Blazing Infernos and How Not To Have Them

Ever since Grant and Matt went on their Churchwardens' training day last year the matter of fire safety has been, as it were, smouldering away under the surface of the church's life. The last time I talked about this I mentioned that, when we last thought seriously about this some years ago, we decided we weren't completely convinced by our consultant, but on reflection this was a bit unfair although 'opinion was divided' among the people who were obliged to work most closely with him. It was more the case that our insurers, carrying out a general risk audit of the church plant, pointed our attention to their own fire risk assessment template to guide us in our thinking, and that suggested (to me, anyway) that all our level of risk required was to put up exit signs and make sure all our sidespeople and hirers knew what to do if they smelled smoke. And then we had to shut the place because of Covid anyway, and anything more involved was forgotten.

But that was all before the new regulations issued after the Grenfell Tower fire. A little while ago the Fire Service visited, walked around the site, tutted and shook their heads, and issued us with Notice to Comply with all the new laws within three months. It took two months to take the first step of managing to find a consultant with the time to visit and draw up a new, authoritative report on what we should actually do. Now we begin the process of getting quotes for fire alarms, emergency lighting, making our electrics and heating boilers safe (they shouldn't really be in the loft over the hall, but moving them is really unfeasible), and raising awareness among church members, to which end I produced a short and bad video outlining what everyone needs to know. 

To a degree this feels a bit unfair. It's not as though anyone lives at the church, and it compares in any way to, well, I don't know, plucking an example out of the air, a block of flats covered in flammable cladding where lots of souls might have to be roused from their beds in the middle of the night. But it is true that a fire might engulf the boilers and race down the pipes into the church before anyone knew what was going on, or the antique electrics of the organ spark and smoulder away long enough to catch the roof timbers without the aroma of smoke reaching responsible nostrils. We might even be able to get some help with costs from a grant, but I may have to ambush churchwardens from other parishes on their way to the Council offices. 

Election Time

I have never, ever voted in a Synod election, either Diocesan or General, but now we have a vacancy for a Clergy representative and Fr Benedict from North Corley, a fellow SCP member, is standing. This is rather to my surprise, and it seems to his as well. He told me someone else was lined up as the catch-all-bit-progressive-something-other-than-conservative-evangelical candidate, but with something like half an hour to go before nominations closed they turned out to be ineligible because they only had Permission To Officiate in the diocese, prompting a frantic set of phone calls and Benedict emerging from the smoke, as it were. 'We so often lose out because the evangelicals are better organised', he complained, and this episode doesn't really do anything to dispel that.

We have 'hustings' coming up, though they take the somewhat bloodless shape of electors submitting written questions online which the candidates then answer, also in written form. Fr Benedict has encouraged me to ask something but although as we all know the burning issue is the General Synod's stumbling muck-up of Living in Love and Faith I really can't think of anything I might ask that could possibly be illuminating. He further points me towards the Evangelical Council's suggestion that parishes who find themselves out of line with their bishops might divert some funds from the diocese towards other organisations, and suggests I might ask the candidates what they think about this. I wonder: left to my own devices, I might want to ask something like:

Why do the candidates think God might want the Church of England (as opposed to any other ecclesial body) to continue to exist?

... but that might be too abstract!

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.

Visitation From On High

The Archdeacon sat in the vestry with me and Hannah the outgoing churchwarden and went through a stack of documents, ticking them off a list. This was, as far as I can recall, the first time since I arrived in Swanvale Halt that the Archdeacon had himself done the usually-misnamed Archdeacon’s Visitation: in the past it was invariably delegated to the Area Dean. The Visitation traditionally focused on going through the Inventory of the church in question, checking that we hadn’t sold or stolen any of the silverware in the two years after the previous one. It’s a peculiar performance measure. Other topics included making sure we had the correct notices displayed (there is some debate as to whether this includes the Table of Kindred and Affinity). For one Visitation some years ago I happened to be away and it was churchwarden Patrick, a blithe and laid-back character, who dealt with the then Area Dean; he answered almost every question with a smile and ‘I don’t know about that’. It was just as well that they knew one another of old, but even then we were issued with two sides of A4 listing all the things that we must make sure we’d done.

Now the focus of the Visitation has changed. We were asked to lay out copies of our Health & Safety Policy, Safeguarding Policy, gas and electricity certificates, and insurance documents, and get out the service registers (although as far as I know the last are not legally-required documents at all and there used to be bitter and recalcitrant clergy who didn’t keep them). The Archdeacon had a checklist on his laptop, to confirm that we at least had something that looked like the kind of thing we should. Having passed that hurdle, we moved on to discussing the Church Development Plan about which the Archdeacon was very supportive and encouraging and made a couple of suggestions about points the diocese might be able to help with. We finished with a wander round the churchyard looking at the flowers.

