Formed for Faithfulness 2: The Turn Toward Managed Renewal

In the opening essay of this series, I suggested that Anglicanism’s¹ present fatigue isn’t best understood as a failure of effort or commitment. If anything, we’ve become too frenetic. What’s missing isn’t hard work, but confidence that the Christian life we’re offering is coherent, demanding, and worth inhabiting over time.

In this essay, I step further back to explore how a tradition that once assumed slow, corporate formation came to be shaped by projects, strategies, and initiatives—and how this shift has altered our common life. Anglicanism didn’t originally understand itself as an institution competing for attention, but as a polity: a people formed together through common prayer, moral discipline, and doctrine over time. Formation wasn’t an individual achievement but participation in a Body. Richard Hooker trusted that truth would form the Church through worship and patient reasoning rather than constant assertion. George Herbert and Jeremy Taylor imagined parish life as a slow schooling of love and obedience, effective precisely because it was shared.

In that world, the Church didn’t need to explain itself endlessly, nor did it need to grab attention. It was simply there—embedded in place, time, and habit. Doctrine wasn’t constantly articulated; it was gradually absorbed. The Church didn’t measure its success; it trusted its practices.

That confidence has largely evaporated.

The Turn to Projects

Organisations often reveal what they truly value when they’re under pressure. This shows itself less in mission statements or strategic plans than in the language they default to when things feel fragile or threatened. In Anglican life today, that language is unmistakably project-shaped. We speak of initiatives, priorities, delivery plans, outcomes, and impact. Even our most hopeful conversations seem to suggest that renewal can be engineered if only the right programme were applied with sufficient energy.

It’s wearying, and for many people, deeply uninspiring.

This evolution didn’t happen because clergy or congregations lost their faith—though many would admit we’ve struggled to pass it on. It happened because Anglicanism now inhabits a cultural and political landscape profoundly different from the one that shaped its instincts. Christianity no longer supplies the background assumptions of public life. The moral ecology that once sustained shared belief, practice, and expectation is now fragmented and contested. At the same time, we live in a consumer society organised around choice, mobility, and experience. Participation is voluntary. Commitment has to be continually justified.

In such a world, faith is easily recast as a lifestyle option—something mainly for the middle class to sample, adapt, or abandon. The pandemic merely exposed what was already true for many: Christian practice had become less a way of life that forms you over time and more an experience that must continually prove its therapeutic or social value.

Like other mainstream churches, Anglican churches worked hard to adapt to this new world. Clergy and congregations experimented, responded creatively to local needs and expectations, and tried to translate the gospel into unfamiliar contexts. Yet adaptation always reshapes self-understanding. Gradually, Anglican life came to be imagined less as a long, corporate process of formation and more as a series of challenges to be addressed, problems to be solved, and targets to be met—often within fixed funding cycles and short planning horizons.

This didn’t happen overnight. It can be traced through successive attempts to respond to decline, one of the earliest being the Decade of Evangelism in the 1990s. Such initiatives are, by design, time-limited: organised, resourced, and evaluated over a set period before attention shifts elsewhere. Some bear fruit; most fizzle out. What remains is a trail of discontinued programmes, abandoned frameworks, and shelves of unused printed material. The cumulative effect isn’t renewal but exhaustion, as energy is repeatedly poured into a curious hybrid of managerialism and revivalism in a church historically shaped by the slow work of liturgical formation. We’ve become like Mrs Bennet from Pride and Prejudice, whose endless social manoeuvring mistakes visibility and activity for the conditions under which lasting commitment actually forms.

A Project-driven Church

One emblematic moment in this transition in the Church of England was the Mission-shaped Church initiative of the early 2000s. It was ambitious, well-resourced, and confidently framed, inviting the Church to imagine new forms of life in response to changing cultural conditions. It generated real goods: fresh thinking, new communities, and a renewed emphasis on mission that many Evangelicals and pioneers rightly value.

Yet it also revealed the limits of a project-driven imagination. Critics from across the Church have noted that its ecclesiology was often thin, that innovation could become an end in itself, and that contextual creativity sometimes substituted for sustained formation. Without deeper attention to what the Church is, such initiatives risk mirroring the culture’s preference for novelty.

Since then, project-thinking has hardened into habit. The language of priorities and deliverables has grown more insistent, while the slow, often hidden work of formation has receded from view. Anglican life increasingly measures itself by what can be demonstrated in the short term, rather than by what might be learned, embodied, and sustained over decades.

