Competition

When Emily's family first came to Swanvale Halt, they arrived at our Toddler Group before they'd even moved into the area. They were looking for a church, they said. Unfortunately when they came with Emily as a babe-in-arms to a Sunday service she bawled her eyes out whenever any music started (everyone's a critic) and so that was that until she was about eight and she became quite enthusiastic, especially when she could bring along her little sister and make a fuss of her. She and her dad were on the serving team for a while, him carrying the cross splendidly and Emily herself making an angelic acolyte. 

Now Emily is in Year 7 and as well as the usual lethargy which I gather creeps over tween/teenagers for physiological reasons she has taken up jiu jitsu which inevitably takes place on Sunday mornings. Her dad has had a few health challenges making carrying a heavy cross around not a good idea, while her younger sister now gets dragged to multiple toddler groups and nurseries during the week as her mum has had to work as a childminder, and going out again on a Sunday to something which doesn't feel very different is less of a draw than staying home and playing with her own toys, thank you very much. 

I mention all this not because it is anything new or results in groundbreaking reflections, but precisely because this is a really quite well-disposed young family which has been very well embedded in the church in the past, and, in an ideal world, would want to be again, but just finds it a challenge. Emily is interested in the putative youth group we want to start later in the month, which is just as well as she's our best prospect of anyone coming at all. It shows that sometimes, perhaps, in the world as we find it, the bits of church life we think of as add-on extras could well be the best way of keeping an entire group of people in contact with God. 

For He Spoke With Authority

I’ve known Fr Embridge for ages: he used to be on the team at Lamford when he worked in the secular world, and now looks after a parish while continuing to write about how the Church can manage the business of change. He is a deep-thinking soul. He often posts about politics on LiberFaciorum; I’m not sure how outspoken he is from the pulpit. You will know how I am very, very reluctant to run my own political preferences up the flagpole (literally) for all sorts of reasons. I don’t believe detailed comment about policy is the Church’s role, at least not unless we have made a definite study of a particular topic; what do I know, after all? What gives me the right to opine out of no greater knowledge than anyone else, just because I have a stole round my neck? Am I not in the position of holding the whole of my parish before God, and holding God before them, souls who have a great variety of attitudes? Looking across the Atlantic, I also see the danger of a society devolving into two non-communicating camps, competing for the control of the space they are both forced to inhabit: a healthy democracy, where you must assume that you will never have a final victory over the people who you disagree with, has to have spaces which nobody controls, where signs and symbols of allegiance and commitment are absent. In our current epoch where it’s absolutely possible to assimilate everything we do into an ideologically-coded identity politics, neutrality is a positive virtue that we have to cultivate, because the pressure is all in the other direction.

Even Mr Farage’s latest pronouncements don’t quite cause me to breach my self-imposed guidelines, although the idea of deporting people to circumstances where they might face torture and death without any investigation treads over one of my own lines and it’s hard for me to see how any Christian might feel different. Instead of denouncing this or that, I strive to think about underlying ideas or attitudes and probe around beneath the surface, which is what I see Christ doing in the Gospels. I might talk about our absolute moral obligation to reduce suffering; the moral danger of polarising language, eroding our ability to share social space with those we disagree with; the inescapable reality of our sinfulness, meaning any idea we can make ourselves generally safer by getting rid of a category of person is a damaging fantasy; and the corrosive effect of developing habitual indifference to the suffering of some groups of others. These seem to me to be legitimate subjects for clerical comment, and perhaps very necessary ones.

Keeping One's Council

The CEO of the local Council was only supposed to be a couple of minutes, but I was waiting for him for about twenty. Well, things come up, I know that. I have agreed to be 'Borough Dean', which is something our Bishop is very keen on: a point of contact between the local authority and the churches of the area, explaining the ways and concerns of the one to the other. When he did arrive, full of apologies and offers of coffee, the CEO made it gently clear that I was representing one of a variety of faith communities, albeit the vastly most numerous in sunny Surrey: that was quite understandable and a role I don't mind filling.

While waiting, I watched the receptionist field enquiries. She has to know who to get in touch with and broadly how the structure works to be able to help the people who turn up. Today, a Council tenant was pursuing a Gas Safety inspection on his property which was supposed to have taken place, but the plumber never turned up and he'd heard nothing back (the same happened to me the other day). The receptionist waited on the phone to someone for about ten minutes and then gave it to the man while she dealt with another gentleman who had some papers to hand to a Council officer who she also couldn't get on the phone (it turned out the officer was out at lunch - she came by later). There was also a woman with a non-native-English accent pursuing a housing enquiry with a man who I presumed was from the CAB or a housing charity or something - he was certainly acting as her advocate. She seemed to be about to be ejected from a friend's house and they were trying to secure her a place in a night shelter. They were shown into a meeting room to call either an advisor or a Council officer, I wasn't clear which. It was quite a tally for twenty minutes, though perhaps mid-day is a busy period. 

At Swanvale Halt church, we pray for aspects of our local community on a cyclical basis, including our local authorities, the elected members and staff. That's all very well, and I'm sure the Lord does something more than absolutely nothing with prayers like it. But watching the Council in action for just a few minutes on this very basic level adds some meat to those outline aspirations. How complex it all is - and how worthwhile the odd prayer seems. 

Dialogue of the Partly Deaf

The young man accosted me as I was returning home from Vespers, with a phrase (whatever it was) which is like the usual opening gambit from a cult: ‘Excuse me, sir, are you worried about the way our country is going?’ He told me there were ‘13 colleges in London where you can’t wish people Happy Christmas’ and that churches were being closed to be replaced by ‘mosques and synagogues’. If I’d had more time I would have tried to explore whether there was a genuine anxiety beneath these statements – I thought his stare and slightly ragged appearance suggested some kind of mental distress – but I hadn’t, I fear. I said things seemed very different in Swanvale Halt where I was doing work in local schools and so on and if churches were closing it was mainly because people didn’t go to them. Did he go to church, I asked? Yes, he said, ‘the main church’ in Guildford, which was an interesting way of describing what was clearly not Holy Trinity on the High Street or even the Cathedral, but Emmaus Road. That’s if it was true.

