by the people of Scotland.

“We have got many remarkable people in our congregation. Everybody has a ministry and they are all different, but I really believe that’s the way forward.

“I think to an extent the outcome is unknowable but I would like to think there will be changes in how we are thinking, the congregation’s DNA will have been changed so that we are a bottom-up congregation in which everyone has a voice, everyone is heard, and rather than being signed up or volunteered to do things they themselves will carry forward their own vision.”

David adds: “I think it’s one of those issues where we tend to measure growth by numbers, but actually I think we need to refocus. I have seen people grow in their faith, and that’s very important. Obviously I would like to see the numbers increase as well, but I think for me we start with that personal growth, and then work out how we are going to translate that through into the wider life of the congregation.

“In the longer term I am really looking for the group to take on discipling people themselves, and to provide opportunities for people to do a number of things – maybe try new forms of outreach, other ways of engaging in the community.”

David says: “I would like to see it transform our congregation from being folks who say ‘we have a Sunday service, you come to us’ to being people who say ‘we’ll come and see you where you are’.

One thing that’s clear though is that Path of Renewal is for the long haul. Alan suggests the three year process will just be about getting the church into a different frame of thinking.

Liz says: “We think probably about the three-year mark we will be starting to see the cultural change.

“It’s based on biblical models. We have been learning from the experience of the Israelites and Moses: 40 years and not even seeing the Promised Land. Yet all the while God was preparing the people to be the People of God in a different culture and context.

“We have to convince people it’s worth hanging on to see the results. We are not going to be able to come back at the end of the three years and say ‘here’s the growth statistics’. But congregations have really grasped that this is something different and they will need to be patient and give their ministers more leeway.

“ When we see people more confident in their relationship with God and willing to discern how God is inviting them to be involved in the places where they live and work, we will know that the culture in our churches has begun to shift.

“When we see people more confident in their relationship with God and willing to discern how God is inviting them to be involved in the places where they live and work, we will know that the culture in our churches has begun to shift.”