L' Ecumenisme en Plein Air

As nobody else had volunteered with just a few weeks to go, I ended up organising the Churches Together annual open-air service at Hornington Bandstand, which mighty demonstration of divine love and ecumenical togetherness took place last Sunday. The main issue was that almost everyone was away. Not only were most of the ministers who took place last year absent or had moved on, we would normally rely for musical accompaniment on the musicians from Tophill, who were also away. I was steered towards a gentleman from the Baptist Church who gathered a range of friends, so that all worked out OK, even if it took us close to the wire. Then someone asked about sound production and I realised the Tophill folk had always brought that with them. The minister at Tophill (one of the many who wasn't going to be around) arranged to have a gigantic amp/mixer available which I picked up and somehow manoeuvred in and out of my car several times, and then got it down to the Bandstand by 9.10 on Sunday morning long before anyone else arrived. We didn't even use it in the end.

One of the absences was the entire staff of the local ecumenical Christian youth work team who would normally deal with any children present. I emailed round the ministers to see whether some other children's or youth worker could do it - 'You don't want me doing it', I warned, but the world was deaf to my admonitions and when the time came I gathered a group of five bewildered children around the steps of the Bandstand and had a rather stilted conversation with them about the story in the Bible reading. One of my colleagues later sent me an email congratulating me for 'so wonderfully and enigmatically engaging with the children' which I have to assume is an autocorrect quirk. At one point an angelic little girl of about three turned to her dad and said 'I don't like this bit'. I wonder whether the mic picked her up.

I was also thanked for 'moving all the chairs' which normally reside in a tiny shed belonging to the Council just on the edge of the field. In fact I didn't as there were others helping, though the gentleman who enthusiastically ran off with the parcel trolley and deposited a towering stack of chairs in the nearby car park was less help than he intended to be.

I will never, ever, ever do this again even for Jesus.

This Weekend Was Brought To You By A Popular Variety of Cough Remedy

It's the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity and we have been doing more than our bit at Swanvale Halt. The couple getting married on Saturday are members of Vineyard, an independent congregation in Guildford, and they took the service over rather, providing all the music and the preacher, a young woman who appeared about 17 to me but couldn't be as she referred to her teenage children. It's the bride's second go and she has a small son who at one point led his mum and stepfather-to-be on a little dance during one of the songs. I pointed out that during the Orthodox wedding rite the priest leads the couple on a (very stately) dance around the altar, but sadly I never got the chance for that. The couple wanted to take communion and that made it all very High Church even without my cope and biretta. 

Today it was the annual United Service at Hornington Parish Church, now itself united with evangelical Tophill. Tophill, it's worth pointing out, hate Vineyard Church as lots of their young families have defected there because they have a better band. I preached and told them all two stories about Nusreddin the Sage - it was relevant, honest, but I did get the impression that many people might only take away the final line, 'Who knows? The horse might sing' (you'll have to look it up). In my cassock, I was the only clergyperson who wore anything other than ordinary clothes. From my point of view, it was a bit sad to see that Hornington's aumbry is empty and surrounded by stacks of chairs, and there's no longer anything that you can point out as a Lady Chapel.

Technically, the Roman Catholics aren't supposed to come to the United Service (go to Mass, is the rule), and so in the evening we had a joint Evensong at Swanvale Halt so they could take part. That worked very well, and it was all to the good that the choir were augmented by some RCs and they managed to find someone to coax them all through the plainchant, as my vocal chords are still misbehaving as a result of a cold earlier in the week. I did warn the remarkably healthy congregation of nearly 60 that it would probably be more Evencroak than Evensong, but I got through it.

Then at 8pm I had an email to say that Sheila might not make it through the night. Sheila is Malcolm's partner, they are both 60-ish and they are the loveliest and sweetest couple you can imagine. She has been in hospital undergoing chemotherapy and the situation has not looked too bad until today. I found her fast asleep and unresponsive in the ICU, and did what was necessary, managing to get through it, as I had the rest of the weekend, with the aid of vicious Volcazone pastilles. At least they seemed vicious when I first encountered them not long after I arrived in Swanvale Halt: now I seem acclimatized to the wretched things and, like a junkie, need an ever-higher dose to have any effect.