On Saturday I did a funeral visit. I knew the gentleman whose wife’s service we were discussing, and must have met his stepson before though I couldn’t remember. The deceased lady had been a Roman Catholic at one stage in her life, at least, and her son had attended a convent school and been an altar server in his teens before leaving that behind. ‘I have to say I think religion is a crutch for people who need it’, he said, while his stepfather believed that God had directed his life in various ways, not least leading him towards his wife via some unlikely coincidences. How the conversation got onto aliens and Neanderthal technology I wasn’t sure, but it felt like a talk I was supposed to contribute to but couldn’t find a rational way into, or indeed to steer back to what we were supposed to be talking about. It was absolutely exhausting.

As was the third unsatisfactory encounter within a few days. This one was at a friend’s early-retirement party where I found myself sitting next to a friend of his who had some potentially interesting things to say about her frustrated career as an engineer, being married to a soldier, running a club for bikers in Camden in the 1990s, and dealing with her son’s schooling. But it became clear that behind each story there was a point being made about the unreasonable behaviour of other people, and I was not so much participating in a conversation as being invited to agree. If I missed the narrative clues to how I was supposed to understand each anecdote there was no way back, and it was easy enough to do that in a loud pub. I was almost weeping by the end.

How rarely one has conversations that actually mean anything, in which the participants are listening to what each other has to say rather than simply speaking at one another. I do strive to view my encounters as opportunities to learn more about other people but they don’t always make it easy!

Omerta

There is an Area Dean in the church-set TV comedy series Rev, but she has a minor role next to waspish Archdeacon Robert, who turns up at the vicarage almost every week to patronise Fr Adam Smallbone and tip his coffee into the sink. And yet thanks to the horrible scandal of David Tudor the phrase ‘Area Dean’ is all over the place: he was a ‘senior priest’, say the news reports, ‘in charge of twelve parishes’ in the Chelmsford diocese. Well, says anyone who knows anything about how the Church of England works, Yes and No.

An Area Dean is a bit of a dogsbody. You don’t get paid to do it, but generally you do the job alongside your parochial duties: someone who isn’t a parish priest can technically be an Area Dean, but it’s uncommon. They act as a conduit for information between the local clergy and the diocese, and have a pastoral brief over those clergy. It’s a task nobody generally wants, because we’re all busy enough, thank you, and yet everyone likes to be asked, because it shows that the bishop and your colleagues have enough confidence in you to think that you’d be good at it. Or at least no worse than anyone else available.

But appointing the Area Dean in a deanery is very much the bishop’s initiative. Which is why, in David Tudor’s case, it not only baffles that Stephen Cottrell, as Bishop of Chelmsford, kept re-enlisting him to do it when he, Tudor, was subject to a safeguarding order, but that he was ever asked to do it in the first place. Just like Stephen Cottrell, his predecessor John Gladwin would have been perfectly aware of the restrictions Mr Tudor had had placed on his ministry some months before he was appointed in 2008: why did that happen at all? How could the bishop, whichever bishop, really believe that being subject to a safeguarding order didn’t make a difference to David Tudor’s ability to carry out this extra duty? Today, clergy in a Deanery – and their Parish Safeguarding Officers – would have been told that one of their number wasn’t allowed to be alone with children, but this clearly wasn’t the case in Chelmsford Diocese in 2008. Or maybe they were told, and decided not to believe it, a habit which crops up in many of these depressing narratives.

It doesn’t seem to matter whether institutions that are seduced by abusers or the bishops who make mistakes in dealing with them are liberal or conservative, evangelical or catholic; instead the real conflict is between openness and secrecy. Priests get used to keeping confidences, for very good reasons, but perhaps the habit tends to extend into areas it very much should not. The next step is to imagine that keeping the secrets makes you important, and that only you have the wisdom to deal with them in the right way. You picture yourself as one of a special cadre defined by the secrets they keep. That's above the non-existent pay grade of an Area Dean: that's bishop territory. 

Live and Let Die

Typical, you might well think, one of the most momentous changes, potentially, in the way the State relates to the life of the individual, and all Fr Weepingcross can think to post about is some woman’s rattled-off opinions on Goth. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t thinking about the Assisted Dying Bill: I just wasn’t in any way surprised by the outcome.

Christians can’t all be found on one side of this question: it was Pope John Paul II who originated, or at least popularised, the ringing phrase ‘the Culture of Death’ to net together euthanasia (as we used to call ‘assisted dying’), abortion, execution, and war; but not all of us go along with it. What we seem to have, in this particular matter, is a culture of autonomy before all else – assuming as an obvious fact that the sandcastle of individual choice can stand against the tide of social expectation. And I am not sure that Christians themselves know what it is they support, or oppose, in this as in many other respects. For centuries the law has defended us against our own ignorance and incuriosity, bolstered our assumption that we are right, and allowed us to continue without examining the basis for what we think we think. That protection has long, long been rolling back, and this is just another step.

But I find myself drawn, the more I think, more in the direction of mad things I would hesitate to say out loud. That the Enemy wants us dead. That he wants us out of the ring as soon as possible, where we can do no more good. That when we begin believing that one life is worth less than another, we make his work easier. That when we take our own life, or someone else’s, it’s like prising open the door of a plane: the air and the other passengers begin to be sucked out along with us. That there are, essentially, no individual choices.

Except I can’t go all that way. I revolt against making someone else fall in line with what I think in this most radical way. Maybe one day our long, bitter process of discernment will resolve that, as well.

