Should That Really Be Here?

It was my fault that I and the churchwardens had to drag ourselves all the way to All Saints’ Fleet this week for the Archdeacon’s Visitation service (confusingly we use the same name for this event, when the Archdeacon admits churchwardens to their office for the year ahead, as we do for their inspection visits of individual churches). Last Thursday we’d all turned up at a completely different church, only to realise that when I told everyone the date and venue, I’d been looking at a memo from 2022.

All Saints is a church I’d never been into. It burned down in 2015 and has now been meticulously rebuilt, and was only reconsecrated in April; I find its red brick fabric rather brutal, unrelieved by any of the usual bits and pieces a church accumulates, because those have all been reduced to ash. The old high altar is still there, though, blackened and strikingly odd, and that’s a nice touch. The arched tomb of the founder Charles Lefroy and his wife also survives, movingly battered and beaten about. The new church has a fancy audiovisual system, but we were all given the poshest orders of service I’ve ever seen for any religious event, full-colour and heavy-gauge, glossy paper and card covers.

One of the troughs of the Triennial Conference last week came when we were all called on to sing a hymn framed around the diocesan slogan ‘Transforming Church, Transforming Lives’. There’s an earnest well-meaningness behind the attempt to shoehorn in the Bishop’s ‘three transformation goals’, but the question is whether it should be done at all. When we stumbled our way through the hymn in Derbyshire – the whole thing was obviously designed to be sung to the familiar tune ‘Woodlands’, but that wasn’t good enough for the Conference’s imported worship leader who felt the need to muck about with the melody of every other verse – I had a horrible feeling that it would henceforth make an appearance at every diocesan event. And so with grim inevitability it popped up at Fleet this week, along with an amendment to the usual ‘Collect for Churchwardens’ that God will ‘hold before them the vision of Transforming Church, Transforming Lives’.

It isn’t just taste that makes me cringe at this. It’s the importation into liturgy of what amounts to a corporate management slogan, the pretence that it’s something else: dressing a completely human idea as a divine one. It’s not quite ‘the abomination that causes desolation standing where it does not belong’, but it’s a step in its direction. What makes it more awkward is that the thing has been written by the Archdeacon, who I like and who has been supportive and helpful to me in the past, so what I’m left with is probably less anger than depressed resignation.