Formation for Faithfulness (5): Obstacles and Opportunities for Renewal

Why Renewal Feels So Elusive, and Why It May No Longer Be Impossible

By this point in the series, the shape of our Anglican malaise should be clear enough. Parishes are busy, clergy are often over-stretched, initiatives proliferate, and yet the crucial work of forming faithful Christians seems increasingly impossible. The problem isn’t laziness or indifference, nor a lack of moral concern. It’s more an unsettling apprehension that we lack a common life vibrant enough to attract and form people into communities capable of lasting faithfulness.

That anxious loss of confidence shows itself in a drift from an inhabited faith to a performative one as short-term projects replace gradual formation and centralised initiatives proliferate. Like a carrot held in front of a donkey, the promise of renewal is dangled in front of us but only rarely enjoyed. Our desperation also appears in the Church’s struggle to speak authoritatively to a world largely indifferent to its voice, and in the growing moral intensity of internal disputes no longer held within a broadly shared theological framework. The Church still works hard and cares deeply. What it increasingly lacks is trust in the formative wisdom that once made that work intelligible, fruitful, and sustaining—a wisdom for forming Christians corporately, not merely for guiding them individually.

The question, then, isn’t whether renewal is needed, but why it feels so difficult in practice—why even those who recognise that something has fundamentally gone wrong feel so unable to do much about it.

The Primary Obstacles to Renewal

Beneath these familiar features of contemporary Anglicanism lies a more pervasive influence: most of us breathe the air of an affluent consumer culture that shapes our expectations and judgements long before it’s recognised as a rival formation.

Affluent societies are organised around choice, preference, mobility, and self-curation. We learn to assess experiences by how well they align with our tastes and emotional needs. Institutions are expected to serve competently, adapt quickly, and justify their demands. Joined to a culture of expressivism—where authenticity is measured by whether something ‘feels true to me’—faith is easily reframed as a personal project rather than a shared way of life. We relate to the Church less as a community that claims us, and more as a set of services we access when needed. We become loyal customers rather than ‘members one of another’ in Christ Jesus (Rom. 12.5) .

Within this frame, style eclipses substance. Style is immediate and affirming; substance only discloses itself slowly. Worship becomes something we attend and appraise, like a play or concert, rather than something that binds and reorders us collectively. Practices are judged by how they enable us to express ourselves rather than by their power to school us in holiness. Affirmation feels like compassion; challenge like threat. Even theological disagreement is filtered through affect—truth determined by whether it feels liberating, threatening, or just distasteful.

Fundamentally, formation is moral apprenticeship: the gradual learning together of what to love, resist, and dedicate one’s life to. It unfolds through repetition, shared expectation, and the acceptance of practices not of our own making. In its classical Christian sense, formation names a way of learning to live with others within a redemptive mystery we know as Christ.

A Church shaped by consumer habits inevitably struggles here. Consumer culture trains us to expect institutions to serve our needs, justify their demands, and treat dissatisfaction as a prompt for change. These instincts don’t disappear at the church door. Over time, they erode the possibility of a common life in which people are patiently transformed through belonging. Formation therefore requires resistance to consumer instincts through practices stable enough to reshape desire and loyalty over time.

As confidence in Scripture, tradition, and shared practice weakens, authority finds a new throne among individuals. What could once be received must now be constantly explained; what resists explanation is negotiated; what can’t be negotiated hardens into conflict. Authority becomes less a shared trust and more a mechanism of management. The result isn’t freedom but fatigue: a common life sustained only by endless negotiation, ever vulnerable to fragmentation.

Against that background, the obstacles to renewal become clearer.

1. The erosion of patience necessary for formation

Formation depends on repetition, stability, and time. Yet our current systems reward novelty and immediacy. Clergy feel this pressure constantly. Work that can be measured or that generates income crowds out work that must be trusted. Prayer, catechesis, and pastoral presence are easiest to erode because they can’t be quantified. When the Church is organised around episodic demand, nothing is allowed to ripen.

2. The bureaucratic strain placed on inherited forms

Anglican institutions—especially the parish—were shaped to sustain Christian life through presence, habit, and enduring relationships. They assumed a shared cultural horizon that no longer exists. As that support has waned, these forms have been pressed into increasingly bureaucratic moulds. What once fostered a thick communal life is now required to justify itself continually, leaving little space for the slow work of formation.

