I am now starting to work on planing a church in my town so I don't have to drive 50 miles each way to an Anglican Church. I ask for your prayers in getting this off the ground.
We were thinking of doing a Bible study, but this is a very post-Christian city so you can’t rely on anyone having reasons to care about the Bible. Instead we are going one level deeper and starting it all with a fellowship where people can just come in and hang out together, form a community, talk about God, why a Bible exists; the real basics. But as long as we do it as a community, we think we’re off to a start.
How does this work? I mean, to have a church you want to also have a priest, right? So, is it your hope that you can get enough people together so that the diocese will take notice and some priest will consider coming there? I'm curious about the mechanics of this.
My jurisdiction encourages motivated folks like our two friends above to start having morning or evening prayer in their home. Once they've got a nucleus of people doing that, the clergy situation will be worked out. The Canon Missioner is also in charge of identifying postulants. But if it is clear the founder of the plant is not a candidate for holy orders -for whatever reason- calls start going out to the handful of ministers that are free to move around.
The priest in a neighboring town is wanting me to gather a group of at least 10-12 people. He will then come down on Sunday' s or Saturdays to help us out and start things off.
One thing I have observed is that many church plants rush to get a building of some kind. This often leads to getting the wrong building and then you're dissatisfied with it after a year. I have a colleague who just relaunched his plant because he got the wrong building the first go around. You had to be an expert at land navigation to find the place. It was over a hundred years old and perpetually having some kind of problem with the HVAC. And the bathrooms were outside. The place never took off and he languished in a lease for a year. Now that he's got a better spot he's seeing visitors on the regular.
You need a priest to have a fully functioning church. You DON'T need a priest to start a new church plant. There are many things that needed to build a community before you get to the Communion-every-Sunday stage: regular meetings for fellowship, prayer, bible study, educating/training lay leaders, engaging in mission/outreach/evangelism in an identified community or area... Having a clergyman on hand or nearby is a bonus, but not necessary to any of those things. Once you start holding a weekly Communion service a lot of people feel like they've "made it" and the work is "done", so when it comes to planting a new church you want to hold off that step until you've got a critical mass of people - the usual recommendation I've heard for the "official public Sunday launch" is 50+ people to attend it. Not that you wouldn't have less-frequent non-publicized communion services before that point. Monthly Sunday mornings, or perhaps more frequent on weekdays, would certainly be helpful for the church planting team. But until you reach that growth milestone, it's best to rely on lay leadership and the Daily Office rather than a priest and the weekly Communion.
We're too far off from an actual functional parish to need a priest yet. Even if we got up to a regular weekly Bible study, we'd still be in the clear. In short, there's a lot you can do for church growth/planting that doesn't depend on holy orders.