Until then, in my imagination, I look to the potential time thirty years hence when medical professionals and others will start subtly hinting to me that the money spent on keeping me going could be better used elsewhere, on more worthy subjects, on children for heaven’s sake, and steeling myself to say, No. I might sacrifice myself for a child, but not for abstract children the State conjures in front of me to persuade me I am worth less. I demand my right to be a burden. I will not disappear for your convenience, I will not weigh my worth against others, not because I’m anything important, but because all human beings are, and accidentally I am one.

Bishop Down

Ironically, as it was pointed out to us at Deanery Chapter today, this coming Sunday is designated Safeguarding Sunday in the Church of England. Some of my colleagues wanted some kind of diocesan statement to be made about the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury that they could share, but although I might allude to it in what I say in any sermons I won't be making any declaration to the parish or even the church as such. Other incumbents found themselves dispirited and concerned for the effect on parish relationships, but my experience is that in so far as people in local communities have any attitude to the Church at all they detach the immediate manifestation of it, the clergy and individuals they know, from anything that might be going on more widely. Haters gonna hate, but everyone else carries on. This generosity is, of course, exactly the phenomenon that benefits abusers - nobody believes the person they know could be wicked - but the rest of us can be thankful for it for now. I will very much let the whole thing lie unless anyone mentions it. 

In general, I wish I could be anything more than wearied and unsurprised by the outcome. It's not that I have no sympathy: were someone to tell me an issue had been referred to the police, I might well assume the police were dealing with it, and move on to the next thing (and there is always a Next Thing onto which to move). It wouldn't make it right, though. If I say that Justin Welby's decision to resign could well turn out to be his best day's work during his tenure at Lambeth Palace, I do so not to be mean or sarcastic, but because I genuinely think the Church will ultimately benefit. It's exactly the dramatic, galvanizing event required to blow the whole thing open, to tip the balance away from power, display, and inertia, and it would not be beyond possibility that Archbishop Justin's will not be the only pointy hat rolling in the dust before too long.

Devotionally Challenged

On my great trip north I called in on my friend Clare (no point disguising her name) who is Chaplain to the University of Cumbria in Lancaster. It's a peculiar kind of arrangement: the University grew out of St Martin's College, a Church of England teacher-training college occupying the site of the old barracks in Lancaster. It gradually acquired other scattered sites and when it was finally instituted as a university in 2007, it couldn't call itself Lancaster University or the University of Lancashire as those titles were taken, so it became the University of Cumbria even though its biggest campus is in Lancaster. Clare describes it as 'very, very secular' but part of the foundation arrangements was that there should be a number of Anglican appointments on the staff, of which the Chaplain in Lancaster is one. So Clare finds herself something of what we would in other circumstances call a 'pioneer minister', sent to a group of people who don't have any longstanding interaction with Christianity (the previous chaplain had, let's say, not been particularly active and the Chapel, built in the 1960s to be a sort of parish church of the College, hasn't had much of a congregation for a long while). 

One of Clare's challenges in restoring the Chapel of St Martin to something like a devotional space can be found behind the altar. Here she is, then, displaying one of the Church of England's greatest artistic treasures, John Bratby's Me as Christ, Crucified by My Ex-Wives and Art Critics. 

I'm teasing you, of course. The mural doesn't have that title (if it has one, it's the tedious Golgotha), but it would be an accurate description. John Bratby's name has virtually disappeared from the story of twentieth-century British art but he was flavour of the day at one point in the 1960s. He was, by all accounts, a dreadful, dreadful man, but his portraiture in particular has a psychedelic verve to it even if, as Clare points out, he seems consistently to lose interest in his figures by the time he gets to their feet. 

The mural was acquired by the College's first Principal, Hugh Pollard, after a theological college in Manchester got queasy about buying it. It does present some challenges as a devotional image, in that it isn't intended as one but rather an unpleasant joke. I'm reminded a bit, in another mode, of Jean Fouquet's portrait of French royal mistress Agnes Sorel as a bare-breasted Virgin Mary, an icon of something else quite a long way from religious feeling. The story goes that when the late Queen Mother opened the College in 1967 and was shown the painting she remarked of the artist 'Do you think he has the slightest idea of what Christianity is about?' Taking a broad view of the doctrine of the Incarnation, you might reply Yes, but only just enough to get it wrong.

So, what is a chaplain to do with it? Clare's predecessor had it covered with a curtain which, she thinks, 'was worse - it means it's lurking unseen like a monster'. Given that hardly anyone comes to worship in St Martin's anymore Clare plans to reorganise the space so that there's a smaller liturgical area with its altar to one side while, for the considerable number of Cumbria students who are studying medicine and allied subjects, she will offer some sessions reflecting spiritually on pain, physicality and selfhood. Take the horror and work with it. It's a bit like the Parable of the Talents. 

Unedifying Accounts

The latest Anglican safeguarding scandal to come to public attention depresses in the same way any other has, though it carries its own special quality with it, apparently coming close to closing an entire cathedral in an attempt to get rid of one residentiary canon. The current Bishop of Blackburn, Philip North – as redoubtably Anglo-Catholic as his predecessor Julian Henderson was a conservative Evangelical – blames it all on the outmoded structures of the Church, though there do seem to be other factors at play. I raise an eyebrow when anonymous sources complain of the ‘absolute power’ Canon Hindley exercised at the Cathedral – I’ve never met a member of any cathedral staff who felt they had the slightest influence over their colleagues at all – but when you hear that a judge concluded he had assaulted a man, but nothing was done because nobody could be sure the victim was underage, you do gape a bit.

