It’s early March and the heat is stifling. People mill around on the pavement of the Uniting church in Crookwell waiting for their turn to enter but there’s only standing room left inside. It’s one of their own.
It’s the fourth funeral that the 32-year-old Rev Daniel Mossfield has taken in three weeks. The emotional toll and additional workload is “taxing”, he says. The other three funerals are for community members not a part of the congregation.
“People come back to us at death, and the assumption is we’ll always be there,” he says.
Mossfield is Minister for the Word for the parishes of Goulburn and Crookwell in the southern tablelands. He was ordained in 2018, making him one of the youngest reverends in the Uniting church.
Nevertheless, he tells Guardian Australia, he has “reached my limits of what’s sustainable”.
In addition to conducting Sunday worship and overseeing the administration and planning for the two parishes consisting of 11 churches, he has a young family and is planning to apply for his doctorate after completing his Bachelor of Theology Honours last year.
He needs more support, but money is tied up by rising insurance and compliance costs. Census data shows that people living in the country identify as belonging to a religious faith at higher than average levels, but for decades people entering into institutionalised forms of worship has slowed.
Fourteen people joined Mossfield’s Crookwell congregation in 2022.
“You never feel like you’re doing your congregation justice – the frustrating thing is you can see what needs to happen to help them grow,” he says.
Mossfield is on a full-time stipend with costs shared between the parishes. In the Uniting church the stipend is paid with the church offerings. In Crookwell, income from rental properties also funds his ministry.
Churches that are underutilised are sold. The Bigga Uniting church in the southern tablelands, founded 115 years ago, was sold last year. Next to go is Kialla, and there are “intentional conversations” about several more, he says.
Mossfield will drop to a part-time stipend in Crookwell in the second-half of the year, but says he is planning on staying for four more years. He is seeking ways to generate alternative sources of income by way of a childcare facility in the rear church hall.
“When you’re facing death the conversation is inheritance and legacy,” he says “In the Christian church we proclaim resurrection, therefore we hope what we leave behind will create new life.
“I believe in the Uniting church and I want it to have a future when I finish my ministry, I want my congregation to be set up for the future.”
Failure to change
In the Anglican diocese of Bathurst, the bishop Mark Calder says less contemporary rural churches are relying on income sources outside the diocese to place ministers in parishes.
“They [Sydney Anglican churches] have geared their ministry to more modern times, whereas in the country churches have not,” he says. “The ministry has been in such a decline because of a failure to change.”
In the diocese between West Wyalong, Cobar, Bourke, and Coonabarabran, 12 of the 28 parishes were without ministers.
“In Cobar or Bourke there will be a minister who travels from Nyngan or Dubbo to help those churches and to take a service once a month, and to do a funeral,” Calder says. The Cobar position has only recently been filled – it’s the first time they’ve had a resident minister in 20 years.
It would take a congregation of 50 or 60 to pay a full-time priest an $100,000 stipend annually, Calder says.
Coonabarabran currently has a full-time minister but other parishes are not so lucky. In Blayney in the central west, the Rev Bec Choi, attends three days a week for a $50,000 stipend funded partly by Sydney Anglican churches.
“It’s not cheap to support somebody in that role, but they make a lot of sacrifices to come and we want to be able to support them generously,” Calder says.
Falling church attendance has coincided, in recent years, with the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse. That, along with a number of high profile cases, turned the public even further against the church.
Calder says he doesn’t personally know anyone who stopped attending because of the royal commission’s findings, but says it might have stopped new members from joining and also affected the number of children being baptised.
“Numbers have been more dramatically impacted post-Covid with churches reporting that they only welcome 80% of people they did pre-Covid. I think this has revealed that some only attended church out of habit or convention, without any real relationship with God.”
In 2016, there were about 11,400 churches in Australia, according to the National Church Life Survey, with just over half located outside major cities. That’s a decrease of about 1,200 churches since 1991.
Archdiocesan chancellor Prof Patrick McArdle says clergy are travelling from larger regional centres or nearby cities to attend outlying parishes with smaller congregations. They regularly rely on lay people to lead prayer and familiarise the clergy with the needs of the local community.
“Look at the number of rural communities, at things like post offices and banks are closing down, but the churches or at least the religious communities are still there and arguing that these communities deserve support,” says McArdle.
In the last 50 years, faith-based organisations have expanded to include more education, aged care and independent living and social services.
“There is a different experience of the life of faith and churches in rural and urban communities,” says Christopher Prowse, the archbishop of the Catholic archdiocese of Canberra-Goulburn. “We’re a great service provider – all of the religions are. We tend to operate – probably in our case larger than others – a school network, healthcare, social services, but all the religions run a range of community activities that are often there for the long haul.”
In times of external threats like bushfires or floods, people turn to the church, he says. The same happens in response to internal threats like the breakdown of a marriage or a suicide.
“In rural areas particularly when there is bushfires or floods, they tend to work together a lot more amongst their own resources,” Prowse says.
Newer denominations are moving in
Despite high levels of faith the established denominations seem to be losing their place in the bush, while modern denominations are growing, getting a foothold across the regions.
Among the newcomers is Generocity Church (GC), founded in Narromine in 2004 by Ben and Libby Staines. It aligned itself in regional and rural New South Wales, planting churches and campuses in Bathurst, Cobar, Coffs Harbour, Cootamundra, Cowra, Dubbo, Forbes, Kiama, Narromine, Parkes and Wagga Wagga.
“Small rural, regional towns don’t deserve any less of a gospel and they don’t deserve any less of a church,” Libby Staines said in a podcast interview in 2020.
GC is part of the Australian Christian Churches (ACC) network, the largest Pentecostal movement in Australia. Hillsong is a former member – it became an official denomination, withdrawing from the ACC, in 2018.
The ACC had risen to the second-largest single denomination by attendance in Australia according to the 2016 census, but by 2021 membership numbers had dropped by 5,000.
And while their attendance is strong, the newer denominations have not yet become part of the bedrock of rural towns, expected to swing into service at times of crisis.
Like a bushfire, burning through a dozen properties north of Crookwell. That’s where Mossfield found himself last week: at the evacuation centre for the Curraweela Road bushfire delivering chaplaincy services.
“Practical service has always been a part of the Uniting church and its predecessors,” he says.
“But the Church is more than practical service.”
