Sharing God's Blessing: How to renew the local church

By Robin Greenwood

A tried-and-tested resource for the renewal of the local church. Faced with the unsustainability of many inherited patterns of church, the temptation may be to fall into despondency rather than seeking to regenerate patterns of mission and ministry. This book is the result of a two-year research project aimed at enabling local churches to regain a sense of confidence through exploring God's blessing and how that might be shared with the communities they serve. In Part One, Robin Greenwood explores the meaning of blessing and the power of face-to-face group conversations to transform church congregations. Part Two of the book contains outlines for five guided conversations for change on the theme of blessing. Part Three contains case study material of how this material has been used in different contexts, including for Mission Action Planning (MAP).

• Language: English
• Publisher: SPCK
• Release date: Jan 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9780281072163

Robin Greenwood

Robin Greenwood, Visiting Fellow at St John's College, Durham University, is a practical ecclesiologist, who over four decades has held posts in parishes, cathedrals and training teams. His most recent book is Sharing God's Blessing: How to renew the local church. His present work includes writing and consultancy to local churches and leaders.

Book preview

Introduction: purpose and leading themes

I believe we can change the world if we start listening to one another again. Simple, honest, human conversation. Not mediation, negotiation, problem-solving, debate or public meetings. Simple, truthful conversation where we each have a chance to speak, we each feel heard and we each listen well.

(Wheatley 2002, p. 3)

Churches that are alert and eager to serve God’s liberating action in the world can’t help but move from crisis to crisis. Chaos will be routine; stability an occasional luxury. Churches that consciously live in God’s generous freedom don’t take this amiss but expect every moment to be a critical point at which to be stretched through discerning God’s purposes and gifts. This book is offered as a resource to churches, regionally and locally, in a time of reorientation. It takes wise and creative blessing as a leading theme in the continued search for transformative ways of being Church for the sake of the kingdom of God. Faced with the unsustainability of many inherited patterns of Church, the temptation is to fall into pathos rather than seek to regenerate patterns of mission and ministry to transform people and places. The title Sharing God’s Blessing is a reminder of how much the rich scriptural concept of blessing is urgently needed at this time. It offers a counterbalance to reductionist notions and practices of community and leadership. This is not to make a naïve connection of blessing with freedom from pain, poverty or illness. Rather it is an invitation to put the uncertain conditions of human living within the wider horizon of the risen Jesus’ promise that in the gifts of the Holy Spirit there is no limit to the great things his followers will do. Fertile churches know how deeply they are blessed and the abundance that flows through a life of blessing God. Blessing is the power for living to the full.

As will emerge, I also write from the conviction that consultancy or companionship in church conversations, with the particular insights of Participatory Action Research and an Appreciative Inquiry approach, has potential to support a renewed expectation of experiencing life, not as demoralizing or dependency-creating but as within the energy field of God’s blessing. For an overview of answers to the question ‘Why Action Research?’, see the edited collection of experience, common themes and commitments by Mary Brydon-Miller (2003), Director of the University of Cincinnati’s Action Research Centre. Participative and unpredictably mutual understandings of ‘blessing’ – between God, creation, humanity, churches, societies and people – offer a disruptive and healing alternative to the muted panic so frequently endemic in churches today.

This book exists because of the privilege I have had, as William Leech Research Fellow, of walking closely with a cluster of churches, ecumenically, in the North-East of England, and beyond. The fruits of this research are offered to all leaders and leadership teams seeking to know how churches might live more purposively and gracefully for God’s coming reign. I understand by ‘leaders’ all in publicly tested and commissioned church roles and all who attempt to follow their baptismal calling and sending within everyday work or in the building up of God’s people. My intention is to encourage readers to join the company of ‘tempered radicals’. By this I mean those who persistently demand that churches make a better job of our Christian life, gathered and dispersed, for the sake of the kingdom, but mostly from a deep affection and gratitude for what Church has given to us and a recognition of the complexities within which mainstream churches are summoned to live.