It takes me back a few weeks when my Antipodean regular reader and correspondent Dr Wellington asked me whether I’d come across the older scandal in the Diocese of London, where the one-time diocesan ‘fixer’ and Head of Operations Martin Sargeant had been convicted of fraud. Yes I had, I replied, and my interest was more than it might usually have been because when the miscreant’s name was first reported I’d realised I’d been to school with him. Within the outline of the middle-aged bloke in the pictures I could just about glimpse the teenage boy I remembered from Bournemouth: you didn't believe much of what he told you even then.

Part of Mr Sargeant’s story involved a now-infamous debrief with the Archdeacon of London when the former left his diocesan post in which he delivered what was described as a ‘brain-dump’ of what he claimed to know about London’s clergy. We now know that this was a compendium of gossip and personal bile with very little truth to it, but the Diocese treated it as positive allegations of abusive behaviour that had to be followed up. The typical Church of England habits of secrecy and inefficiency kicked into motion and one result was the suicide of Fr Alan Griffin who spent a year being investigated for crimes that were never made known to him, and which, the coroner who examined his death decided, ‘were supported by no complainant, no witness, and no accuser’.

It struck me that given our current, and completely understandable, safeguarding culture, it’s hard to stop this happening. We are all taught that any allegation must be reported and followed up: it rests with others to decide what is to be done next. What if, as seems to have happened in London, everyone in the chain feels they dare not be the one who says, ‘this is just poisonous gossip and we will take it no further’?

The integrity of the local safeguarding team is presumably crucial. I have had a case which ours regarded as less serious than I did, and it turned out they were right. On the other hand, I know someone against whom an allegation was made many years ago, then withdrawn (in neither case by the supposed victim, who maintained nothing had happened) and, when the priest demanded in a meeting with the bishop and the Diocesan Safeguarding Adviser the right to begin the long, difficult process of having the matter expunged from his record, was told by the DSA that as far as she was concerned he was guilty no matter what anyone said, and implied that him being ‘obviously a homosexual’ was proof of paedophilia. The bishop, my informant said, ‘went white’ and insisted on dissociating himself from the remark (I can mention this as all concerned are long gone).

At theological college I once found myself marvelling at the ability of the kitchen to both overcook and undercook rice at the same time, and the CofE’s safeguarding practice seems caught in the same place, at once hopelessly lax and unacceptably hypervigilant. The answer, as so many voices say, is simply to bring the police in whenever any allegation is made, like every other organisation. Why, yet again, should we imagine we’re so special?

Perpetual Guest

It took the local council a matter of minutes after the Prime Minister stood in the rain in Downing Street and announced the date of the General Election to phone up Grant the churchwarden to book the church as a polling station on July 4^th. In fact I expect it’s the hall that will be used rather than the church, as it was for the Police & Crime Commissioner election in May, a rather less exciting affair it must be said but our first experience of performing this public role. This week I’ve also been trying to sort out the hustings event traditionally hosted by Churches Together in Hornington & District, which won’t be at Swanvale Halt because of the limited parking locally. The Greens have yet to nominate a candidate for the constituency (they only have till tomorrow) and our incumbent Tory MP has yet to reply; disconcertingly it was the Reform candidate who was first back to me. Perhaps he has more time to check emails, or alternatively a laid-back agent who doesn’t do it for him.

It all leads me to reflect again on the oddness of the Church of England parson’s position in society. In so many ways we are the go-to persons, and our churches the default venues, for such events. But equally we operate in a society whose assumptions are secular and non-sectarian and I would really not have it any other way. On Tuesday morning I looked in my diary and found the inscription ‘2pm Willow Grange’ and embarrassingly had to contact the Bishop’s secretary to remind me what it was I’d agreed to come to. The event was part of what the diocesan staff call ‘Tent Week’ when the bishop invites cohorts of folk across the diocese to have tea in a marquee in his garden. This particular gathering was for those involved in ‘the ministry of listening’ for which I qualified as a Local Vocations Adviser, apparently, along with the Chaplains, Mentors, and Spiritual Directors. Anyway, the point I am coming to is that we had a short talk by a pleasant woman priest whose name and role I can’t remember who mentioned the experience of ministering in contexts we do not control, where we are guests, and which are sometimes indifferent to us and sometimes actively hostile. It made the event slightly more than pointless (though there may have been a point in simply showing my face as it's likely to be the only time I will be in the proximity of the bishop for some time). 

In my parish, I do have a clear identity and status signalled by my distinctive dress and my link with the big old stone building with the little steeple in the centre of the community, but in another way the parish isn’t mine at all. It is a space I have a responsibility for, and yet do not control in any way. There is nobody I can command. I am always a guest, and just occasionally one who nobody is quite sure what to do with. But then I suspect that may have been the Lord’s position as well.

O For A Thousand Tongues

Continuing the Rowan Williams theme, Dr Abacus does me a great service in pointing me to an article from The Times I would have to pay to consult myself, in which the former ABC opines about the plight of modern hymn-singing. Absent anything more than the vaguest knowledge of religious music on the part of the general public, he says, people asking for hymns at funerals or weddings are driven back to ‘primary-school level’ songs. It’s worse that that, I would think: every clergyperson despairs at having to sing ‘All Things B&B’ again, but that’s the ‘primary school level’ of 50 years ago or more. This is not just a random outburst from Dr Williams, as he is president of the Hymn Society of Great Britain & Ireland, but it does edge in the direction of grumpy-old-priest-ism. He pleads for priests ‘to encourage children at local schools to do more hymn-singing’ (I will do my best and we’ll see how that goes) and it’s left to the Society’s secretary, Fr Richard Cranham, to offer thanks that people still know 'All Things B&B' even if they’re ignorant of everything else. 'Apart from Away In a Manger', probably.

