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How St. Stephen's Rochester Row is Improving Administration through the Digital Church  

With a small but dedicated staff who are keen to maximise the effectiveness of their time and commit as much as possible to their mission, the team at St Stephen's Rochester Row was asked to be part of a pilot for the Digital Church and its pioneering Visitation Module, a church software. We spoke to Reverend Graham Buckle and Church Warden Suzanne Mercer to understand their goals and how digital transformation is helping them so far.  

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Source: https://www.sswsj.org/
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Source: https://www.sswsj.org/

What makes St. Stephen's Rochester Row unique?  

Graham: I am the vicar of St. Stephen's, and I have been here for 10 years now, which has flown by. I have also been in the diocese and archdeaconry for over 34 years, always in Westminster but with time spent across four very different parishes.  

The last parish I was in was the most socially deprived parish in London, and I was there for 14 years there. St. Stephen's is different in that it's made up of a lot of professional people who are often time-poor and exhausted. However, in some senses, it's very similar to my last church in that it's a parish church and a local church, and we cater to everyone. It's Church of England, unapologetically liberal, and we pride ourselves on living in faith and love. 

Here, we're thinkers and challengers, and nothing is taken as read - we discuss things, and there's a lot of lively debate. We have a lot of thinkers amongst us, but not many people have much time to actually do things, so that is our challenge.  

What challenges does St. Stephen's face?  

Suzanne: We have a small, dedicated staff, so we need to recruit more people as we're always stretched quite thin, but we also need to make the best use of peoples' time when they're able to give it to us.  

As well as the church, we have several residential flats, and we lease space to several commercial businesses, so we manage that on top of everything else. It's helpful as a source of income for the church, allowing us to make repairs and pay our common fund, but it also takes time away from the ecclesiastical side of things. 

We're not a rich church, but we have some rich resources to tap into. If we were purely dependent on congregational giving or church donation, then the church couldn't survive, so it's important that we manage those resources so we can be generous in our giving. At the moment, we have a lot of '70s stock, and we're getting to a point where we need to pay a lot of attention to our resources. 

We're a very creative church as well as traditional, and we do so much with the community, from creative services to events for children. We have an artist community, film screenings and more. The amount we do with the personal power that we have is unbelievable, but that's the challenge - to balance those needs. 

Another big challenge has been the retirement of our bursar of 15 years. She left about a year ago, and it's been very hard to find someone to fill her shoes. The person we now have can only do around a third of her hours, and naturally, there's a huge knowledge gap - 15 years' worth of memory about the church! She left fantastic handover notes, but they're not quite the same, so the church management software or Visitation Module has come at a great time so we can store things centrally.

How is your church currently faring regarding growth and the number of members or visitors?  

Graham: Like most places and institutions, we were really hit by Covid. Before the pandemic, we had around 100 people join us most Sundays, and we had a large group of 20-plus young people. While our weekday services remain strong, now, on Sundays, we're at about 50 to 60 people. They're beginning to come back, but it has been hard work.

I think the culture of churchgoing has changed since Covid, and the church perhaps hasn't fully woken up to that. I don't think going to church was considered habitual before, but it seems, given the amount of people who don't come any more, that it was. The prioritising of church and faith in one's life has really altered. 

We have a regular group of training curates bringing people on, which is good in that it brings more human resources, but it takes time. There's always room for growth, and I would say we are a recovering church, as most are - we're gradually getting back to where we would like to be.  

How important is it for churches to understand any opportunities for improvement?   

Graham: I don't think it's about improvement - what we do and what we provide spiritually is still nourishing and powerful. I think it's about adapting partly to change people and partly to change ourselves.  

To experiment liturgically is a good thing. I don't think it’s just about numbers and church attendance because our weekday services have grown - it's our Sunday morning services that have been the challenge, but evensong is huge.  

There's also been a wealth of community support. For example, the people who ran our soup kitchen pulled out, and the congregation stepped up, so now we're providing that directly instead of through an external provider. There's lots of goodwill and church donations, and our goal is to make sure we're just not being exhausted by everything we want to do.  

How is the Visitation Module helping you so far? 

Suzanne: We have only been using church software for a couple of months, and we're still getting used to it. The biggest thing it's helping with is organising all the information that was previously in the former bursar's head. The challenge when she left is that we don't know what we don't know, so this is giving us clarity on that and means everything can be kept in one place.  

In terms of visitations specifically, before the Module, we were very last-minute in our approach. We would get the heads up from the archdeacon and then would have to get everything in order over the next couple of weeks. That was fine because our wonderful bursar knew where everything was.   

Jessie, our administrator, has been good at running the Visitation Module, and she was surprised by how much we could feed into it. We still have a lot to do, but it's reassuring to know we can log in to online church software and carry on from where we left off.   

Beyond the current benefits, what other advantages do you anticipate from using the Visitation module?  

Graham: Being prepared is the biggest thing. On one level, it speaks for itself - instead of dashing around at the last minute, we can get everything together and say when we're ready for a visitation, which is a good thing. On another level, I think it will be excellent as an ongoing tracker for all our information and will make it easier for us to get other people involved going forward.   

If someone was considering implementing the Visitation Module for their church, what advice or insights would you offer?  

Suzanne: Do it! Just take it up - I don't see the disadvantages of using it, it's all upside.