Anglican Diocese of Perth

Northern Region

Bishop Farran's Sermons 2004

A sermon preached by Bishop Brian Farran at S. Nicholas Church Carine-Duncraig
Pentecost 14, 2004
Theme: A vision for S. Nic’s as a Community Church

Since breaking my wrist twelve weeks ago, I have spent a significant amount of time in waiting rooms - doctors’, radiologists’, occupational therapists’. The quality of the magazines available in these waiting rooms is very similar. The magazines are out of date, focus on the social life of Hollywood starlets, and are full of diets.

According to these glossy magazines, counting calories is a contemporary fascination, maybe an obsession. I can recall the first forms of diet substances that were marketed in supermarkets. These were biscuits named Limits. They were a bit salty and sandwiched an unpalatable lemon substance.

Limits were supposed to live up to the name. These biscuits were to limit the number of calories you ingested, thus reduce your weight, and allow you to become a human pencil. It was about this time that I promoted an alternative view on life - chunky is spunky! However, my modest promotion did not really catch on, did not rob Limits of its market share, nor indeed the growing market share of its descendant dietary substances!

Strangely, the diocese of Perth has practised a kind of dietary approach to parish development. A report was commissioned by Archbishop Sambell in the early seventies that concluded that there ought to be an operational ratio for parishes. The Floate Report detailed that there should be one priest and one parish church for every ten thousand people in Perth. Since the delivery of that report, the Archbishops have steadfastly used its premises to develop new parishes.

Of course, society has changed greatly since the early 1970s. The number of people who declare on the Census that they have no religion has increased markedly, the number indicating some connection with the Anglican Church has fallen, and the actual number of Anglicans in Church on Sundays has declined in Perth by 9% in the past decade. All this has happened whilst independent churches have arrived on the scene and flourished. I think of churches like Riverview and North Side City Church in Hepburn Heights. Indeed, the large independent churches in Perth have a greater combined Sunday attendance than do all the Anglican parishes.

Consequently, the vast majority of Anglican parishes are termed ‘small churches’. About 75% of all Anglican Churches in Australia have 75 or less present at Sunday worship. There are serious consequences to this level of attendance.

For instance, the number of people available in such congregations to teach in Sunday School is very limited. In fact, there are some congregations where there are almost no children. Sunday School classes are virtually impossible to hold regularly because of the small numbers, the wide age range, and the inconsistency in attendance. Further, often the physical facilities are inadequate for housing such classes. In one church I stepped through a children’s class in the foyer on my way into the worship area.

Such small centres are like the disappearing corner store. Such parishes struggle under limits. Music, education, worship, administration, outreach, community connection all are limited simply because there is only so much that 75 people can manage. Indeed, without being unkind, these parishes function more as clubs for the insiders than as missions for the outsiders.


This functioning runs counter to the thrust of the gospels and to the energy of the New Testament. In the teaching and practice of Jesus, the church is for the outsiders - the lost, the least, the left out. Such people are the church’s priority, at least according to the most famous of Luke’s stories like the lost sheep. The shepherd, you recall, leaves the 99 and goes after the one lost sheep! Whereas, the expectation has developed that the clergy will stay with the 99 and regret the lost one!

Since I became bishop of this burgeoning Northern Region, I have sought to develop possibilities of large parishes - parishes that have 300 or more worshippers each Sunday. In fact, in my first initial attempt to excite about this possibility I identified eight such parishes that given intentionality, dedication and persistence as well as missional skill might grow to that size. Of course, 300-500 is a long way short of the 4,300 that attend Riverview over a weekend every weekend.

Now I am not succumbing to a corporation infected thinking. I believe that we require various sized churches in this Northern Region in order to minister effectively. However, it would be beneficial to have at least one church that hosted congregations of 300 - 500 worshippers each Sunday. Why?

Such a congregation could offer quality educational programmes for all age groups that ensured good Christian formation of everyone. Our educational standards in our parishes overall are poor. Biblical illiteracy rates are high in Anglican Churches. Intelligent reading of the Bible as a primary source for the formation of our lives is not that general.

I mounted a campaign after the May Regional Assembly to promote the serious study of Matthew’s Gospel in Term 4 as a preparation for listening to Matthew’s Gospel throughout 2005. Thus far about 60 people have signed up for this course. 60 people sounds impressive until you aggregate that number and realise it is less than two persons per parish!