OFSTED it’s not, and neither should it be. I’ve heard stories from colleagues in other dioceses of Visitations which begin with the legal checking-of-documents bit but then move on to a closed-door discussion between the Archdeacon and PCC members from which the incumbent is excluded – people being told ‘you are not allowed to attend’ – and the result of which the priest is sometimes not even informed, apart from a vague ‘it went well’. It sounds like the Church’s traditional love of secrecy and power-games under the guise of accountability, and I’m relieved we haven’t gone down that route here.

(I found this image by Googling ARCHDEACON. It depicts Revd Colley, Archdeacon and former Rector of Stockton. With his biretta, stole and shoulder-cape, he is clearly a Sound gentleman. But why is he, with so very serious an expression so we must assume he isn't taking the mickey, carrying a trumpet? Should this be standard issue for all archdeacons?)

Renewing An Interest

Fr Donald, the retired hospital chaplain, and I met in the café opposite the church after mass to sign the form to apply to renew his Permission to Officiate. This has to be done to make sure there are not retired clergy knocking around and illicitly doing stuff . 'Why do they want to know this?' he boggled, pointing to the demand that he specify the number of times he has presided at the Eucharist, preached, or done anything else that might fall within the remit of our agreement as to how his ministry should be exercised in the fair parish of Swanvale Halt. We agreed there could be any number of reasons. Positively it could be a way of making sure that a retired clergyperson's incumbent sticks to whatever it is they've agreed they should be allowed to do - not much, in the case of Donald and myself, just him being available when I might need him - to rule out them being sidelined or overworked. But I've never heard of the diocese intervening in such a case. The diocese could want to know what human resources they have available which they don't have to pay for, or how many fees are disappearing into the pockets of Retireds rather than the coffers of Church House. We weren't sure. But we did agree that him speaking to a group over Zoom at the intervention of an incumbent somewhere else he knows probably didn't need to be reported to the Bishop as it was difficult to see what harm he might be doing. Unless he's spreading heretical opinions, and in that case it's the business of the Bishop of London rather than His Grace of Guildford.

Major Considerations

The Vicar of Tophill and the priest-in-charge of Hornington described for the meeting’s benefit the process of establishing the new ‘minster’ parish that will cover them both. When we last mentioned this here, some of my readers expressed a degree of scepticism over whether the term ‘Minster’ was really applicable to Hornington church which is a sprawling and very badly organised parish church rather than anything grander. His Grace of Tophill stated that ‘minsters’ were often former monastic churches and Hornington qualified partly due to once being a Benedictine monastery. I don’t know where he got that from: it may be scrambled from the fact that there was indeed an Anglo-Saxon ‘minster’ there, but those were not always monastic and not always very big either. He outlined the current requirements for a church to be designated as a minster. The trouble with this is that what he’s talking about is not actually ‘minster status’ but ‘major church status’, something which I think has existed since about 2020. This seems to have developed from, and is still tangled up with, the notion of a ‘Greater Church’ which is about thirty years older.

In 1991 a group of big and historic churches, often former monastic ones, which were of a near-cathedral size (and in many cases bigger than small cathedrals like Carlisle and Oxford), but lacked the recognition and resources available to cathedrals, set up the Greater Churches Network to swap ideas about fundraising, marketing and management. There were more in some areas than others: Dorset had three (Sherborne Abbey, Christchurch Priory and Wimborne Minster), but Surrey, none at all. The GCN trundled on for a couple of decades and then in 2016 the Church of England issued a report discussing the idea of the ‘Major Church’. To be designated ‘Major’, a church had to fulfil several criteria: it had to be more than 1000 square metres in size, be Grade 1 or 2* listed, to have exceptional historical significance, and a role beyond that of an ordinary parish church. When the GCN dissolved itself in 2019, it had 55 members; the 2019 report had already identified 300 ‘major churches’. Not all were as big as the former ‘Greater Churches’; not all were even very old, as the number included Fr Gresham Kirby’s modernist gem St Paul’s Bow Common. It’s this designation which Hornington is being proposed for, rather than the courtesy title of ‘Minster’ which doesn’t really mean anything and which certainly carries no legal status whatever; you’d have to be very imaginative indeed to describe St Paul’s Bow Common as a ‘minster’. As I mentioned, the GCN is no more, and is now the Major Churches Network, and designated Major Churches can apply to join it (though its membership is still only 65).

It seems clear that Major Churches are just one element of a Church in a state of flux. It might be that they could indeed develop into being something like the Anglo-Saxon minsters, centres for Christian activity locally, with dependent daughter churches or communities, and organising and galvanising bodies for mission; but that’s not what they are yet. They would need to work out the boundaries between that kind of activity and the strategic role deaneries are supposed to be developing, and what happens to those churches who find themselves in the region of a Major Church with which they are out of sympathy ecclesiologically? That’s likely to be the case with Swanvale Halt and Greater Hornington. It only makes the £300K the Diocese is giving to the putative new ‘minster’ for additional staff grate all the more. If there’s that kind of money to be given away, I could make use of some!

