THE Church needs to plant churches to “let Jesus out”, the Archbishop of Canterbury told a conference last week.
MultiplyX 2021, hosted online by the Gregory Centre for Church Multiplication, secured an endorsement for an urgent programme of church-planting from both Archbishop Welby and the Archbishop of York, the Rt Revd Stephen Cottrell, who emphasised the historical precedent for the work.
“Every church we ever go to has been planted at some point or another,” Archbishop Welby said. “In every generation, if we are going to make a difference, we have to get the church out. And we have to get out of the church as it is normally seen. . . To quote Pope Francis, we have locked Jesus into the church and we need to open the church and let him out.” New churches “go out because there is no choice, because there is no one coming in”.
He diagnosed a need for culture change. “It’s a new discipline for quite a lot of people, Anglicans, that we are meant to witness. That we are not meant to leave Jesus inside the church when we go out, and pick him up again when we come back in the following Sunday but to go with him. . .”
Good write up of multiplyx in the @ChurchTimes , encouraging Christians of every tradition to participate in planting & pioneering, to remember Christ's work in the world calling us to be the Church in the present for the future @MadsDavies @stmellitus https://t.co/fhEHklwgqt
— Fr Simon Cuff (@frsimoncuff) July 2, 2021