The Language of Power

As confidence in formation waned, Anglicanism began borrowing its categories from elsewhere. We learned to speak of reach, growth, engagement, and impact—not because we wanted to become businesses, but because these are the dominant grammars of authority today. In a world that no longer grants the Church cultural influence by default, management-speak is the language that signals seriousness, competence, and the capacity to act.

It’s, quite simply, the language of power.

Purpose now has to be stated explicitly and justified publicly. Meaning has shifted from inhabitation to articulation, from formation to performance. What was once trusted to emerge through common prayer and shared life now has to be made visible, measurable, and explicit—often through short-term initiatives designed to demonstrate effectiveness. The irony is that this effort to secure relevance frequently hollows out the very depth it seeks to discover.

This shift places a subtle but relentless strain on those who care most deeply about the Church. Clergy are asked to inhabit opposing roles at once: to innovate without unsettling, to preserve without stagnating, and to generate momentum within cumbersome bureaucracies. Lay leaders feel a similar pressure. They’re urged to give time, energy, and goodwill freely, often without a clear sense of what all that effort is meant to add up to. Much faithful labour is spent simply keeping things afloat.

In a consumer society, activity is reassuring. Launching projects creates a sense of agency, especially when coupled with an inherited hope for revival: the belief that if the right strategy can be found, energy will return and growth will follow. Managerial planning quietly absorbs revivalist expectation.

How Renewal Became a Project

What’s striking is that many of the instincts now dominating Anglican life began as sincere attempts to recover something vital.

For several decades, there’s been a strong emphasis on action: proclamation, service, engagement, mission. This arose from a genuine and reasonable concern that the Church had become complacent. Ministry needed to be revitalised and shared. The laity needed to be released into their vocation. Yet over time, activity has become its own end, as managerial confidence merges with revivalism in the hope of sparking renewal. When this fails to happen, the response is usually to redouble effort rather than pause to ask what might be missing.

Alongside this developed an equally strong emphasis on continuity and institutional survival. This too emerged from loss: the erosion of shared belief, confidence, and cultural support. Energy was poured into keeping churches open, maintaining buildings, and ensuring that at least something still happened in them. In many places, this has resulted in churches that do little more than offer occasional worship, as though the bare fact worship were enough to justify the church’s presence. The building remains open but with little expectation of meaningful formation.

Both instincts respond to real pressures by seeking either to foster or protect something precious. Yet both risk becoming substitutes for a shared way of life rather than expressions of one. When action is detached from formation, it exhausts. When structure is detached from formation, it hardens into mere preservation. Neither approach inspires faith over the long term.

The cost of this isn’t only organisational fatigue, though there’s plenty of that. It’s a spiritual hollowing-out. When the Church is experienced primarily as a sequence of projects, faith becomes provisional. Nothing is allowed to settle.

Formation, by contrast, depends on patience. It requires repetition, stability, and trust in slow processes whose effects are often hidden. Projects demand momentum and visible outcomes. When the Church confuses the two, projects disappoint and formation never quite happens. Eventually, a corrosive apathy sets in. People don’t resist new initiatives; they simply stop expecting much from them.

There’s a sad irony here. Anglicanism could embody something priceless in our restless, consumer-driven age: a way of being Christian that doesn’t depend on urgency, intensity, or constant novelty. It could offer seriousness without anxiety, stability without stagnation, and faith rooted in place and time. That gift hasn’t disappeared. But it’s being obscured by the fear that unless the Church looks visibly busy or demonstrably effective, it’s failing.

The question, then, isn’t whether the Church should plan, organise, or adapt. Of course it must. Nor is this a call not to undertake projects and initiatives. These are necessary. But we need also to ask why Anglicanism has become so strongly characterises by short-termism and activity. Are we trying to form disciples, or are we merely furiously digging our own graves?

Those questions can’t be answered without first attending to what we have lost, not only internally but publicly. For much of its history, Anglicanism assumed a public role that made slow formation plausible and patient practices intelligible. As that public role slipped away, the Church didn’t simply lose influence; it lost the conditions that once allowed it to be patient.

To understand how we arrived here—and what recovery might require—we need next to examine what happened when Anglicanism lost its public voice.

1. In the UK, people usually refer simply to “the Church” rather than “Anglicanism.” The latter is used here only as a convenient collective term for the Churches of England, Wales, and Ireland, as well as the Scottish Episcopal Church. I hope, though, that it has some applicability to other churches in the Anglican Communion.