You Cannot Go Back

During the pandemic I was able to book an appointment with my GP via their online system and I assumed that would be the same today. Not so: the sequence went as follows, more or less:

  - The GP's website relocates me to Patient Access

  - Patient Access tells me I do not have a GP registered on my account

  - Having selected my GP I must now prove my identity and I am relocated to NHS Login

  - My first photograph of my driving licence is unacceptable

  - My second photograph, exactly the same as the first, is acceptable

  - My face must be scanned to make sure it's the same as the person on the driving licence

  - It doesn't seem to be similar enough no matter the angle or arrangement of spectacles

  - I am offered the chance to record a video of my face instead, during which recording I have to repeat a code of four numbers

  - Despite making sure NHS Login can access my laptop camera, the video doesn't work

  - It is made very clear that I can't go back and try another driving licence photo

  - I give up and in the afternoon visit my GP so I can be issued with an access code

I suppose such obstacles are one way of putting people off making appointments!

A Matter of Choice

The proposal that the old town centre parish church in the probably-to-be-merged parish of Hornington and Tophill next door to Swanvale Halt be referred to in the future by the ridiculous title of ‘Hornington Minster’ is merely annoying: a more troubling aspect was brought to my attention yesterday.

Every Anglican parish has a patron, the person, or body, who has the right to propose someone to be its vicar or rector, a system which goes back to the early Middle Ages when the system of parish churches was first established; before the creation of Parish Church Councils representing the laypeople, the patron merely appointed the incumbent, and the right to appoint to a rich parish was well worth owning. When partisan activity in the Church was at its height in the late 1800s and early 1900s the societies set up to promote various aspects of either the Anglo-Catholic or Evangelical position gaily bought up ‘advowsons’ – the patronage of parishes – to embed their own viewpoint. The trade in advowsons came to an end in 1924, and, especially in rural areas where churches have been yoked together in multi-parish benefices, patronage is now often a complex matter, a patchwork of religious societies, Church authorities, Oxbridge colleges, and private individuals; Fr Barkley’s patron in Yorkshire is the local Lord of the Manor, while Il Rettore’s in Lamford was the Lord Chancellor. Since the foundation of PCCs representing the laity, the PCC has the ability to reject a candidate for the incumbency – not that it would be advisable for them to do it too often.

I learn that the patronage of the putative united parish of Tophill, Bramblecombe & Hornington is to be passed to the Church Pastoral Aid Society, an Evangelical missionary society which has been around since the 1840s.  Now, the last appointment to the united benefice of Tophill and Bramblecombe, just after I arrived in Swanvale Halt, was made by a patronage board including the Archdeacon, the Area Dean, the Lay Chair of the Deanery Synod, the PCCs of the two churches, and the Martyrs Memorial Trust; the MMT – like Simeon’s Trustees, another Evangelical body – has handed all its patronages over to the CPAS which explains their involvement. But the patron of Hornington is the Bishop. The proposal for the CPAS to take over the wholesale patronage of the entire united parish is presented in the form of a request to the Bishop to surrender his interest in Hornington, and as a tidying-up exercise. But, although our current Bishop is an evangelical, his successors might not be, and the removal of the Bishop effectively disposes of any non-evangelical influence in the appointment of a new incumbent.

Of course it makes me think about Swanvale Halt’s position. With the exception of Thorpe, whose patron is Keble College; St Augustine’s Aldershot, where the Bishop and the Society for the Maintenance of the Faith appoint the incumbent jointly; and the Clandons, where the Bishop and the Earl of Onslow alternate to make appointments, all the remaining Catholic parishes in the diocese are pretty vulnerable. Our patron here is the Bishop, making another reason for me to stick around to see whether Guildford Diocese is abolished and merged with a more congenial neighbour. I wonder how the Bishop would react to a suggestion from our PCC that he ‘surrender his interest’ in the patronage in favour of, I don’t know, the Guild of All Souls?! 

Power to the Laypeople

We weren’t sure whether Paula’s licence as Pastoral Assistant had expired, and it took ages before I was able to find someone at Church House who could tell me. Pastoral Assistant, it turned out, was no longer a licenced role: we should have had a letter from Bishop Jo about it at the end of 2019. Neither I nor any of the three people in the parish with PA licences could remember getting a letter from Bishop Jo, but fair enough. PAs were now PAs as long as they and their incumbent wanted them to be.

