No One Expects

So far, the Diocese hasn't posted anything on its webpage about the Clergy Conference. From its Twitter feed you would certainly discover that one of the speakers was Dr Ellen F. Davis of Duke Divinity School in North Carolina, who took us through a passage of 1Kings and the book of Ruth, and you can find a picture of Fr Malcolm Guite, the poet, who spoke about the interrelationship of poetry and faith. There is a reference to the third speaker, Bishop Philip North of Burnley, but it comes from a retweeted tweet from a priest attending, not from the diocese itself. We'll see how eventually it gets reported.

Bishop Philip turned up on Wednesday morning and began unremarkably enough, talking about finding grace in unexpected places. He led us through Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem 'Felix Randal' and pointed out how the people to whom priests minister also minister grace to them, and we all smiled and nodded. We recognise that. It made us feel good.

Hopkins discovered grace among God's poor, went on Bishop Philip. That's the way God always works. Renewal and revival starts with the poor, the marginalised. It doesn't come from the centre. Neither does cultural change more generally. The poor are where creativity begins.

So isn't it a shame, a scandal, that the Church of England seems to exercise an option for the rich? It's churches in poor areas, on the margins of cities and towns, that are allowed to run down and get shut. It's those areas that can't fund clergy. Some dioceses sit on hundreds of millions of pounds of inherited assets while the newer ones - which are mainly the ones in poorer parts of the country - have pitiful resources in comparison. The diocese of London is pointed to as a model of church growth, but so it should be, not just because of immigration but because of resource: 'if you've got a church hall in London, you've got a children's & families worker because your rents will pay for one. If you've got a church hall on an estate in Stoke-on-Trent all you've got is a headache paying for its maintenance.' Our practices suck initiative and leadership out of poor communities, making them dependent recipients of charity directed at them from outside. The Church's recruitment procedures make it especially hard for working-class candidates to find their way through unless they get converted into middle-class book-learners in the process; 'we're producing a monochrome institution of white evangelical graduates'. 'God will renew the Church. Renewal is inevitable. But if we want to be part of it rather than looking in from the sidelines, we have to alter the balance fundamentally in favour of allowing the experience of the poor to penetrate to the centre.'

Well. You must bear in mind that most of the audience listening to the bishop were, er, white evangelical graduates. What he was saying was also diametrically opposed to what the Diocese of Guildford is doing: its new Parish Share system will penalise small churches in favour of large ones which are all, funnily enough, evangelical, and which will in future have a far greater role in 'helping' small churches develop - which is what else but enforcing the sort of hegemonic church culture he was complaining about. But he still got a lot of applause. Morally, it couldn't be argued with, and for the rest of the conference people wanted to talk about little else. In a Q&A session Il Rettore, attending his last conference before he retires, stood up and told Bishop Philip how his speech had redeemed his previous 34 years of conference-attendance to that point, unreconstructed Corbynite as he is. And the little knot of Catholics felt a bit less isolated. At the final plenary session our diocesan bishop set his face into a grin and chose to refer not to Bishop Philip's case in as many words but to his insistence that renewal was inevitable and people shouldn't talk about the Church 'declining'. That's a message everyone likes to hear.

I like Bishop Philip's vision of what the Church should be; my issue is that it never has been that, it's never been a place where the experience of the poor has been the organising principle. That evening I lay in my bed reading about how some of the Cistercian monasteries of medieval England and Wales, rather than setting up in wilderness and waste and colonising them as the cliché is, actually achieved the spiritual 'solitude' they craved by simply clearing away the existing inhabitants of an area. I thought about the sudden upsurge in Christian adherence in the Roman Empire after Constantine converted, or the Slavs being mass-baptised at swordpoint by Prince Vladimir of the Rus. God may well always bring spiritual renewal through the poor, but where the Church has most spectacularly 'succeeded' it has often been precisely where it sits lightest to what it says it believes. It has always, always absorbed and institutionalised the organising principles and assumptions of the world around it at the same time as preaching the exact opposite.

The miracle - and it truly is that - has been that the Church also always holds within itself the radical contaminant of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, forever subverting, calling to account, and undermining its own practices. Perhaps we heard an instance of that at The Hayes this year. I don't hold out much hope that the experience of the margins can become the framing principle of the centre, and it may be that the Church of England has actually served God's purpose for it: 'renewal' may well pass us by in the end. But it certainly will if that marginal experience is stifled. It can only be kept alive by acting counterintuitively, by exercising an option not just for the poor, but for the unexpected, the irrational, what does not make immediate best sense.