He pointed to one church plant within his diocese whose regular attendance increased in 18 months from 30 to 350 people after Norland Nannies were brought in to look after the children in the congregation during service times.
Bishop Hill maintained, however, that faith was crucial to positive change within churches.
“My fundamental belief is this: God is so brilliant that He works despite us. Please don’t think that the future of the church could be [guaranteed] if you could just learn a few tricks from leadership books and business management books.
“I think what we want to do is grow in faith, that we might release the power of God into this dark, hurting world that we are called to serve and to save.”
Bishop Hill appealed to local level church leaders to keep their focus on glorifying God.
“There’s a terrible pressure on you when you are a leader to make your mark. And actually godly leadership isn’t about making your mark. It’s about drawing your line in the sand for Jesus,” he told church leaders. “It’s about how you can leverage whatever gifts you’ve got in your organisation to give glory to God and not to draw attention to yourself.”
He also urged church leaders to expect a long and difficult road to success, saying that great leaders in the Kingdom were the ones with “immeasurable reserves of courage”.
“That doesn’t mean that they don’t get frightened,” he told the audience. “Courageous people still feel fear but what courageous people do is they work out strategies to help them get beyond that and when faithful people do that you would be amazed at what can happen.
“I never saw a great work of God that didn’t involve a massive injection of courage, and neither did I see one that didn’t come very close to folding completely.
“God wants to know how persistent we are, I think, and how faithful we are and sometimes He allows projects to run very near to the bottom of the barrel in order that He can discover how persistent and how faithful we are.”
Bishop Hill concluded with a word of encouragement to local level church leaders.
“Local church leadership is one of the toughest callings that a human being can have. Churches are full of people who think they could do your job better than you.
“But the bottom line is that very often they are measuring it by the criteria of a commercial organisation, not a voluntary organisation, which is far more subtle, far more demanding, far more scary in a way. Thank you for what you do.”