Eternal City Limits

When the Rt Rev Jonathan Baker, Bishop of Fulham, was just Fr Jonathan, vicar of Holy Trinity Reading, he was the first person I was taken to by my then vicar (who’d been at college with him) to discuss my sense of vocation. His main bit of advice was for me to begin praying the Office, which I have dutifully passed on to the enquirers who come and speak to me!

We all ribbed Fr Thesis of the West End when he revealed on LiberFaciorum that, led by Bishop Jonathan, he and the clergy of the trad-Cath Fulham Episcopal Area were going to Rome for their clergy conference. Many priests shared the less glamorous locations of their own conferences; ‘In Guildford Diocese’, I commented, ‘we say that all roads lead to Swanwick’ (but at least Swanwick isn’t Butlins). Little did anyone realise that the trip would result in an ecclesiastical row that had nothing to do with its intrinsic merits but the circumstances of a particular act of worship.

Even I was somewhat astonished to see photographs of Bishop Jonathan celebrating mass for the Anglican party in the basilica of St John Lateran. Now, St Peter’s in the Vatican may be the Pope’s own chapel, but St John’s is the cathedral of the diocese of Rome itself, and in terms of significance and seniority it outranks any other church in the city. Nobody seems to want to be very explicit about how an Anglican bishop came to be presiding over the Eucharist at its main altar, but it wasn’t some kind of guerilla service in which the Fulham clergy ran in with their kit in black holdalls, hurriedly set it all up, and rattled out a mass without asking: it seems to have been done with the full knowledge of the Lateran chapter. To normal, non-churchy people, it would be baffling to have any problem with this, but not if you’re a conservative Roman Catholic for whom Anglicans are at the very best well-meaning heretics whose sacraments are invalid, and at worst deluded deceivers whose services are snares and traps for the unwary soul. To have an Anglican bishop – if you can describe him as such, rather than a man dressed as a bishop – carrying out a pretended mass in the very heart of the Catholic Church mocks the truth, to them. From the photographs of the service you can't easily see that it's taking place in a roped-off area of the cathedral so that no Catholics in communion with the See of Rome might wander in, accidentally take communion, and endanger their immortal souls.

Who was responsible for this appalling event? The day after it took place and Twitter went ballistic the Lateran Chapter issued an abject apology blaming ‘a breakdown in communication’. Presumably they simply didn’t enquire very deeply as to who this group of clergy were: they were, of course, all male, and the presence of a female or two would have given the game away. Fr Jeffrey here in Swanvale Halt hadn’t heard of the fuss, but he could see how it might have happened: ‘In Italy nobody understands what Anglicans are’ (rather the same as in England, then). There are photos of Bishop Jonathan by the side of Pope Francis in St Peter’s Square, and again, you can excuse the Pontiff for not investigating when he gets photobombed by a random character in purple. The same could not be said for Cardinal Kaspar who came to address the Fulham clergy during their tour, but had it been just him, and had the mass taken place in some back-street church in Rome, probably nobody would have noticed, because Anglicans, I fear, are loaned Roman altars all the time, in the same way Fr Jeffrey is loaned ours each and every week. I wouldn’t ask to use his, though; as I know he wouldn’t be able to say yes.

New Responsibilities

From now on, when he occurs, I will refer to the new incumbent of Lamford as Fr Dominic to distinguish him from Fr Donald the retired hospital chaplain in our parish. So, that said, today Fr Dominic served me vegetable soup (‘During the vacancy the Diocese cut off the power and water supply to the greenhouse; it would be very handy to be able to grow some tomatoes’), bread and cheese for lunch. Very Lenten, though St David whose feast day it is would have baulked at such indulgence as cheese. We were meeting to discuss my potential taking over as Rector of the Guildford Chapter of the Society of Catholic Priests. ‘The Bishop’, he went on, ‘will see you as more congenial than me after my civil partnership with Jake, but probably only just. All these things are relative.’ SCP has been doing next to nothing lately while Dominic has been relocating to Lamford, the Secretary is looking for a new job and the Treasurer is run off his feet. I will probably assume the role in July, provided the existing committee – all three of them – can work out some dates to meet.