3. A moral climate that valorises rigidity over discernment

Anglicanism now exists in a culture where moral and ideological positions are often treated as absolute, leaving little room for patience, concession, or shared learning. Conviction is prized over discernment, and compromise is too readily cast as weakness or even betrayal. Within the Church, this makes renewal difficult: disagreements take on existential weight precisely because they’re no longer held within a formative common life capable of bearing them.

4. Authority without formation among those who lead

Those entrusted with most authority must now navigate complex bureaucracies, legal demands, and relentless pressure—all necessary for keeping institutions afloat, but not necessarily involving skills for cultivating communal formation. Renewal is often expected to flow downward from those who have had little space for continuing formation themselves. Leadership becomes bureaucratic before it’s ecclesial, and renewal is imagined structurally rather than as the enlivening of shared life.

5. A pervasive distrust of authority

Formation depends on guidance, teaching, and moral expectation that isn’t coercive or merely procedural. Yet authority is too rarely experienced as a source of confidence, loyalty, or love. Clergy are responsible for everything, but trusted with very little. Consequently, the Church often turns formation into packaged programmes and external courses. But true formation can’t be delivered on demand; it grows only within the life of the Body of Christ, sustained through enduring practices, steadfast relationships, and patience.

Opportunities in the Present Age

Taken together, these obstacles explain why renewal so often feels elusive. The Church doesn’t lack insight; many see the problems clearly. What it lacks are the conditions—time, trust, patience, authority, and resistance to consumer formation—required to turn those insights into enduring practices. Yet the present moment also offers opportunities for renewal.

1. Widespread social anxiety and exhaustion

Institutions that once provided meaning, stability, and belonging—political parties, professions, neighbourhoods, even families—have weakened or fragmented. Digital life encourages constant social comparison and moral outrage while undermining physical presence. Loneliness is becoming endemic as social trust erodes. The pressure to be endlessly resilient, adaptable, and self-defining leaves many depleted rather than empowered.

2. A growing search for meaning amid nihilism

In a time shaped by widespread nihilism, many feel the emptiness of life devoid of enduring purpose or moral guidance. They’re drawn to communities that offer real connection, shared purpose, and a sense of something greater than themselves. They long for places that can sustain them through uncertainty, hardship, and the challenges that seem too great for anyone to face alone.

3. Renewed openness to disciplined ways of life

In this context, Anglicanism’s deepest gifts may appear less antiquated than they once did. A tradition that doesn’t require constant self-expression, that treats time as something to be inhabited rather than filled, and that offers practices capable of carrying belief when individuals falter answers questions many people feel but cannot articulate. What once felt restrictive may now feel mercifully stable.

4. The Church’s local, embodied presence

While national authority has waned, parish life remains woven into ordinary communities through worship, pastoral care, schools, and rites of passage. In a society marked by institutional withdrawal and social fragmentation, this patient, embodied presence is itself formative. It nurtures belonging that’s given rather than constructed, shapes identity through shared practice rather than self-assertion, and sustains a community that endures, day by day, long after initial enthusiasm has waned.

5. Disenchantment with progress as a theological opening

The collapse of the assumption that history naturally bends toward the good has been destabilising, but it also clears space for a more truthful faith—one less dependent on optimism, success, or affirmation. Anglicanism, at its best, has never promised a better future. It has promised faithfulness. In an age wary of grand narratives of improvement, that promise may once again sound credible.

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None of this guarantees renewal. Anxiety can drive people towards anger or distraction as easily as towards faith, and the Church itself isn’t immune to impulse. But the present moment is an unsettled time of transition. Such moments are precisely when deep formation once again becomes imaginable—not as an optional extra, but as the Church’s defining work.

The question is whether Anglicanism can resist the forces that are shaping it—consumerism, expressivism, corporatisation—long enough to trust its own inherited wisdom and practices once more. Are we bold enough to recover a common life that forms Christians together, imaginative enough to see our inherited practices as gifts rather than constraints, and faithful enough to reorder our life so that belonging, formation, and witness can truly flourish in our day?

In the next instalment of this series, I’ll begin to try to answer that question.