But that wasn’t, it seems, a one-off: the Diocese is completely changing the ‘Lay Training Pathway’, as I was told in a meeting on Tuesday. Once upon a time, Pastoral Assistants, Occasional Preachers and Worship Leaders were all trained centrally, on their own specific courses, and either ‘locally recognised’, ‘centrally authorised’ or ‘episcopally licenced’; now the intention is simply to let parishes get on with it in all these three areas and if people want to have any training they can take part in the relevant modules of the Local Ministry Programme, the training schedule for priests and deacons. When Sylv, the most active of our PAs within the church, did her lengthy and demanding course, she came out of it with an obvious sense of confidence and of being equipped for what she wanted to do, so it was worthwhile in her case, but the diocese maintains a lot of potential PAs are put off by the training and what they want to do is ‘empower the laity’. Mind you, they also want to avoid the situation where a church has half-a-dozen Occasional Preachers all stabbing their diocesan paper of authorisation with a forefinger and demanding their full entitlement of five sermons a year or whatever. I was baffled by the distinction between the new ‘Lay Pastoral Visitors’ and the old ‘Pastoral Assistants’ who have ‘done more training’, when you would that thought that the training was tailored to the role rather than determining what role you have. Oh well. A liturgical church is less likely to need ‘worship leaders’, and as for Occasional Preachers I allowed local teacher Tim to occupy the pulpit (if we had a pulpit) without a demur as I was sure he wouldn’t preach heresy or upset people too much. I’ve always thought I could do what I wanted in that respect anyway.

I had to explain that I was keeping myself muted because there was off-screen noise at my end, but I didn’t explain the noise in question was an online seminar on another screen with Professor Ronald Hutton talking about the contribution of occultists Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente to modern paganism. I think I managed to get the gist of both, but it was a close-run thing, I can tell you. 

Tying the (Tangled) Knot

‘It’s Paul from the Bishop’s Registry,’ said the phone message, ‘Please get back to me before 4.30, it’s a bit urgent’. I saw the message at 4.21. For a Surrogate for Oaths, a call from the Registry is a little like a police car pulling into the drive - you automatically assume you’ve done something wrong. In fact the call concerned a forthcoming wedding for which I needed to adminster an oath, and it would all turn out more complex than usual.

Liam and Rianne wanted to get married at Ellington, in the eastern part of the diocese. They come from a Traveller background; Travellers typically marry younger than has ever been the custom in mainstream English culture (except for medieval nobility), let alone now, and that applied in this case. Rianne was 17, and therein lay their problem: the minimum marriage age in England and wales has been raised to 18 to counteract forced marriages, and nobody was quite sure when it would come in. Their parish priest suggested they wait, but they were adamant they didn’t want to, and that left only a couple of days for the wedding to take place.

Nothing about it was straightforward. A little while before the couple were due to see me, I flicked through the guidance notes and suddenly remembered that, as a minor, Rianne needed to have permission to marry from her parents or guardians. The guidance notes give no instructions as to the form or wording for this. I knew Rianne had no relationship with her father, but Marian their priest had already met her mother, so I hurriedly phoned and asked Liam to make sure his prospective mother-in-law wrote and signed a note to this effect. It turned out to be scribbled on a sheet torn from a pad, which I trimmed so that when I sent it to the Registry it didn’t look quite so dodgy. Rianne had no relationship with her father, and last year changed her name by deed-poll so the name on her passport, issued before the change, was now different from her legal name. when she and Liam arrived – they’d come into the church as Toddler Praise was finishing so they were treated to that! – they discovered that they’d forgotten the deed poll certificate so had to drive ‘home’ to get it. while they were gone I looked at Liam’s driving licence and realised the address was somewhere in Sussex, neither Ellington nor wherever it was they’d just gone which they’d assured me was only ten minutes away. So what was their connection with Ellington? Marian had told me they lived there. When they got back they told me they were all staying with Rianne’s brother, but their actual home was in Ellington. I would have to send all the stuff off to London and trust that, if any question was raised, Marian had something to prove it was true.

Liam is actually a Christian who goes to a ‘gypsy church’ – these tend to be pretty serious, and he gibbed a bit about swearing the oath, but in the end did so. So all was well, and I sent them off to Ellington (via Rianne’s brother’s house) to get married. I assembled all the bits of paper, rather more than I usually put together, and posted it all off to the Registry. If I get another call on Monday, my heart will beat uneasily!