When we used to get together to plan the monthly Family Service (RIP) at Swanvale Halt, Edgar (RIP) could usually be relied on to argue that we needed to strive to include modern hymns that non-churchgoers knew. "But Edgar", I would say, knowing that what he meant was something written in the 1970s, "the problem is that people now don’t know any hymns. We can’t just restrict ourselves to the half-a-dozen that they might possibly have heard of" (especially when that includes the aforementioned 'Away In a Manger'). My main reflection is that, quite apart from any spiritual deficit that might result, the lack of hymn-knowledge is a tremendous cultural impoverishment. Lots of traditional hymns are nothing very special, but some are stunning. Anyone who thinks that trad church music is boring should have been at our evening mass last Sunday when we sang 'O For A Thousand Tongues' to the tune Lyngham. As I told the congregation, it’s a good 18^th-century hymn tune so for the bit where you repeat lines you can basically sing the words you want and whatever notes you want and provided we all come together at the end it will be all right. And it was sensationally uplifting. As for schools, the usual fare at our Infant School – apart from the songs the children sing, which tend to be seasonal rather than religious – we troop into assembly to the worship songs the head teacher is familiar with from her own place of worship, but I remember the day when she instead decided to play 'Eternal Father Strong to Save', which is one of my favourites, rigorous in its theology and incomparably powerful in its emotion. I definitely got a lump in my throat. And yet, although I think many people would probably recognise this song if it was put in front of them, they probably aren’t aware enough of it, or many, many more like it, to remember it otherwise.

What we do about this is another matter. Once upon a time we had a thing called ‘Sunday Sing’ which was simply a group of us gathering one Sunday evening a month to sing hymns that might be coming up in worship in the next couple of months, with tea afterwards. But only the usual suspects ever came, not the souls who could have benefited most from singing them. Still, I’ve often wondered whether hymns are, potentially, a bridge to unchurched people.

Perhaps the Goth-inflected Irish entry for the Eurovision Song Contest, Bambie Thug, has some knowledge of hymns, though they show no overt sign of it and Roman Catholics aren’t all that used to singing compared to Anglicans. Following the usual Goth strategy of turning negative emotions and experiences into something positive and active – victimhood to autonomy – the artist’s witchy imagery of candles, pentangles, and baths full of flower petals and coloured dye, provokes Irish priests to outbursts that read more like an old bloke ranting in the pub than a sermon, but although I’m sympathetic I don’t warm to it a lot either. I understand what’s going on, but these occult mechanisms of blessings and hexings are either a way of talking to and animating elements within yourself – a form of meditation – or an attempt to make things happen in the real and concrete world by bargaining with forces that in fact aren’t there – a form of magic. Either way, they're a spiritual dead end. Mx Thug would be far better off, ultimately, getting to know a few hymns: I can't help feeling that they, and the great majority of people, are missing out terribly.

Disgusted Of

'Never read the comments' is of course sound advice in almost any corner of the Internet (not here as all the comments are informative and kind). So I can't recall what led me to take note of some letter to the Telegraph lately in which a gentleman in where else but Tunbridge Wells opined in the following terms:

SIR – Although there are social and demographic reasons for the Church of England’s decline, a major contributory factor must be finance. The wasteful pursuit of woke causes by both the central Church and dioceses, as well as the unnecessarily large number of bishops, are putting huge burdens on the parishes. ... It is not clear to me why there are nearly twice as many now as there were 200 years ago, and four times as many bishops, while the number of parish clergy has fallen by three quarters.

As soon as anyone denounces 'woke causes' their views should very largely be put carefully to one side, but apart from that I bring this up only to mention that I don't recognise any of this picture. I'm not sure about the decline in numbers of parish clergy, but there are about 13,000 ordained people in current ministerial roles (as opposed to retired priests still doing stuff) and just over 100 bishops, which doesn't seem all that top-heavy a structure. And bishops don't really cost all that much either, certainly not enough for cutting their numbers by, say, half to make any material difference to the funding of the Church of England. I have questions as to what bishops do - at least ours, who we barely see from one year to the next - but there's little reason to think that their existence is pulling the rest of the structure down. I also struggle to think of a single 'woke cause' that might be imposing any burden on the parish of Swanvale Halt. Race, sexuality and gender identity - no, there's absolutely nothing that our diocese has demanded we campaign on or develop a position about. I think the hearing aid clinic run by Sally our Pastoral Assistant is the closest I can come up with. Special treatment for the hard of hearing? It's political correctness gone mad!

Heathen Rights

Il Rettore is due to take the funeral of an old friend – but not as a clergyman, just as a friend, as the gentleman was a determined atheist. ‘We knew each other well enough to argue about it’, he told me over coffee.

I mentioned that a little while ago a couple I know well asked whether the funeral of their son, who’d died suddenly in his 30s, could be held in the church. They aren’t Christians, and for a few hours I didn’t realise they were asking for a funeral service in their own tradition. There is no chance of this happening: canon law says specifically that any act of worship in a church must not ‘be contrary to, nor indicative of any departure from, the doctrine of the Church of England in any essential matter’, and an act of non-Christian worship clearly is that. Thankfully I know the people well enough for them not to take my refusal personally, and they’d already been warned by a knowledgeable friend this would probably be the case.

At almost the same time someone I know posted on LiberFaciorum a link to the funeral of Stuart Brogan, who ran the Wyrdraven Viking shop in Glastonbury. This took place in Glastonbury parish church and was led jointly by Revd Diana Greenfield, the ‘Avalon Pioneer Minister’ who worked (she’s moved on very recently) with alternative communities in and around Glastonbury, and a pagan officiant. Revd Diana said at the start that the service would ‘reflect Stu’s respect for a variety of faiths’, but while the pagan officiant mentioned pagan deities and ideas, there was no specifically Christian content to the service at all as far as I could see or hear. Local media referred to the service as a ‘heathen funeral’, which didn’t seem unfair.