And the evening offered another gathering, Churches Together in Hornington & District. Now, this I’ve known I will be taking on for quite some time as I’ve been Vice-Chair for the past year, preparing to ascend to Chair at the AGM. I’m not sure what to do with SCP particularly, apart from providing a space for my colleagues to bend a sympathetic ear, but I do have some thoughts about Churches Together. The schedule of events could do with being pruned a bit; for instance, in this year’s calendar a ‘Pentecost Songs of Praise’ appears which was done last year over the Jubilee weekend as part of those celebrations, and I would quite like that not to become a regular fixture without anyone actually taking a decision about it. We also claim to be co-operating in service to the community, but we don’t really. I wonder whether getting our various pastoral assistants together to swap experiences and think about issues of concern to the Hornington area we might be able to tackle together in some way. It might come to nothing, but it’s a different way of going about what we say we do.

How I fit it all in is another matter, but as our Area Dean is resigning and I really did not want to be considered for that thankless task, I thought it a wise precaution to do take on something else instead!

Give Me Your Hand, My Friend

It was Patrick, the former Methodist minister at the joint Methodist-United Reformed church down the road, who concluded the Churches Together United Service his church was hosting one year with the hymn 'What Shall Our Greeting Be', and ambushed us, his clergy colleagues from other churches, by grabbing the hands he could reach and insisting we should do the same. Had he been a silly young fellow and not a doughty elderly one who should have retired several years before, I would have found it maddening and not splendidly nuts, which is the attitude I did in fact have. Today we were hosting the same event which included communion for the first time since 2019. Paula and husband Peter brought along the bread - boxes of little cubes of sliced white, not what we usually use - and some grotty de-alcoholised wine. I thought as a gesture in the direction of unity, Patrick's successor Alan should preside at communion, and as I hadn't warned any of my other clerical compatriots it was only his hand I grasped during the singing of that hymn at the end. We just about got away with it all, and there were nearly 200 people in church, far more than I thought there would be.

'That', said Alan afterwards, 'was so nerve-racking. I haven't been as anxious as that since seminary.' This surprised me. Once I'd got all the elements in place and everyone turned up, I was pretty unconcerned about the whole occasion. I suppose once you accept that communion isn't going to take place in the way you expect - that it will be in the form of little cubes of bread and wine whose best recommendation was that it didn't actually make you grimace, and that Paula will take the leftovers and give them to the ducks - you're not that worried about the rest. How strange to find myself the more relaxed party.

Oleum Infirmorum

It must have been a copy of the parish magazine from the 1950s that recently came my way in which I learned that my illustrious predecessor-but-four Canon Artington had intended to start a healing service, which seemed a rather unusual thing for the time, and even more for a solemn graduate of King’s College London and St Stephen’s House. Without access to the service registers from then I don’t know whether anything came of it. Anyway, I had Canon Artington in mind on Tuesday when we had a contemporary go at the same kind of thing. It struck me months ago that there was an Autumn gap in the calendar of Churches Together in Hornington & District between the August open-air service and the Christmas excitements, and St Luke’s Day on October 18^th caught my eye. He is the patron saint of physicians. None of the local churches does anything explicitly connected to the healing ministry; as a healing service isn’t necessarily eucharistic, it ought to be something all our local congregations could subscribe to. Of course having come up with the idea I had created a rod for my own back in planning it, but in the event everyone I asked to take on a task said yes. It was quiet, reflective and candle-heavy, with piano music and a modest schola singing the Ubi Caritas, laying-on-of-hands and anointing in the proper manner, and a team from Tophill to provide individual prayer if people wanted it – in fact that caused the only slip in the liturgy as they were still praying with some people as the main action reached a pause, with no sign that they were coming to a halt: even in a ‘quiet and reflective’ event, if you are sitting doing nothing when you know that there’s something left that you will be doing, there’s a point when expectation shifts uncomfortably into tension. I found myself approaching the service with more trepidation than I expected, and not for fear that it might go wrong or nobody turn up, but that I was deeply unworthy to be saying the words I would have to. I kept a semi-fast through the day (fluids and bread only), and felt more acutely than usual having to recall that these are the declarations and actions of Christ, not me. As well as being candle-heavy, the service was also clergy-heavy, but their feedback afterwards was especially appreciative. Perhaps clergy have an unusual need for the healing grace of the Spirit.

Payback

While we were keeping today as the Ninth Sunday after Trinity, the Roman Catholic parish were observing the Assumption of the BVM. But, disaster! Deacon Justin had turned up in a white-and-blue dalmatic, while Fr Jeffrey had left the parish’s Marian kit in Hornington. ‘We have a white-and-blue set’, I offered, showing Fr Jeffrey the vestments in question. ‘And it’s a nice lightweight one, too’, he said enthusiastically. Indeed it is, and in my view the very best of the church’s own kit, a beautiful ivory damask from the late 1940s. The Assumption is, in the immortal words of Bishop Mervyn Stockwood, ‘not an assumption we share’, but I was delighted to see the vestments used.

