IT HAS been dubbed PJs at PJ's: for the past six months groups of six or seven Sydney Anglican rectors have been invited by their archbishop, Peter Jensen, to sleepovers at his exclusive residence before the launch of the diocese's ambitious evangelical drive to convert Sydney.
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Already 100 ministers and assistants have participated in midweek conferences at Bishopscourt with the archbishop driving discussions about how to better connect with the unchurched of Sydney.
The remaining 170 will be invited to the brainstorming sessions after the archbishop returns from his overseas mission this week, fresh from promoting the creation of a new power bloc in the Anglican communion opposed to liberal thinking on such matters as homosexual clergy.
Detractors suggest the visits might be used by the archbishop to micromanage parishes and subtly test the orthodoxy of diocesan rectors.
The diocese says they are just a way for the archbishop to use his personal imprimatur to spur parishes to look more outward.
The overnight conferences are the first in-house residential workshops conducted by the archbishop and are meant to lay the groundwork for Connect09, the diocese's get-to-know-Jesus mission that will launch on February 8 with a webcast link-up.
While Sydney has just farewelled the Catholic Church's World Youth Day week-long evangelical blitz, the Anglicans are focusing on a year-long strategy directed at the grassroots community, which will involve the street distribution of Bibles and DVDs.
The $2 million recruitment drive comes as the diocese concedes it has fallen short, at the halfway mark, of its ambitions to convert 10 per cent of Sydneysiders to Bible-based churches by 2012.
The Bishop of North Sydney, Dr Glenn Davis, said the weekend sessions with the archbishop discussed mission, the sharing of resources and the changing demographic profile of parishes, and provided for an exchange of ideas on how to better reach out to communities so that the "church was not a ghetto on a hill". Ideas to emerge include a back-to-church Sunday or open church.
One overnight visit with the archbishop had inspired a clergyman to invite his parish council to visit the local TAB. "They came back to him and said, 'We didn't know where to go - there were video screens,' and the rector replied, 'Well, that's how people feel when they come to church.' "
The senior minister of St John's Park Anglican Church, Ted Brush, a former executive of McDonald's Australia, said churches could take their lead from the restaurant chain by "banding and branding together".
