Caring about growth: a theological critique of church growth through a hermeneutic of disability

Thesis

This thesis explores ecclesiology through the lens of disability, offering a critical and constructive account of church growth within the Church of England. It argues that contemporary growth strategies, exemplified by the Renewal and Reform (RR) programme (2015), are increasingly shaped by market-oriented logics of efficiency, measurability, and optimisation. Within such frameworks, congregations become construed as units of productivity, flourishing is equated with expansion, and decline is rendered synonymous with failure. This shift risks reducing the church to a triumphant organisation oriented toward survival and replication, rather than recognising it as the pilgrim body of Christ.

Methodologically, the thesis develops a mode of critical ecclesiology pursued through comparative political theology within a cultural–linguistic register. Drawing on Nancy Eiesland’s symbolic linkage between the church and the disabled body as a theological heuristic, it analyses how ecclesial metaphors, strategic texts, and institutional discourse encode normative assumptions about strength, vitality, autonomy, and success. A hermeneutic of disability thus functions both critically—exposing the ableist and economistic assumptions implicit in dominant ecclesial imaginaries—and constructively, by reorienting theological judgment towards vulnerability, interdependence, and finitude as constitutive of ecclesial life.

The argument unfolds in two parts. First, it offers a historical and critical analysis of contemporary decline discourse in the Church of England, situating Renewal and Reform within wider patterns of institutional response while interrogating the technologisation of mission through growth-oriented language and strategy. Second, it develops a reparative ecclesiological account informed by disability theology, liberationist commitments to praxis, and care ethics, placing rival accounts of ecclesial flourishing into sustained theological comparison rather than proposing a singular alternative model.

The thesis concludes that caring about growth is insufficient unless reformed through an ethic of care. To acknowledge the church as a disabled body is to recognise decline not as loss nor growth as mere success, but both as sites in which God’s grace is disclosed through embodied, interdependent life together. In this way, the thesis contends that the Church of England may yet find renewal, not through optimisation or expansion, but through the grace of becoming a church that takes care seriously.

Authors: Warnke, D

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-avy0o1d58
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English