Without delving into the specifics of Mr Brogan’s funeral and why it came about in the way it did, I don’t think I could have taken part with any integrity. A church isn’t a neutral space as a crematorium properly is, and the presence of a Christian minister isn’t neutral either. I want to welcome everyone, but I also want to welcome them to something – to Christ’s presence, and to the place where he has promised to be. I don't think I can do that unless he is named. 

Bottom Up (or another part of the anatomy)

The Deanery Chapter gathered yesterday to hear the head of the Mission Department at the Diocese talk about lay ministry. That's what the deanery secretary had told us, but he didn't, except in passing. Instead he said he was there to 'begin a bottom-up conversation about how we resource parish ministry in ten years' time'. 'I want to record these conversations', he went on, putting a small flashing device on the floor, 'and I'll feed it all into an AI processing program to pick out the details later'. That made sure most people didn't want to contribute anything at all. He outlined his impression of the pressures on parishes, particularly in terms of finding laypeople to fill important roles, and suggested that we were working within a structure designed for a time when 45% of the population was in church on a Sunday at a moment when that figure is more like 1.5%. The diocese would work with parishes to try to provide for the continued existence of worshipping communities into the future, 'developing creative solutions tailored for local circumstances', etc. etc. It would all have sounded more convincing did we not know that the parish of Manton, which fell vacant just before Christmas, has already been told there's no question of their previous full-time incumbent being replaced and instead they will have someone on house-for-duty. Bottom up? Certainly, if you'll excuse the vulgarity, the phrase 'my arse' comes into any response. 

Still, there's a serious question to be asked about the pattern of Anglican church life in a choppy and uncertain future. As some of my colleagues complained, worshippers simply will not willingly be relocated from one church to another, even for a Sunday, and the reason for this is not just cussed awkwardness but because their experience of Christian community, and therefore of Christian discipleship, is deeply linked to a particular place. 

The point is that we are called into community, and that community, the group of people with whom we journey and experience what it means to be Christians, has to have a degree of continuity over time. It has to be deep and committed, especially because, in the Catholic way of looking at it, it isn't something we fundamentally choose ourselves, and Christian churches are not primarily voluntary associations of people who come and go as they decide. We acquire obligations and those obligations shape who we are becoming. We enter into a something which existed before us and will exist after us. The primary way the life of the Christian community is shaped is the action of the Holy Spirit through the sacraments. Each community is eucharistic and baptismal; each community hallows time through the rhythm of its daily prayer. 

Signs of continuity are not absolutely necessary, but they are helpful. They include the buildings we worship in, which acquire their own personalities. We have a relationship with those physical surroundings and they come to shape our spiritual lives and imaginations. Ordained ministers are another sign of continuity because they are sent into the community from outside it, and occupy an office in a visible sequence unfolding across time. Bishops are the paramount mark of the continuity of the Christian community, linking together individual, local communities into an Apostolic lineage. You can imagine Christian communities persisting without historic buildings or ordained leadership, but their presence makes continuity easier to maintain. Without them, they may well drift in many directions, and the task would be all the harder. 

Locating Christians

A few weeks ago we touched on Will Self’s reasons for going to church, and this morning on the magic wireless journalist Sara Wheeler decided to share hers – ‘not because a bearded old man lives in the sky or because I want to hear a sermon of the “dearly beloved” variety’, whatever she means by that, but because church supplies ritual that ‘helps me cope with anxieties about the gas bill’. Repetitive symbolic behaviour, Ms Wheeler speculates with the aid of Emil Durkheim, is about imposing structure on essentially structureless experience and so reducing anxiety; ‘public telling of morally-charged stories’ helps us understand ourselves; and being aware that you’re doing the same things as others have done before you and will do after you puts your own experiences into a longer, and more realistic, perspective.

Clearly not every ritualised action will carry out these personally and socially worthwhile functions, although you can see shades and reflections of them in everything from the Brownies to golf clubs. Religion is a bit more all-embracing in its explanatory narratives, and has that element of pointing to eternity which is harder for the Brownies to manage. But although many of us may not find it a sufficient reason to engage in religious practice or to persuade others to do so, for others, perhaps lots, it will be enough. You don’t have to believe to get something out of it.

Most of modern evangelistic practice is focused around belief, about bringing nonbelievers to the point of believing, and making sure people who are already in believe harder, as it were. Now, there have to be some who believe in order to make the whole thing work, which is why clergy have to make vows and are encouraged to sharpen and hone their spiritual lives, but perhaps we ought to be less fixated about belief as such. Experience seems to be that people who develop what you might call a dogma-based faith are recruited from the larger number of Will Selfs and Sara Wheelers who have a practice-based faith, and always have been: they ‘catch’ it as a result of doing it. We seem to need more of the latter to generate the former, and not the other way around.

Christmas Revival

As Christmas approaches there is often a spate of journalistic comment about religion that doesn’t necessarily bear on the season, but on the state of Christianity as a whole. Dr Abacus recently called the attention of myself and other clergy he knows to a piece for the FT by Camilla Cavendish, about the benefits of religious observance, while in The Scotsman Tory leader in Scotland Murdo Fraser tilts at the long-toppled windmill of Dr Richard Dawkins to allege ‘early signs of a Christian revival’ in the UK. I thought both were a bit questionable. Baroness Cavendish describes herself as an unbeliever but prescribes religion for personal wellbeing, while Mr Fraser, while also declaring Christianity’s utility in answering what he reports as Nicky Gumbel’s summary of human needs – ‘to be loved, to have a purpose, to belong’ – adds to them its role in underpinning 'Western values', basically roping God into culture-war discourse. His description of Christianity’s ‘inspiring message of hope and light’ rings every bit as hollow and unconvincing as you might predict. I’d never dream of using arguments like this. The first amounts to ‘come to church and you might feel a bit better’, while the second translates as ‘come to church and together we can stop the Muslims’. Never satisfied, me.