Give Us Your Huddled Masses

Having decided I wouldn’t be hosting refugees from Ukraine, but very keen to do other things – and for our local churches to have a more coherent approach to supporting refugees in the future, not just in this particular geopolitical event – I was setting great store by yesterday's meeting hosted by Tophill church who are big and well-organised compared to humble Swanvale Halt, and came away from it little the wiser. Sam, the rector of Tophill, described getting daily phone calls asking whether he could help house refugees and the assumption his callers (who are they?) seem to have that a suburban Surrey church will know what’s happening in disputed areas of Ukraine. Nobody has phoned me up, I thought, perhaps they know better than to try. He and his family have signed up to take someone in, but he thought that ‘if we wait for official channels we’ll be waiting forever’ and pointed to the informal community groups which are already trying to organise matches between refugees and hosts and thought the Church could do that. The members of the group who’d actually had past experience dealing with refugees thought this was not a good idea, and church communities should focus on providing help to refugees and hosts, whether those hosts come from within their congregations or the community more widely, rather than being ‘introduction agencies’ which they thought carried more responsibility than just saying ‘you are a host, and you are someone who needs shelter, here you are, you do all the rest yourself’. What would actually happen when someone arrived at Lille or wherever, heading for the UK and needing a visa? It turned out nobody knew for sure. Sam described spending forty minutes on the phone to ‘a helpful lady from immigration who couldn’t tell me anything’. Not knowing anything, however, didn’t stop everyone in the meeting having an opinion. In fact, once I checked gov.uk this afternoon, it seemed pretty clear that this is the ‘official channel’, and it sort of makes sense, even if the initial stage in the Government guidelines – ‘sponsor and guest find each other’ – is almost mystical. Clear, perhaps – I’m not saying it’s easy.

It eventually became apparent that I wasn’t going to get any concrete pointers to help me in what I wanted to do at all. By the end of the gathering we’d agreed that we wanted to make and facilitate contact with official and unofficial groups and potential hosts; to support hosts and refugees; and to identify a range of tasks to help make this happen. These were all things I assumed were givens before we’d started, not the results of 90 minutes of to-ing and fro-ing. My task is to contact some of the relevant charities to find out the very things I thought the meeting might tell me.

Our lay reader Gisele, who has transferred her licence from Tophill to us, was taking part. She and her husband have signed up on the official system as ‘phase 2’ hosts. ‘I lost the will to live’, she admitted to me, ‘though it’s good to know there are people who want to do the right thing’.

Reorganising the Bishops

When he attends Morning Prayer at Swanvale Halt, Donald, the retired hospital chaplain, often brings a subject which is at the top of his mind to throw in my direction, which can be useful as he takes the Church Times and I don’t. ‘Have you seen anything about this latest report on reorganising the House of Bishops?’ he said this week. ‘They’re planning to have bishops as Church spokespeople on Brexit and the like.’ I’d been aware some news of this sort had been doing the rounds as there had been ribald remarks among friends on LiberFaciorum about bishops’ pensions, which related to the same report, but this specific matter was new to me.

The idea of ‘a bishop for Brexit’ was indeed what caught the imagination (and attracted the derision) of the non-Church media, but the actual document turns out to be less crackers and more dispiriting than that. It ponders the role of bishops in the modern Church of England, beset by financial, cultural and organisational challenges, and how the episcopal office might be exercised in a way which meets those challenges more flexibly and effectively. Much in the manner of such consultation documents it throws around a variety of ideas, including shrinking the number of dioceses, ‘enhanced regional structures’ whatever that means, early retirement and fixed terms of office for bishops, as well as those ‘specialist’ bishops to speak into particular topics; and, again much in the manner of such things, it remains to be seen how many of them may survive. The Church Times was mainly exercised by how few people had seen the document – the bishops themselves! – and demanded wider discussion.

There is a theological paper accompanying the document which hasn’t seen the light of day beyond the House of Bishops: its absence doesn’t help dispel the impression that it’s very light theologically, and the trouble is that our current bishops don’t think very theologically. They talk about being pastors but behave like managers. The document has a whole section on ‘missionary bishops’, mentioning the Celtic Church (remember what we said here about St Samson of Dol a while ago) and, in a more modern mode, the role of the Bishopric of Islington which since 2015 has worked rather well in establishing new church communities in the Diocese of London. It even cites the Flying Bishops who oversee trad-Catholic churches as a helpful example. But I am becoming suspicious of the whole language of ‘mission’ which seems to have little practical effect. The paper mentions that ‘leading God’s people in mission’ is part of the Ordinal for bishops, and so it is, but words like this appeared nowhere in the old Book of Common Prayer and crept in to do their mischief when Common Worship emerged in 2000, so we have had two decades of bishops ‘leading their people in mission’ and precious little to show for it. What I suspect will happen is that rafts of new bishops will conceive of ‘leading God’s people in mission’ in terms of writing reports and issuing goals, targets and objectives, not, say, baptising people, preaching, or going to live as hermits in derelict Roman forts like St Samson did; that is, telling other people how to ‘do mission’ rather than, in any remotely practical way, doing it themselves.

Apart from the occasional circular letter I haven’t had any interaction with our bishop in about three years: ‘good thing too’, you may cry, but even given the pandemic, it does make you wonder where the office of pastor pastorum really is.