This parish does have the potential to enrich greatly the lives of many, many families through its already established ministries. Your music enhances the worship. You do not have to stagger through the music or excuse its quality. Your pastoral partners programme, the children’s ministries, the Alter service for young adults are all very significant. I cannot think of any other parish in this Region, nor in the Diocese, that has such developed and attractive ministries.

At this point of parish development is the time, the opportune time, to extend these ministries further. Research into congregations reveals that unless congregations re-develop themselves at a point of growth, they decline. This parish is at such a point of decision - either grow or without an expansive vision, you will decline. The data is visibly around us in other parishes that have not been energized by vision and have declined.

Such congregations tend to blame other circumstances. The reality is, however, that whatever the external circumstances, these congregations failed to vision for their future. They did not seize their opportunities. They forgot their foundational story as a missionary movement. They contracted into being worship clubs with their focus on the insiders and not on the outsiders. Sadly, they misread the gospel imperatives.

If you are thinking that my proposals seem unchurchy, then recall the thrust of those two peculiarly Lukan stories from Jesus about careful calculation. Jesus acted intentionally. His was not a hit-and-miss mission. There was determination, decisiveness and intention about what Jesus did and said. His community (the church) cannot be and do otherwise!

Let me make some suggestions about your possible future.


First, have a big vision, an exciting vision, a vision impregnated with features of the Gospel and with your own foundational story. One facet of your foundational story is that you did not hoard what you were given - you intentionally gave away 11% of your income. That laid an important spiritual foundation that has shaped your spirituality as a church and your expectations as a church. I would encourage you to return to and live from that foundational story of generosity.

The vision of growing to a Community Sized Church of 300-500 worshippers each Sunday is yet another aspect of that same generosity. Each parishioner will have to give up something in order that others may discover what is radiant for you in membership of this church. This is an ultimate gospel test -do we clutch at our faith like a small child not yet used to sharing lollies, or do we extend the fellowship of this place to the others not yet here?

In order to allow many, many others to come here and worship, belong, be educated, be cared for, be empowered for ministry, some structural changes will need to happen. Changes like recognizing that the building has reached its limits in seating the numbers you already have at 9.00 a.m. Being full (and that is about 80% occupancy) means that people can be deterred from coming back. After all, just like cinemas the front seats of churches are not usually occupied!

What might you do about this happy problem?

Well, you might expand the building, or begin another service that will require a similar level of staffing and attention as do the existing services, or you might plant a congregation in another place, maybe in another Anglican Church. This might mean that the planted congregation relates closely to S. Nic’s, uses the dynamics that S. Nic’s has, but is physically distant on a Sunday, but integrated in leadership, programmes and administration.

Or even more boldly (and I do not want to scare you so that nothing happens), you might start a second campus of this church in another place using an on-line video-link as do some very enterprising American churches. These second-campus churches have local live worship and the sermon is beamed in from the ‘mother’ church, using the gifts of the senior priest whose preaching ministry has been and continues to be the glue for the growth of the church.

If you think that such worship might be odd, just consider how engrossed you become when watching television or a movie in the cinema -are you not present to such experiences, so present that you become absorbed in them?

We need an imaginative leap in this diocese in how to be church now. We need quality churches that mirror the quality of experience we receive and expect in all other areas of our lives. It is not improper to expect quality worship, worship that uplifts, that connects with the wonder of God. It is not impertinent to want quality Christian formation for children, given the quality of education that they receive Monday-Friday. It is not selfish to expect music that is culturally attuned to our age.

This parish alone in this Region at this moment is the one place where this can happen expansively for the benefit of the many, many others who think that church is a nerdy activity. This is a parish that does not have to be limited. The Northern Region needs this parish to become a landmark parish of possibility so that those other seven identified places can be inspired to undertake the vision that energizes this place.

See the possibilities. Calculate what is required (as the gospel stories instruct), use your imaginations. Some things can only happen with an imaginative leap into the future, when the natural limits are defied. I encourage you into such imaginative leaping!

Give up limit thinking -thinking that is as unappetising as those distasteful dietary biscuits. Join with the thinking of the first evangelists who imagined their small church being so enlarged that it reached to the ends of the earth!