Meanwhile over on Radio 4 we have a somewhat more rewarding and intellectually hard-edged diatribe from Will Self:

It’s precisely in order to hear [these ultimate questions] posed that I attend church services of all denominations, and ones in mosques, ashrams, gudwaras, and synagogues as well. Other non-believers may go for aesthetic reasons, and especially at this time of year, for a live enactment of some Christmassy reverie; I go, as I say, to test the mettle of my own understanding of my self, and its relation to others and the world, and for this to work for me, I require a sermon! Often, I’ll find the sermon in the established churches so woefully bad I have to restrain myself from heckling. It’s not just a matter of banal popular cultural references, it’s the reduction of the majesty and awe that should be associated with this extraordinary belief system to a kind of weak humanist jus.

… which all acts as some sort of cautionary warning as I compose the five sermons I will preach across Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, just in case someone like Will Self is there, ‘believing that any sermon I hear could be the one that triggers some profound conversion experience’. At least he was mildly approving, despite one throwaway reference to Nigel Farage, of what he heard ‘on Advent Sunday as I sat with about forty others in the exquisitely beautiful St Jude’s-on-the-Hill’, preached by, as it turns out, Revd Emily Kolltveit, former Mediaeval Baebe and leader of symphonic-metal band Pythia before she caught religion. I wonder what sermon got to her.

Prayers at the Hour

‘I think that clock is fast’, observed the Chief Executive as he cast his eye across the Council chamber, and so it was – by about five minutes. ‘Someone’s been overzealous winding it’, suggested one of the councillors.  I couldn’t help Brian Cant’s voice running through my mind: ‘Here is the clock, the Trumpton clock, telling the time, never too quickly, never too slowly …’

The reason I was there, and waiting for 6pm to arrive, was that I was leading prayers before the full council meeting of the Borough, an authority which includes Hornington and a couple of other towns and the villages in between them. Paula, still technically one of our Pastoral Assistants, is Mayor this year, having been Mayor of this or that authority on several occasions, including stepping in one year when the sitting Mayor of Hornington had to stop sitting and go to prison. She is perhaps unusual in being a Christian of progressive political opinions in public life, and a definite supporter of the principle of the Council being prayed for when it meets.

Now this has been an area of some controversy in the past. I’m not sure about the Borough, but Hornington Town Council went through a period when prayers were deliberately not being offered, one of the rare occasions when Paula found herself on the same side as the Conservative councillors. It threatened to become a little skirmish in the culture wars, until Paula became Mayor again and offered the compromise that prayers would be offered before the Council meeting was formally opened, giving councillors who didn’t want to be present the chance not to be, and to enter the chamber only once prayers were finished. 

The whole issue seems to have calmed down since then. Not all the current councillors are Christians by any means, including the present Mayor of Hornington (also a Borough Councillor – I hope you’re keeping up at the back, there), as evidenced by his own civic service back in June. I noticed that none of the elected members availed themselves of the opportunity not to be present as I offered their deliberations and decisions to the Lord. I also note, consulting the Youtube video recording the meeting, that the proceedings went on until twenty to nine, so I’m glad I wasn’t obliged to listen to the debate as the councillors had to listen to me ...

Changing Times

Keeping with the principals of theological colleges, Fr Robin Ward of Staggers lately posted a link to this video of Pope John XXIII being carried to St Peter's in Rome for the inaugural mass at the start of the Second Vatican Council in 1962. What a glimpse into a long-past world. John's successor Paul VI was also borne aloft on the sedia gestatoria and fanned with ostrich feathers on ceremonial occasions with visibly less and less enthusiasm, until John Paul I refused to use them, only being persuaded to be carried on the sedia by the argument that people needed to see him, provided he could dispense with the rest of the regalia and just wear a plain white cassock. John Paul II got rid of it entirely and you simply can't imagine a pope using it again. 

But why can't you? Benedict XVI revived lots of bits and pieces of old papal kit that his two predecessors had dispensed with (including things John Paul II had gradually discarded over the course of his long reign). Here, he can be seen wearing Pope John's mitre and mantum, visible in the video from 1962 - except that the mantum has been shortened and reduced to the dimensions of an ordinary cope. Lots of trad-Roman Catholics (and the Anglo variety, too) would be very excited to think it might all make a comeback one day. No, this kind of prelatical ceremony is inconceivable now because it belongs to a version of religion that Christians have moved away from, and it's worth thinking about what is going on here, in emotional terms.

When I first saw the film, I, even I, pursed my lips in a slightly Protestant way and found myself wondering where Jesus might be in it all, what he would make of such a spectacle if he was among those watching crowds. The interesting retort to that is that this is Good Pope John being carried through the throngs flanked by ostrich feathers and surrounded by men in Renaissance uniforms: Angelo Roncalli, the peasants' son who became pontiff, and who we know was one of the humblest and holiest souls ever to occupy the throne of St Peter. He's doing it because it's part of the job. His jewelled mitre is uncomfortably rammed down on his head making his ears poke out; he's tired and even after mass has to go through the business of having his gloved hand kissed by a succession of bishops and heads of religious orders: for each of them it's a special encounter, but for him it's one in a long, long chain of bowed heads. The pomp itself is not the issue. 

The point to remember is that there's nothing religious about the grand spectacle of the papal procession, whatever might have happened in St Peter's afterwards. Before the age of film or photography, only those present would have had any idea of its existence: the audience for such an event were the people of Rome, watching their head of state in his pomp. It's essentially monarchical. If there was any kind of Christian element, it would have been the gestures of blessing His Holiness made to those on the ground. But after the Papal States were lost (around the same time, coincidentally, that it became possible to transmit images of such ceremonies around the world) it became something else - a way of declaring and dramatising Catholic identity. One poster on LiberFaciorum commented on the film 'This was spectacle - on the scale of Cecil B DeMille when I was little - 6th grade I think. It was awesome and edifying - the school sisters were filled with anticipation - we prayed for the Council - it was epic for me'.