Using the book

The shape of the book is as follows:

Part 1 explores the purpose, methodology and benefits of transformational conversations on blessing. Part 2 leads groups through five structured conversations. Part 3 offers examples from experience of a variety of ways of holding church conversations, large and small, on specific occasions. It also contains some reflections by participants in this research project on the benefits of engaging with the twin themes of blessing and conversation. Its purpose is to grow confidence in embedding in church development a conversational rather than adversarial practice.

Across the world, traditional churches vary in their adaptivity to very different and new circumstances. Changing the culture and habits of being Church is proving challenging and – for some – overwhelming. This resource is designed to support the exploration of God at work in particular situations, in relation to the wider Church and world. It is an antidote to despair, hesitancy and the fearful guarding of a past inheritance.

My real desire is that you will now be convinced that you and your colleagues would benefit from reading this book together or discussing possible responses together once each has read it.

The Introduction explains why I came to write the book as I have, briefly introducing leading themes. Part 1 invites church leaders and leadership teams to engage with the theology of blessing and the possibilities for transformational conversation. Unlike discussion (which has its place sometimes), the attentive listening of conversation moves away from combative speech. Slow and respectful conversation brings us fully into presence with God, one another, society and ourselves. Here you will find encouragement and ideas to persuade your church to take time to talk together and so to grow a way of being Church as a beloved community that shares in God’s blessing of the whole creation. I recognize that the term ‘community’ always needs qualifying. It can seem naively utopian unless we notice how communities can be recognized, for example as established, emergent, potential, hierarchical, divided or transient. Scripture shows often that when people and groups respond to the invitation to become God’s people, risky – often turbulent – community emerges. The ordering together of community life as love is often characterized by chaos rather than stability. My experience is that the more churches dare to live in a chaordic ethos of praise, wonder, hospitality, face-to-face encounter, gratitude, laughter (in other words, ‘blessing’), the more easily they move beyond the habits of pathos and resistance. As they move more confidently, they naturally enter into their role as a key agent of blessing in their locality and beyond.

Part 2 – available separately on the SPCK website as a free download at – offers five structured conversations for groups to learn to listen more deeply to God and to one another, grow in a sense of their church being upheld, resolve intractable problems and be challenged by God’s blessing.

Conversation is, by definition, an emotional experience. It may involve dialogue, but above all, it will move us as people to a different emotional place than that which we occupied before the conversation. What happens subsequently is our choice. We may choose to act differently, or we may not, but we will have experienced something different.

(Lewis et al. 2008, p. 72)

Part 3 uses a variety of very different case studies of participative learning events I have devised and used as a further stimulus to embedding transformational conversation as a way of unleashing new power and confidence in local churches.

Making plans for group conversations

Chapters 6–11 offer five practical outlines to get your church started on conversations on blessing. This is an invitation to make this work in your particular locality. So the suggested outlines are not set in stone. A key intended benefit is for your church to gain confidence through working out how to use this material, how much of it and over what period of time. So this is deliberately not an off-the-peg course to be used without adaptation to local circumstances. The outlines benefit from having been ‘road-tested’ by churches and critiqued by churches of different denominations, in the UK and the USA. In Part 3 I have noted how some churches have developed their own ways of using this material.

When we merely discuss, think and plan at a surface and rational level, we are limiting our capacity to accomplish strategic goals or behavioural change. The practical organizational research of Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey suggests that doing ‘what makes sense’, however compelling as an idea, is not enough to help us cross critical thresholds: ‘We must also experience sufficient need or desire, visceral feelings – which is why we say they come from the gut’ (Kegan and Lahey 2014, p. 210).

Encountering God and one another in conversation that includes feelings and actions helps us venture into being more present, in a new transformative place, escaping ‘the tidy prison of small certainties’ (McIntosh 2008, p.