Forms of Evasion

It’s becoming hard to keep up with the shifts in management in the Church of England. Just days after the Diocese of Chester announces the creation of two new Suffragan Bishops (there are already two) who, according to the advert which seems to have disappeared from the online world, would be prepared to ‘weep and sing with us’ and ‘as comfortable wearing wellies as vestments, at the colouring table as at the altar’, comes the Diocese of Sheffield, recruiting four ‘Associate Archdeacons’ to develop the ‘oversight model of ministry’. Here’s the advert, in case you wanted to apply. Sheffield’s little logos accompanying its slogan ‘Renewed, Released, Rejuvenated’ look suspiciously like the ones that go with Guildford’s ‘Twelve Transformation Goals’ which you will remember so accurately: I wonder whether the same marketing company produced them both. Coventry Diocese has a Reconciliation Enabler.

Such stuff doesn’t go innocently unremarked, and the resultant scorn which I regularly read is part of a tide of reaction against recent Church trends that encompasses both ordinary laypeople and clerical figures as varied as Marcus Walker, recalcitrant rector of Great St Bart’s, and Giles Fraser of Radio 4, sorry, Lambeth. Tangled up with simple distress at the invading jargonisation are a range of other concerns: the Church’s ham-fisted response to the epidemic, and the slash-and-burn approach the authorities are taking to ‘reform’ in the Diocese of Chelmsford, where 61 parish clergy are being disposed of while the Diocese appoints its first CEO. It’s a strategy Chelmsford's former bishop and now Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell seems to be taking to the national level, whereas once he wrote innocent little books about how to pray during Advent and that sort of thing: the parishes tremble as well as fulminate.

Sometimes the criticisms are a bit unfair. Fr Walker picks on Southwark Diocese’s ‘Director of Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation’; it is, to be sure, a ridiculous title, but the role seems to correspond fairly closely to Guildford’s former Director for Social Responsibility – a term which has instead a very 1980s stamp to it – and at least one member of the Southwark team, the one responsible for environmental issues, only works a single day a week. I may have expressed some annoyance when silliness surfaces in Guildford, but the truth is that out in the parishes we do occasionally want a bit of help when an issue pops up that we may not be that familiar with: we need someone at Diocesan House to give us some advice. In fact, rather than sacrificing parish clergy at the altar of resources, it’s just those people Guildford has got rid of, and it no longer has a Board of Social Responsibility. Even the Mission & Parish Enabling Department don’t seem that au fait with the kind of techy matters I’d often like assistance with. Reading back, the Guildford 'Transforming Church, Transforming Lives' strategy even sounds fluffless and realistic compared to some of the stuff that's about, perhaps because it's five years old now.

There is a hideous truth underlying the financial squeeze on the Church which the pandemic is likely to make much worse, and it's that, however painful Christians may have found it to be unable to meet together to worship, secular society has got on pretty well without us. A friend-of-a-friend commented on LiberFaciorum that the pandemic was just the wrong time for priests to become invisible: his father would have knocked on every door in the parish to check that people were all right. Had he done so in Swanvale Halt, I fear, he would have found either that they were, or whatever they needed he could do little about. Within hours of the lockdown in March we had a range of community action groups springing up: it took mere days for the Council to adopt and incorporate them into the official structure, and I quickly realised that the most efficient way of managing anyone who wanted ‘to help’ was to point them in that direction. Our congregation has about half-a-dozen able-bodied people to give lifts, and no money. If I come across anyone in actual need, the money comes from me. My church has lost a quarter of its income as lettings have stopped, and my stipend subsidises it even more than it did before. Most of the modest and gentle ways in which the church can support people (and, not forgetting how important it is, make contact with souls to introduce to God) are impossible in situations where we can’t meet, hold hands, and offer tea. The biggest problem the parish’s families face is managing children at home, which I can’t solve; the most regular complaint I seem to have from vulnerable older people is ‘My carers are trying to kill me’, and I can’t help that either, because they're not. Whatever may be happening elsewhere, this Christian community is not a powerhouse of action: it can’t be. The bell rings and the prayers are said and the Mass is offered but it’s a fond delusion to imagine that – except in the hidden, spiritual realm – the Church is anything other than marginal to the lives of most of the parish’s people.

You have to face this. I suspect that the heightened language the dioceses are increasingly using to describe their posts is a form of hysteria, a way of not facing it: because the things we believe pull our imaginations, rightly, into the realm of glory, we pull that vision into job descriptions and policy documents because what is actually happening to us is so uncomforting. And in our hearts we know it, we know that all this stuff is soul-sick and will not work.

Last night Lillian the ex-lay-reader was taken to hospital with blurred vision. She has, thankfully, not had a stroke or developed a brain tumour: she has nasal polyps which can be fairly easily removed. Sandra the Messy Church leader prayed for her and the next thing she knew by pure chance it was her own daughter who was caring for Lillian at the hospital. I think of the smiles and prayers of the laypeople of Swanvale Halt, and the children running on the pavements, and I look forward, oh how I look forward, to the time when I can bow with them before God once more as he comes in bread and wine.