Certainly this is what it looks like from the video; but as in any such occasion it might feel different to experience it in person. Noise, difficulty in seeing what's happening, discomfort of various sorts, indigestion distracting you from the thoughts and reflections you're supposed to have: we're well versed in the distance between image and reality now, and are a bit wry about it. 

Perhaps this why we've become very unused to expressing our sense of self-hood, even when it involves being part of a wider group, through this kind of grand spectacle. It's not just a matter of taste, or even the individualism which leads us to prefer the small and local. At least partly, it's because we know, deep down, that it doesn't really work.  

Setting Goals in Oxford

Oxford was wintry yesterday when I arrived (despite the best efforts of the rail network completely thrown into chaos by a points failure at Slough) to fill in the gaps in my lists of Surrey clergy with a visit to the ranks of Crockford's and the Clergy List on the shelves of the Bodleian. I also wanted to look up Old Cornwall, the magazine of the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies, to pursue accounts of the restoration of holy wells, which meant my first-ever visit to the Taylorian Library. I was shown to the farthest recesses of the basement where there was a tiny, tiny desk at the end of a row of rolling shelves. 'I could give you directions', said the thoughtful young woman at the enquiry desk, 'but they'd be too complicated to remember'. I think she just wanted a break. On my way out I looked through a doorway and saw a bust of Voltaire seasonally-decorated.

I made my way up the Banbury Road to Wycliffe Hall to see the Principal, Michael Lloyd, who was my doctrine tutor at St Stephen's House. What's happening at Wickers these days, I asked? 'It's interesting, we have quite a number of students who regularly worship at Pusey House', said Michael, 'so we're working out how to negotiate that without losing the basic Evangelical nature of the college.'

'Our current ambition is to help renew the Church of England's engagement with society on an intellectual level - trying to do something about its current habit of anti-intellectualism. We want to encourage Christian academics who work in different fields, not just theology. Strangely though there's a lot of talk about the conflict of religion and science, there are lots of Christian physicists and chemists, but hardly anyone working in English literature or sociology. It impoverishes the Christian mind. We have a writer-in-residence here: I'd like to have an artist-in-residence, a musician, a film-maker. The Church has spent too long just talking to itself, so it's no wonder the rest of society ignores us.'

'I'm so pleased to hear that', I said, 'it's been something I've complained about for years (to myself) - that we talk all the time about engagement with the world but don't do it. All we seem to do is shout at it.'

'Yes', went on Michael, 'we're calling it "The Renaissance of Christian Intellectual Life".

'I don't know what we'll do next year.'

Objection

There are many occasions when I take great comfort from not following the debates of the national Church in any detail: there are plenty of strains and stresses in ministry and life generally without adding to them, and my only interest in Synodical acrobatics is in how they might impact on what I am called on to do or not do. So there are many people more invested than me, for differing reasons, in the Synod vote this week to go ahead with experimental services to pray for, or bless, relationships in which both partners are of the same sex. I’m not entirely sure how it’s decided which measures do or don’t require an Act of Synod to enact: the admission of women to the ministry did, which was why two-thirds of Synod members had to support each measure, whereas this current change only needed a simple majority in each House of Bishops, Clergy, and Laity. And the Bishop of Oxford’s amendment to the effect that blessing services could be separate events rather than incorporated in other acts of worship only squeezed through by one vote in the House of Laity. Although some of the votes against might well have been cast by Synod members who would have preferred to go further than the proposal on the table, this isn’t a consensus, whatever else it is.

The Church of England Evangelical Council is now exploring ways of supporting dissenting clergy ‘who in some way might feel their membership of the CofE to be compromised’, including feeling unable to relate to their bishop on anything other than a legal basis. This is clearly inspired by the similar arrangements that have been in place for many years for trad Anglo-Catholics opposed to the ordination of women, but it’s odd, because Evangelical objections to these changes to do with sex arise within a different sort of ecclesiology. For those trad Anglo-Catholics, the Church itself, including its organisational arrangements, is the creation of the Holy Spirit, and fundamentally altering those arrangements is, arguably, cutting the organisation off from the Paracletal electric current. It’s not just about cohabiting organisationally with people you disagree with. But Evangelicals don’t think about the Church in that way. If you’re an Evangelical Anglican, your relationship with God is direct. It doesn’t make any fundamental difference to you what the church down the road does, or what your bishop believes. Your bishop’s opinions are probably massively divergent from yours already. It may be uncomfortable that she, or that putative church a few streets away, might be blessing or even eventually marrying same-sex couples, but you will still have the option of regarding them with the same derision and contempt that you probably do now. You may find it awkward that a same-sex couple might turn up to worship with you (though they’ll probably steer well clear), but they could easily do that already. No, my brethren who take a more conservative view on this matter won’t be forced to do anything they don’t want to do, and neither will I, so, as I have no interest in compelling anyone to fall in line with what I think, my sympathy is really very limited.

++Justin is clearly very content that he abstained on the vote, ‘to act as a focus of unity’. This too is modelled on the way the Church has accommodated trad Anglo-Catholics over women, and again it shows the same kind of misconception. A trad Anglo-Catholic objects to a bishop (or Archbishop) who has actually ordained a woman, not because that prelate thinks ordaining a woman is right or wrong: it’s not a matter of opinions, but of deeds. Evangelical objections are precisely about opinions, and we all know what the ABC thinks. That's why, I imagine, sundry Christians might find him hard to talk to from now on, if they hadn't before.