Church, Community and Change: Methods of Congregational Review and the Reality of the Congregation-Community Relationship Revised version of paper given at ARNOVA Conference, November 2002, Montréal, Canada Presented to BIAPT Conference, July 2003, Cardiff Dr Helen Cameron, Visiting Fellow, Centre for Civil Society, London School of Economics Introduction I teach on a Masters programme in Consultancy for Ministry and Mission that educates people who work as consultants with congregations. One of my lectures is on tools for congregational review. It looks at the various tools and packs produced over the last fifteen years to help congregations in the UK reflect and plan. When I gave the lecture last year, once student assured me that, in her diocese, congregations were ‘bored with review and wanting to know what was next’. It occurred to me that it would be interesting to see what impact these review tools had had on congregations in a particular town, and whether they shaped the congregations’ relationship with their context or community. In conducting fieldwork in an English town, I found that only one of the twelve congregations I approached had used a published review tool. Some of them seemed unaware of the process of congregational review. The purpose of this paper therefore is to analyse the review tools and analyse the change processes in the case study congregations. By comparing the two, I hope to understand the reasons why the tools had made so little impact and to reflect further upon the realities of the relationship between English congregations and their communities. The paper is shaped by four academic contexts, each of which I wish to argue is relevant to the congregation-community relationship. The first context is congregational studies, the second, research on organisational change, particularly that relevant to voluntary organisations and associations. The third context is practical theology and the fourth, community studies. The paper proceeds by reviewing relevant literature from these four academic contexts. Then the research method is described. Data on the review tools and case study congregations is presented. Discussion of the data and conclusions follow. The paper will show that in many ways the available review tools fail to reflect the reality of congregational life and instead reflect the optimism of the generic organisational change literature. The low profile of the limited literature on congregational studies, practical theology, voluntary sector studies and community studies is reflected in the practice investigated. The congregations seemed semi-detached from their communities, focusing on sustaining existing activities in a context of decline. There were two exceptions to this – one growing congregation and one congregation that did not see its