In fact we had no main service at all, observing whichever observance, being invited instead to Hornington Bandstand for the Churches Together summer service. It was the usual hymn-sandwich which I see, in the terms of traditional moral theology, as materia exercitandi virtutis: it had the benefit of being short. We did consider whether to move the service into the parish church because of the heat, but decided to stick it out – we’d had to shift the Jubilee one in June indoors, and it would have been a shame to have to do so again. If some worshippers succumbed, well, there are others. I was given Psalm 8 and preached on drought, the fragility of civilisation, and apocalyptic. My punishment was to be collared afterwards by a woman who wanted to convince me that the ‘killer injections’ (otherwise known as the covid vaccines) were about to murder hundreds of thousands of people. Served me right for ignoring Our Lady. 

The Ministry of Hospitality

Some of my friends regularly post pictures of food on LiberFaciorum which I rather scorn to do, but I am breaking my rule here to show you a Dorset apple cake. It isn't made with Dorset apples, I fear, but Surrey ones from my garden. I'd unexpectedly found myself hosting some of my colleagues from other denominations, Fr Jeffery of the Catholic parish, Revd Alan of the URC, and Paul, the new Baptist minister, for our regular ministers' lunch. We were supposed to be at Revd Marlene's up in Tophill, but she was away at a funeral. She and her husband invariably provide us with cake when we visit and I felt somewhat shamed into furnishing my colleagues with something a little bit nicer than just chocolate biscuits from the Co-Op. Perhaps this might rouse me from my catering torpor: if Fr Jeffery can cook a huge meal for four of us at the start of Lent, can't I be at least minimally hospitable and bake a cake? It's not as though this version of Dorset Apple Cake is hard to do - just flour, butter, some defrosted cooked apple, and a dash of sugar. 

Among my Anglo-Catholic researches I have been writing about Revd John Chandler of Witley today, one of the very first priests who took Tractarian ideals in the parishes, and almost definitely the first in Surrey. In 1870 as Rural Dean he hosted his colleagues for a Christmas dinner provided with nothing less than a haunch of venison sent by the then-recently-retired Bishop Sumner of Winchester, to whose gratitude he replied in verse:

Thanks, my Lord, for your venison, for finer or fatter

Ne'er ranged in a forest or smoked in a platter.

I at once ascertained from the basket and label

That 'twas none but your Lordship who furnished my table.

His eighty hymns were in quite a different mode!

United

It only takes a moment to volunteer for something as a generous gesture and then with it comes a tidal surge of worry. I can't remember what led me to say to the executive of Churches Together in Hornington that Yes, we could have the annual United Service at Swanvale Halt. Last year, of course, it was all online, but we wanted to do it in person this time, and so towards the end of last year I began trying to assign roles to various people, attempting to ensure a good mix of church communities, male and female voices, and things like that. 

In past years the music provision has constituted a knotty issue. Customarily a group of musicians from churches across the town has 'emerged' and wanted a degree of input into what ends up being used in the service; a negotiation has ensued between them and whoever is organising the event until a consensus has been reached. Some years it's harder than others. This year I was assured that there were musicians out there, but nobody felt they were in a position to organise them, so in the end I fell back on the boring but reliable option of using one of our organists.

We do the service this time of year because it falls within the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Churches Together in Britain and Ireland issues a set of liturgical resources which this year were devised by the Council of Churches of the Middle East. You can't use the whole lot because you'd be there all morning, but they help. I decided to project an appropriate image of the Visit of the Magi rather than get our Crib back out of the loft again, and thought it would be nice to play St Ephrem's Hymn to the Divine Light from the Syriac liturgy, one of the pieces included: that would help us reflect on the circumstances and experiences of the ancient Christian Churches of the Middle East. Nice ideas but requiring fiddling with laptops, projectors, screens and iPods: these are antique tech these days but do the trick provided they work. And there's the rub.

It was all fine. Lots of people came, Simon the organist caused me more nail-biting by uncharacteristically only turning up ten minutes before kick-off but he was there, Revd Alan from the United Reformed Church preached movingly on 'Light from the East', and nothing went wrong. That's all one can hope for at the moment.

