The Right Reverend Ric Thorpe, Bishop of Islington, is the Vice Chair of the Anglican Communion Church Planting Network (Plant Anglican), and lead bishop for Church Planting in the Church of England. He spoke to the Anglican Communion Office about his experience of evangelism and church planting ahead of the next Lambeth Call webinar on Mission and Evangelism.
What is your role in the Anglican Communion right now?
My role is to catalyse church planting and church planting thinking. Part of the work, as well, is to help churches think through how they could be growing in depth of relationship with God, their impacts on the community, but also in numbers evangelistically and that’s a part of my work that takes me inevitably to different parts of the Anglican Communion as well. I’ve worked in the Diocese of Europe, not just with Anglican churches, but with other denominations as well, with the Roman Catholic Church and with the Lutheran Church and various Pentecostal churches and also in Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand.
I’m also the Co-chair of the Anglican Communion Commission for Evangelism and Discipleship with Bishop Moon Hing from West Malaysia. That’s a new Commission that combines church planters with those who are wanting to encourage evangelism and discipleship.
What has your evangelistic journey been like?
I was brought up in the church and I knew a lot about God, but didn’t come to know him personally until 19, when I was invited to a church at university and heard the Gospel preached in a way that just clicked and I encountered Jesus personally. That turned my life upside down and right from the beginning, I was encouraged to share my faith with those around me. People on my corridor got to hear about Jesus and they all came to church. I met someone very recently who said ‘40 years ago, you helped me to become a Christian’, which is amazing, and he was someone who lived on my corridor at university.
At the end of my time at university, I was involved in a mission and the evangelist for that mission was someone called J John. He’s an Anglican evangelist and he asked if I would like to come work with him the following year. I said yes, I had a job with Unilever lined up and I delayed that a year and was J John’s driver and bag carrier, travelling to missions with him all over the country and during that time, I felt God calling me to the church at some stage in the near future. So after that, I joined Unilever and I was at the same time going to Holy Trinity Brompton in London and I was in Nicky Gumbel’s Home group, who, of course, helped develop the Alpha course. He said after a couple of years, ‘Would you like to come and join the staff?’ and I said yes.
One of the people who’d really influenced Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) was a man called John Wimber, who was leading the Vineyard movement. He was involved in church planting in America and he did a church planting conference at HTB and during that conference, I felt God saying, ‘you’re going to be involved in this and you’re going to be involved in planting lots of churches’. And I thought, ‘That’s amazing. I’d love to.’
What has influenced your understanding of ‘mission’?
I’ve been really influenced by the Great Commission of Jesus to go and make disciples of all nations. Baptising in the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit and teaching them to ‘obey everything I’ve commanded you’ and that sense of going to another place to make disciples, to baptise. That’s obviously leading people into faith and to teach them everything I’ve commanded you. Well, what do you command them? To go and make disciples and so if you’re going to a new place, making disciples, baptising and teaching, you’re forming new churches. And so I was beginning to discover the link right from the beginning of evangelism and discipleship and church planting all united together. So that’s been a very influential verse and actually seeing it in practice, seeing God do amazing things in people’s lives and seeing people coming to faith and people coming back to faith.
What is Plant Anglican?
The Most Revd Héctor Tito Zavala Muñoz is the Archbishop of Chile, in the Province of Chile. He had just been consecrated as the Archbishop of Chile as a new province and between us, we started saying, ‘Well, how can we encourage people all over the Anglican Communion to do church planting?’ In that conversation, we realised there’s so much we can learn from each other. So, we formed a church planting network. It was the Anglican Communion church planting network (ACCPN). In a nutshell, its purpose is to equip and resource church planters all over the Communion.
What are the challenges in planting churches?
I think often a church planter feels isolated because they’re doing something at the frontier of a mission field and they’re often on their own. It can be very isolating and it can be very challenging because it’s like ploughing hard soil sometimes and people have experienced loss, spiritual attack and opposition to preaching the gospel and starting new churches. What we have found is that it is a great encouragement for people in that place to have resources and stories and prayers that they can relate to and just go, “Yes, there are other people in this situation,” but also we want to pray for and encourage those who are enabling church planting. For me, it is, genuinely, really, really exciting to hear what’s going on and I want to not just be the person who hears these great stories. I want to be able to enable them to tell their stories to many other people. I think that’s just part of what we are doing, enabling people to tell other people their stories of what God is doing and bringing that inspiration to their own context.
What excites you about the Lambeth Call for Mission and Evangelism?
The exciting thing about this Call is that it is for every Christian, not just for clergy or bishops or archbishops. This is for every follower of Jesus and sometimes, as followers of Jesus, we can be quite daunted by the task. It might be that people in our families or in our communities might not appreciate our own faith in Jesus. And sometimes that’s challenged, or it’s sometimes even ridiculed or worse.
I think one of the extraordinary things about the Anglican Communion is that we experience both blessing and challenge in very, very different ways, so there might be physical persecution in one place, but it might be mental or emotional in another. We face spiritual challenges of all kinds all around the world, and so there’s a lot we can encourage each other in and pray for in this, but also we see extraordinary breakthroughs as well. So one of the things that’s so exciting in England at the moment (and I think in Western churches as well), is that there is a move of God by his Spirit where younger people are coming into churches and just saying. “I want to start coming to church”, and they know a little bit about the Christian faith because they’ve seen it online and they’ve checked out, they’ve heard sermons and they’ve done their homework, if you like, but they’re desperate for Christian community and hungry for Jesus.
This is something which is really encouraging for us, but also it’s encouraging for others as we tell that story, for other people in different places. And so I would just say that we need to be ready for these young people. We need to welcome them and be ready to share our story with them. Peter says, “be ready to give a reason for the faith that you have.” We need to be ready ourselves with our own story. We’re called to be witnesses. We’re not called to be evangelists. There are evangelists, but we’re all called to be witnesses. That means, like a witness in a court, we tell our story. When we’re asked the question, “What has God done in your life? What does Jesus mean to you?”
The Lambeth Call really is about being ready to answer that question, to be ready to give a reason for the hope that you have. I’ve seen this again and again that churches that are intentional about evangelism and mission tend to be churches that grow, whereas churches that are not intentional about evangelism and are even a little bit fearful of evangelism tend not to grow so lean into that intention, actually saying, ‘God, how can we be more effective in sharing our faith?’
One of the things that I’ve been personally inspired by is the Thy Kingdom Come movement, which is a prayer movement that’s specifically calling Christians to pray for five of their friends who aren’t Christians to come to know Jesus. It’s very simple and something anyone can do. It’s what’s behind this Call to inspire everyday people to do everyday evangelism.
