13 October 2026

Jody Stowell is an Anglican vicar in Harrow. She ministers in what she describes as a ‘small church’. She defines this smallness as a church with a worshipping community numbering a hundred or less. This categorisation would cover most of the congregations in the Church of Scotland.

The main thrust of her argument in 'Bruised Reeds and Mustard Seeds',  is that small churches have gifts to offer which are not valued by the institutional church. Her main bone of contention is that the Church of England is riddled with anxiety and has passed this anxiety down to the small churches.

The strategies which she has seen in her denomination are replicated in our own – a focus on numbers whether its congregational statistics, the numbers of vocations, the numbers on a financial spreadsheet. It’s all about data analysis rather than our ministry to love God and to love our neighbour.

There is an assumption that the bigger churches are the successful churches and the institution has been taken over by the mantra, ‘The survival of the richest!’ We have seen this recently in the Kirk where the charges eligible to call a minister are the charges who can afford one.

Stowell makes several points. Here are two. The first is that death and resurrection is a central theological concept. The existential threat to the institutional church should not make us afraid. We should reframe it as an opportunity to face this death and look forward to the resurrection.

The second is that vulnerability is a constituent part of what it means to be human and to live in a community. In denying this, the institutional church ‘prevents the framing of vulnerability as a gift and something through which God saves us – if Jesus had not been vulnerable, he could not have died.’