Hail the Day!

My cotta is only the wonkiest of the three clergy here because I have been fiddling in my pocket trying to turn my microphone on. Yesterday for the great festival of the Lord's Ascension we had a service at church on behalf of Churches Together in Hornington and District led by me and Fr Jeffery the Roman Catholic priest, with Marlene from Tophill Church preaching. Fifty souls was far more than I was expecting and despite the predominately Catholic tone (the chanting of the Magnificat was to a particularly Catholic tone, one I had to be introduced to) it was a genuinely ecumenical event with people present from lots of churches. Only I and Fr Jeffery did the singing, of course, and I could have done with 'Hail the Day That Sees Him Rise' being pitched a bit lower. It always amazes me that, after the first verse, you never seem to sing the same version of that hymn in any setting you happen to be.

Battling with the Tech

Ascension Day is one of the occasions in the year when Churches Together in Hornington & District tries to hold a joint service. This year I and the Roman Catholic priest were going to do Evensong & Benediction together but this being impossible it was suggested we hold Compline over Zoom. My heart sank a bit.

In fact although I was leading the service someone far more technologically literate from the RC congregation set it all up. I think the main problem I have with liturgy done via Zoom is the claustrophobic feel it has - in real life you are not quite so close to your fellow worshippers. Until the time for interaction comes, I don't really want to look at them: it's quite enough to know they're there. Christian communities always face the hazard of turning in on themselves and liturgy over Zoom can mark another step in that direction, shifting the balance from community being the context in which worship happens to worship becoming the language in which community is expressed. (We will leave aside how far this is genuine community: I am coming to the conclusion that 'if you can turn it off, it's not Church').

However you can avert most of this by the simple expedient of showing something other than lots of people's faces, or even the face of the person leading (mine doesn't appear on the photo here). For Compline we displayed a copy of the liturgy so people could follow it. How many warbled their way through Te Ante Lucis Terminum along with me I don't know, given that they were muted. I was far too busy coping with the Catholic lady who was reading the responses and alternate psalm verses for the benefit of the congregation. She was uncomfortably slow for my tastes, but I slowed down to try to shadow her. Then it occurred to me that she was in turn slowing down even further to coincide with me. It was like a liturgical slow bicycle ride. 

Transdanubian Interrogations

Amisia from Romania was only part of the congregation at Swanvale Halt for a little while, but she made a great impact, not being much like many other worshippers here. She came as carer for a regular member of the church and loyally brought her to church every Sunday so she could meet her friends, having been poorly and isolated for quite a while. Amisia herself was feeling her way forward after some hard times and so they did each other a lot of good.

Not unexpectedly Amisia was Romanian Orthodox by tradition. She told me that her brother had had a terminal cancer diagnosis and she had gone to pray at the tomb of the local saint, St Parascheva, and from that moment he began to improve and today is fine. Like many Europeans she found the concept of Anglicanism a little bewildering and had a lot of questions, not all of which were of a technical nature. Queries that begin ‘What does the Anglican Church believe about …’ are often quite hard to answer because there is not much that the Anglican Church does have definite beliefs about. As I like to quote, the Catechism of the Church of England has 21 pages and 60 clauses; its Roman Catholic counterpart (at least in the edition I have) weighs in at 675 and 2863 respectively …

One thing Amisia wanted to know about was sin. Here, you see, I ran up against the fact that the Anglican Catechism only mentions sin once, in the account of the assurance of ‘forgiveness of sins’ in baptism: nowhere does it say what sin is or what acts are sins. I found myself compelled to define what the Church of England’s general attitude to sin is, which seems to be that it exists and, very vaguely and indefinitely, can be defined as ‘that which goes against the will of God generally or for a specific person’, but, beyond that, mainly leaves believers to work out for themselves what their sins may be. I am certainly very, very reluctant to determine for people what their sins are and to tell them from the pulpit (or I would be if our church had one). I feel that this is the business of the Holy Spirit rather than ministers of the Gospel, and that I am only intended by the Lord to comment specifically if asked to do so. Even then I am loth to do so without having at least some idea why something might be sinful. In a modern and very individualistic world we have lost the sense that acts which apparently only concern the individual have an impact on the community because they affect how a person’s character grows, and exactly how that might happen involves quite a lot of guesswork. I have a great fear of sounding like the late Cardinal Siri, for instance, denouncing women wearing trousers because it ‘caused them to forget their natural function in childbearing’.

