“Our vision is to reverse the decline in the Church of England,” says Sarah Jackson. “We don’t want our denomination to close one more church without first offering it to us to send a team to revitalize it.”
Sarah is co-pastor, with her husband Tom, of the Sunday evening service at one of London’s largest-attendance churches, Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB). She is also CEO of the church’s Revitalise Trust, whose mission is to plant, revitalize and resource churches across the United Kingdom and beyond.
HTB’s efforts have birthed 184 new churches since the Revitalise Trust was formed in 2017. Roughly one-third are revitalizations of existing congregations that had declined to a handful of people, and the rest are fresh church starts in new areas.
Unexpected Evangelistic Tools
Attendance in the Church of England has been dwindling for years, Sarah explains. “We’ve lost at least one generation, and we don’t want to lose more.”
HTB, founded in 1829, has experienced its own revitalization under vicars Sandy Millar and Nicky Gumbel (pioneer of the Alpha course), and continuing under its current vicar, Archie Coates.
“We’ve come a long way since John Wimber and others encouraged us to release the Holy Spirit, plant new churches and give away our best leaders,” Sarah says. “Our ignorant, initial reaction to the term church planting was to think he meant to begin landscape gardening on the grounds of our beautiful church buildings.”
HTB is not alone in its efforts to reverse the Church of England’s numerical decline—especially by reaching people with the gospel of Christ. But even with collaboration of others inside and outside of its denomination, HTB has made many surprising discoveries of its own along the way.
- Run Alpha Year-Round.
HTB is home to the Alpha course, an evangelistic program that creates a safe and open space for people to explore their questions about life, faith and God through a series of presentations and discussions. It typically runs 11 weeks, including a weekend retreat.
Every outreach initiative at HTB uses it at some level. “Alpha as an evangelistic tool has become a global movement for a social transformation that has helped church planting take off,” Sarah comments.
In 2024 more than 2 million people had the opportunity to explore and develop a relationship with Jesus through Alpha across 146 countries. New churches and church revitalizations sponsored by HTB tend to run Alpha several times a year.
- Deploy Retired Seniors.
Among already-established Church of England congregations the average member’s age is quite high. That means a disproportionate number of Christians are trained and experienced in ministry, but many are also retired with time on their hands and pensions to support them. HTB has been inviting this group to enter formal training to become ordained pastors.
To their delight, more than 100 are already in the one-year training process, with 300 on a waiting list.
“We’ve called them the Calebs because at age 85 Caleb told [Joshua] ‘Give me this mountain’ (Joshua 14:12),” Sarah explains. “He had the desire, strength and skill to take it.”
Calebs become self-supporting “focal” ministers trained, authorized and deployed back into their local parishes, supporting their local vicar through serving their communities and telling people about Jesus.
“If we can mobilize 8,000 in our Caleb stream over the next 10 years, it will stop the decline and perhaps even reverse it,” Sarah says.
- Train Nontraditional Leaders.
A very different group being mobilized for ministry are known as the Peters.
“It’s interesting that Jesus did not say, ‘I will build my church’ to someone like the apostle Paul who had a great pedigree, knew theology and was a great orator,” Sarah notes. “Instead, he picked Peter, who I like to think is the kind of person who’d be tattooed up to the neck today and otherwise be quite rough around the edges.”
What’s known as the Peter stream is a pathway for training those from backgrounds that are underrepresented in the Church of England, whether ethnically, socially or educationally. The program started in 2017 with four curates (apprentices), and today there are more than 100, most of whom will become a church planter or revitalizer.
Other nontraditional leaders are being identified from youth groups at parish schools or cultivated through sports ministries. Because of the nation’s current economic struggles, many schools lack extracurricular activities.
“That’s created a wide-open space for the church to go in and do music lessons, the arts or a sports program we call Bridge the Gap Football, which often includes curry nights to eat together where we can talk about the gospel and invite them to Alpha,” Sarah says.
- Demonstrate Justice.
“Whenever we plant or revitalize a church, we plant Love Your Neighbour, which is our social transformation project,” Sarah says.
Love Your Neighbour is a national alliance of more than 1,000 churches and local partners, including HTB. They work together to provide practical help, love and ongoing support to individuals and families in need. Last year, the alliance helped provide 2.4 million meals and supported over 240,000 people through food distribution, debt advice, employment training and community support. A total of 48,000 volunteers contributed to this work.
“Gen Z may be skeptical about truth claims, but they will come to our anti-trafficking project,” Sarah explains. “Quite a lot of them come to our homeless shelter or our food bank to volunteer because they’re justice-driven. At some point they ask, ‘Why do you guys do this?’ We respond by inviting them to an Alpha course, where many of them come to faith.”
- Offer Relational Support.
With a vision to transform society through stronger relationships—with self, others and God—HTB offers resources for every stage of relational life. Whether someone is single, dating, engaged or married, there’s something for everyone.
One example is HTB’s pre-marriage or marriage-refresher training. Other in-person and online courses include the Love Lessons Podcast, the Love Lessons Conference, and a monthly Relationships Roundup email. In 2024 alone, 7,303 people engaged with the courses, while the podcast reached over 562,000 listeners.
Hope for the Future
Sarah continues to marvel at the wide range of people who step forward to serve. Besides the waiting list to join the Caleb stream of older people, a diverse crowd of young adults are joining the front lines of ministry as emerging Peter leaders.
“We’ve got young men and women saying, ‘Where is that toughest, most deprived place? That’s where we want to plant a church,’” Sarah says. “Who could have imagined that level of commitment and passion in so many people? It’s clearly a move of God.”
HOLY TRINITY BROMPTON
London, England
Vicar/Senior Leader: Archie Coates
Website: HTB.org
Founded: 1829
Denomination: Church of England (Anglican)
Attendance: 4,500
Locations: 6