Finding a Substitute

My recent long break was the first time I've been in the position of leaving the parish to its own devices without any ordained person around. Previously, so far as services are concerned, I could leave our curate Marion to do the lions' share and call in an odd favour or two to make sure she wasn't overburdened. This time, Swanvale Halt has no curate, so lots of favours had to be called on. My stand-ins this time were an ordained couple who are on the staff of Hilltop and are always happy to come to us; an NSM from a neighbouring parish; Catherine, who used to be a member of our congregation before her ordination and now looks after a tiny church nearby; and Colin, chaplain of a public school for whom I have done several weddings and whose chapel I've agreed to preach in later in the year. Just as well, as his was the biggest favour: I wanted him to cover a baptism for a couple who were anxious to have their son baptised before his second birthday and had already delayed the service twice due to plague. Just as knotty a matter as the services is Church Club at the Infants School: for that, I roped in the families worker from Hornington Baptist Church who to my relief found the children 'delightful' and apparently had them acting out the story of David being chosen as King of Israel - not his fight with Goliath, that could have got dangerous.

Parishes in need of a priest to cover a service can always apply to the Register of Clergy on Call, but if they do, they have to pay them the standard fees and expenses. For the period of my holiday, as I worked out the duties, doing that would have cost us £231 rather than the four bottles of wine and a box of chocolates it did, and I'd rather have people I know looking after the congregation, in any case.

As I was in the middle of trying to arrange the cover, the Area Dean reminded me that we'd agreed as a Deanery not to approach people individually, but to send out a general request for help through the Chapter secretary. I thought nobody would respond if I did that, but complied. Nobody responded. Thankfully Catherine and Colin aren't in the Deanery.

Who Does What?

The little stacks of paper - not as high or as colourful as this - spread over my dining room table, then the chairs, and finally the floor. There had to be a lot of them, as each represented a member of the congregation and the jobs they do, or did before covid put paid to so much of our church life. Some people have a stack that is only one sheet of paper high; others have gathered reams of roles. I am reaching the end of a big project of writing role descriptions for everything that everyone does. To be entirely frank, I probably wouldn't have even begun had not incoming churchwarden Grant expressed some irritation with verger Rick's habit of taking responsibility for things when he has not been explicitly asked to: you could describe this as initiative, but sometimes it goes beyond that and we agreed that what he needed was something that described what he is actually supposed to be doing. However, if the verger is to have a job description, everyone must, so Rick doesn't feel singled out.

In fact the diocese has been nagging at us incumbents to do this for some time, if only because it gives an opportunity to state which roles are subject to DBS clearance (or, as the Safeguarding Department insists on terming it, 'eligible for clearance' as though it was a privilege people looked forward to) and which aren't. It has been a colossal and bewildering exercise of drafting and consultation, and this final stage will involve writing a letter to everyone and getting the things to people (not everyone is online and I think in this case physical bits of paper will concentrate the mind). 

One ambiguity is that I don't really know how many of these beloved souls will actually want to resume their former roles once it becomes possible. For a liturgical, sacramentally-focused church, we now have perilously few people who are available to carry out liturgical functions; and then there's the practical but vital stuff, such as serving the post-service refreshments that enable people to get to know one another, the most basic step in building up the Body of Christ as any kind of community. I am starting to see how the pandemic has cut us down to the roots. I would like this to be like coppicing a tree, an operation that enables it to spring back into life and new growth - but I am far from sure!

A Superfluity of Supply

A simple enough post: a book. It's the new register book in which we are encouraged to record marriage services that take place in the church, now we are not legally registering marriages but following the new, slightly involved process of downloading a 'Marriage Document', filling it out and then posting it off to the Registry once the service is completed. Note that in recent years the Registry had been issuing much, much thinner register books with spaces for, I think, twenty weddings so they stood some chance of seeing them again within the lifetimes of the peoples whose names were recorded there. The new book is a handsome volume and our sacristan went to collect it from the Cathedral bookshop a couple of days ago and it will take a century to fill it. I suppose that's an expression of confidence. 

Paper Mountain

Margaret's anniversary combined with the forthcoming Annual Parochial Church Meeting has made me reflect on something that has surfaced in my mind for quite some time; where exactly are all the old PCC records? We have had four PCC secretaries since I arrived in Swanvale Halt, including Margaret who was just retiring at that time. She handed on to me a vast collection of papers: her husband, who'd died some years before, had been church treasurer at one stage and so there were dual his'n'hers copies of a lot of the records. Eventually those went up to the loft in the church but scanning round the place now I am not entirely sure where they are, and I haven't kept tabs on the location of the more recent ones at all.