I prefer rather, and I think the Church of England prefers, to develop the believer’s conscience so that they can work these things out for themselves. Some sins are obvious in that they cause clear hurt and damage or involve the breaking of promises, but some aren’t. Now writing to the Corinthians the Blessed and Holy Apostle Paul (see how Orthodox my phrases can turn!) says that Christians should not eat meat offered in the temples of pagan gods, not of course because there is anything wrong with the meat or that the pagan gods really exist, but to avoid wounding the conscience of a Christian who might still have residual pagan inclinations: in the company of such a person, to avoid any hint that they might be eating it because it’s been offered in a temple, they shouldn’t eat it. In fact, he says it twice: ‘if you sin against your brother in this way …’ Clearly it isn’t the consumption of the food which is sinful, it’s the thoughtless effect it has on the other person. Now cases of this kind, when innocent acts become sinful in particular contexts, could be infinitely multiplied, and any Church that sought to list them all would be a foolhardy institution indeed. Instead Christians need a Spirit-formed conscience to negotiate the way forward, to know what’s the right thing to do, and when to say sorry.

But the hazard with such tolerance is that we say the words of the General Confession in the Mass and let them wash over us, as impervious to the Holy Spirit as a stone is to water, like the lady who once said to me, years before I became a priest, ‘I don’t know why we have to confess our sins every week, sometimes I don’t have any!’ I told Amisia that Anglican priests aren't given lists of sins. 'Then how do we know what's a sin and what isn't?' she asked. It’s a quandary I still haven’t found a good way out of (though I can only comfort myself that the Blessed and Holy Apostle Paul probably hadn’t, either).

Innovation

The Anglican Church, not surprisingly, hasn't got a rite for the installation of an icon; I'm not sure anyone has, to be fair. But when Hazel, the widow of our retired priest Jim, decided after he died in 2014 that his memorial should be a pair of icons, I didn't want just to have them put up in the church without any fuss being made, so I had to make something up.

The icons show St Benedict and St Edmund; one was the patron of the last church Jim served as incumbent, and the other has a link with the Roman Catholic parish with whom we share our church building. Both have been painted by a member of the RC congregation. I wanted their 'unveiling' to be an occasion we could both share, so thought we could have a short ceremony in between our two normal services on a Sunday morning. St Benedict's Day is back in July; the closest Sunday to St Edmund's Day this year is November 17th, and the date just happens to be Jim's anniversary. 

I wasn't sure how many people would be around and if necessary the little rite was one I could do with one other person. In the end most of both our congregations were present, so it became a cast of thousands, including Fr Julian, the new priest of the RC parish, Marion our curate, Rick the verger, a server from each congregation, and Rob who carried the cross. The choir were augmented by some Catholics. We emerged from the vestry and made our way to the pillar where the icons had been placed while singing the old plainchant Office Hymn for All Saints: 'Father in whom thy saints are one ...'. I said a brief introduction and prayed for Jim's soul before reading a slightly odd but useful passage from 2 Esdras (most of the Apocrypha is a bit odd, if you ask me), then unveiled the icons which had been covered with a corporal. I anointed them, read the Collects for St Benedict and St Edmund: Rick handed me the lamp which I hung in front of the icons and then lit. I said a final prayer asking for God's blessing on the images, and we retreated while the choir sang Rutter's 'The Lord bless you and keep you'. Once in the vestry, it was off with the cope and on with the mass vestments.

I wasn't half shaky by the I got back! I suppose that's what comes from making it up as you go along.

A Long Run In

I was sat next to the minister of One Accord Church in Hornington at the induction of the new minister of the town's Baptist Church. Ultimately, and interestingly, even within this Nonconformist setting there are shadows of Catholicity, as it were. There's not much in the way of obvious ceremony but there is ritual of a bare and unadorned kind, the shaking of hands and making of promises, which all go to recognise that the minister is both sent by a body wider than the local church, and called by it. Some fellow from the regional Baptist structure administers the promises to the new minister, to the elders of the church, and the congregation as a whole, all of whom bob up and down exactly as they would in an Anglican service.