Clearing out my study yesterday I realised that a collection of ring-binders underneath a table were in fact a group of PCC records that came from Harriet - or was it Pru? - when she relinquished the role of Secretary. So I can account for those. Meanwhile Darren, the new Secretary, has always preferred digital record-keeping, partly because of health issues that make it sensible to reduce the amount of dust-harbouring paper he might have around the place. But I think there should be hard copies as well, if only because I am supposed to sign the minutes off, and thanks to the dislocations and remote meetings of the last year or so I am not sure what I have physically signed and what I haven't: such is the relief of getting to the end of a rushed Zoom meeting that remembering actually to stick my signature on something at a future point is a demand too far, it seems. I know, gentle reader, that such matters are eye-wateringly dull, but among my many other 'recovery tasks' will be dealing with this!

The Last Wedding (like this)

It's not every wedding where the groom’s outfit gives rise to more comment than the bride’s, but on Saturday Adele’s gear was relatively standard (white dress, veil), while Cal’s included a leather top hat, black brocade jacket and pointy purple patent leather shoes. That wasn’t the only unusual aspect of the proceedings: as well as general covid-compliant considerations we were joined by Cal’s granddad in the form of a small wooden urn containing his ashes, were treated to his stepfather singing 'Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring', concluded the ceremony with 'Fly Me to the Moon', and, as Adele’s family were in sunny California, livestreamed the entire proceedings. For some reason the laptop didn’t recognise the external webcam so we had to make do with the integrated one but at least they saw something. In fact, as I mentioned, Swanvale Halt was probably as sunny as the west coast of the USA that day if probably not as warm.

Because Adele is a US citizen she and Cal had to be married by what is called a Superintendent Registrar’s Certificate, the legal preliminary you use for a church wedding where one or both party is a national of a country outside the EEA. They (ideally) get the agreement of a priest to marry them, then lay their case before the civil registrar who does all the paperwork; they take the said certificate back to the church as proof of permission to marry. Cal and Adele are the first couple I can remember doing this for in sixteen years, so it isn’t all that common though I have advised people marrying at other churches to go down that route. In theory a couple can get a SRC and just turn up at a church asking to be married, but in those circumstances a priest can tell them to swivel and any sensible registrar will want to know they’ve got that sorted out first.

Unless something very unexpected happens, Cal and Adele will also be the last couple to be entered in our marriage registers, because that entire method of marriage registration, in place since 1836, is coming to an end. Finally exasperated at having to harry parish clergy for their data, the civil registrars are now about to begin doing it all themselves. From the start of May, every couple marrying in a church will have a document filled in by the minister which will then be passed to the Registry as the basis for producing their actual marriage certificate. In the first draft of the legislation it was the couple themselves who were to be responsible for doing this: in a rare outbreak of sense which may be their most significant positive contribution to the life of this country in years, the bishops managed to argue that a couple who’d just got married were probably not the best people to arrange this and that even parish clergy were more likely to get it right, or indeed do it at all. There have apparently been some complaints about the inadequacy of the training we’ve been given about this quite serious change in what we do, and there is to be an online seminar in a couple of days’ time, but I didn’t think it was that bad – although I did do an executive summary for Marion the curate’s benefit which may have been a bit clearer. In fact I’d’ve been dismayed if it wasn’t.

Part Vindicated

Estelle is a Teaching Assistant at Swanvale Halt infants school; she has family history with the Post Office and when our sub-postmaster was caught up within the scandal which has finally made headlines a decade after it should have done she first took an interest, then raised a petition, then began working with Nick Wallis, the journalist who has pursued the case as it has made its way through progressively less obscure corners of the media and finally the courts (and who, it turns out, is the son-in-law of one of the Lamford churchwardens - it's a small world!). Estelle was outside the High Court a day ago to hear 39 sub-postmasters have their convictions for fraud and theft overturned. There is something deeply moving about these utterly ordinary people winning a victory against an institution which has been for so long apparently above the law, which has distorted and suppressed information, and which has lied so massively and shockingly to its employees, to official investigators, and to the Parliament to which it is in theory accountable. At last the media is referring to the Post Office scandal as what it is: the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history.

How was it, exactly, that Post Office Ltd managed to convince itself - if it did - that reality was something entirely different from what they claimed? How could Fujitsu, the company that devised the fatal Horizon accounting system, keep so silent throughout this whole event? Why did court after court never notice or comment on the apparent irregularity of a single institution being both complainant and investigator? I heard a former Conservative business minister on the radio yesterday regretting that she had never paid more attention to this matter while she was in office; why didn't she? Why did a succession of government ministers in both Labour and Tory administrations simply turn aside from the rising tide of complaints and claim they couldn't do anything? When our Swanvale Halt Post Office was closed, I wrote to doyenne-of-the-Corbynites Rebecca Long-Bailey as Labour business spokesperson to complain, and didn't get so much as an automatic email from her office (our own Tory MP was more forthcoming). Was everyone just scared?

Last year, as the original trial relating to Horizon was reaching its conclusion and Mr Justice Fraser issued what must be one of the most damning judgements ever laid down against a public corporation, Estelle was trying to find out the legal basis for the governance of Post Office Ltd. Discovering that as what is technically referred to as an 'Arms-Length Body' - a corporation which is not formally part of Government but related to it - it should be governed by a 'Framework Document' which lays out its precise relationship with civil servants and ministers, Estelle put in a Freedom of Information Request to see the document. At first she was sent irrelevant papers, and then was stonewalled by civil servants. Finally the Business Department admitted that there wasn't one. There was, in effect, nothing that described how Post Office Ltd should be run. This, presumably, was what allowed it to act as though it wasn't subject to the law and which made Government ministers so reluctant to tackle it.

Forget Mr Johnson and his text messages, or even his wallpaper: if there is not a public inquiry into these events it will be a dreadful shame: there are so many questions that need answering.

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.

The Latest Missives

Any idea (hope, perhaps) that the hierarchy of the Church of England had got its act together after a recent series of mis-steps was scotched a couple of days ago when the Archbishops sent out what appeared to be a draft encyclical about arrangements for administering communion in churches over Christmas. Since the beginning of the pandemic we have got used to the laity receiving communion in bread only, an anomalous situation but one perfectly acceptable legally and theologically. Their Graces of Canterbury and York decided that this was a shame, as most of us agree, and wrote to the effect that the priest could intinct the Host before giving it to each communicant. They did this in a letter which had to be rescinded hours later in favour of an updated version which corrected the grammatical and legal errors, but that still left the basic issue untouched of how practical it is to dip a wafer or even a cube of leavened bread into a chalice and then hand it to a communicant without it dripping, without contaminating the wine, or without hands touching which they are not supposed to do, notwithstanding the excessive detail in which the letter described how it might be done. One might have the strange impression that neither of Their Graces had ever presided at the Eucharist before. The country echoed to the sound of diocesan bishops, to their credit, incredulously choking, stressing to their clergy that they had seen nothing of this before it was published, and stating that it was probably better if everyone continue as they were. 

The idea that the Archbishops are now trying to make policy on such a practical matter without talking to anyone outside their own offices is quite bad enough, but they also took the opportunity to advise what is arguably a complete breach of canon law. Non-alcoholic wine is permissible at communion, the letter said. Now Canon B17 defines wine as 'fermented juice of the grape', and it's a nice matter whether it remains that once you artificially remove the product of fermentation, that is, the alcohol. I have since seen Anglicans anxiously debating what is, and isn't wine, or what is brought to the table, as it were, by the alcohol. Now sacraments must in some way represent the thing signified: the matter they employ must be capable of bearing the symbolic meanings and resonances of the act, and canonical statements of what is or is not valid matter represent the consensus of the mind of the Church about what can or can't do so. You could see debates about the matter of other sacraments - whether you can ordain women, or celebrate marriages with two people of the same sex - as subsets of this issue. What seems clear, however, is that two metropolitan bishops can't change the Mind of the Church on their own as though they were a sort of Anglican Papacy.

Meanwhile the Diocese of Manchester is advertising for seven full-time Area Dean positions. This is a diocese that can hardly pay its stipendiary curates. Traditionally Area Dean is a thankless job that clergy do in addition to being a parish incumbent, but over recent years it has been drawn upwards into the hierarchy, transmitting and implementing the management initiatives of the new breed of activist bishops who think their mission is to 'transform' their areas of charge. The new Area Deans in Manchester are to 'play a significant part in our exciting transformation', 'to implement pioneering and strategic decisions', 'bringing about change and transformation to the way we are church'. 

At St Stephen's House I did a long project on 'Catholic Mission' and envisaged a time when stipendiary clergy would be something like little bishops in their own areas, tying together a series of Christian communities which would not necessarily be parish churches. To be honest, this would not be all that very different from the situation in many big parishes in the past: my reflections were helped on their way by the weeks I spent on placement in the parish of Poplar, which before World War Two had half a dozen churches and about ten curates all presided over by the Rector from his Georgian pile next to All Saints Church. Moving towards seeing the Area Deanery as the fundamental organisational unit, rather than the traditional parish, isn't a million miles away from what I was thinking about some 16 years ago now. 

I wouldn't mind that, although I am feeling old enough and tired enough not to look forward much to reorganising the way I think in this way. If the bishops, if our bishop, would be honest and talk humbly, realistically and genuinely about a way of advancing which might stand a better chance of making sure we are still bringing people into contact with the God who loves them in generations to come (presuming there are any generations to come, which must always be a caveat in these times of climate emergency), I would give them a hearing. But what we get - and forgive me because I am just sounding off, really - is management guff and corporate bollocks, and I'm very much afraid I am coming to the conclusion that there are few less honest and straightforward groups of people than the episcopal bench of the Church of England. And as the letter on intinction shows, an episode every bit as messy as trying to dip a bit of bread in a cup of wine and then give it to someone, they're not even very good at it.