It was the length that caught me out rather than the form or the style. At one point a representative of the minister's former church described what she'd done there; the secretary of Hornington Baptist gave an account of how they'd recruited her; and she herself then went through the process from her own viewpoint. Each of these speeches took some time. The church secretary recounted how the church had set up the 'search committee' and who was on it, and how they'd looked up the manual how to recruit a new minister on the Baptist Church national website. They were given a list of fourteen potential ministers, she said, 'and they were ...' and I thought, My goodness, she's going to read the whole list. I had visions of a kind of Baptist version of that bit from Father Ted where Mrs Doyle tries to guess the name of the Presbytery's new house-guest and lists the name of every priest in Ireland: 'Father Pigling Bland! Father Dermot MacGaslight! Father Shaughnessy O'Bastard!' But no, the secretary just went on 'and they were a huge variety.' Sigh of relief breathed.

We stumbled out into the chilly February afternoon after two hours, the minister of One Accord and I. I will sit at the next Anglican induction service I go to, listen to a bishop give a leetle leetle sermon, hear the awkward words of welcome to the new priest from various community representatives, the clanking of church keys and the ringing of the bell, and feel myself to be in the antechamber of paradise itself.

One Accord

The minister of the One Accord Church in Hornington has a distractingly pleasing view across the meadows from his office window. I was there on Sunday taking part in the annual United Service held on behalf of Churches Together locally. 'Here at One Accord we are a combination of four denominations', he told the assembled throng optimistically; well, technically it was two, the Methodists and the United Reformed Church, who joined together to form One Accord many years ago, although the URC was itself a combination of the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians, and a few Salvationists have started coming along since the Salvation Army Citadel in Hornington closed a couple of years ago, so that arguably makes up the four. Mind you, judged by that test Swanvale Halt Parish Church is a combination of loads of denominations. 'There are millions of services like this happening today,' went on the minister, and I thought that was a bit optimistic as well. 

It was a bright, sunny morning on Sunday (as you can see) and the church was pleasingly full. Over the years I have posted repeatedly about the doings of our local branch of Churches Together (such as here, here, here and here) and you might have discerned my frustration with the organisation. The United Service is one thing - notwithstanding the generally watered-down liturgy, it's good for Christians themselves to get together in big groups and compromise - but several of the things Churches Together has been doing for twenty years and more do seem to be running into the ground. Our common efforts at 'witness to the community' are increasingly coming up against the obstacle that the secular world is more and more adrift from the Christian calendar and ways of doing things. Once upon a time, for instance, Churches Together ran a Christmas market culminating in the Blessing of the Crib and an ecumenical carol service in the old parish church in town. Then the Chamber of Commerce decided it wanted its own earlier street market to coincide with the turning-on of the Christmas lights. This year, the Chamber has objected to Churches Together closing the High Street for its charity-based Christmas market the weekend after the Chamber's own, and the Town Council has agreed, offering the churches the following Saturday instead, leaving some people positively intemperate. The clergy have for some years been arguing that the whole event needs to be rethought - what 'witness' is it to line the High Street with increasingly tatty charity stalls when the commercial ones look so much better, when far more people come to the Chamber of Commerce's market? - but the Town Council arranges its event schedule so far in advance that no sooner is one Christmas past that we are locked into planning for the next, a treadmill that leaves no time to think and evaluate. 

Twenty to thirty years ago, the sight of Christian denominations co-operating in worship and community events was a spectacle which non-churchgoers found impressive in and of itself: I don't think it is any longer. It's become what everyone expects. Christians have to do a bit more than that to catch anyone's attention. What should that be? I don't think we have any clear idea.

But, for a morning, we could put all those thoughts aside. I could even forgive the non-alcoholic wine. 

Frustration in High Places

Our Archdeacon is still quite fresh in the job. I went to his house a couple of days ago to have a conversation about how things were going in Swanvale Halt. I am aware that having gone through a gentle decline for a couple of years (themselves succeeding several years of gentle growth) numbers at church have been dropping quite steeply for about 18 months as a whole cohort of faithful souls die or become too infirm to attend, and aren't replaced by new ones coming in at the bottom end. I know this isn't anything to do with me directly, though I need to keep alive to the possibility that someone else might do the church better. My firm grasp on the Parson's Freehold, last priest in the diocese to be appointed thus, means I can't be dislodged unless I agree to be, but I don't like to contemplate the possibility that the bishop's staff team might be sitting around the table on a Monday morning and saying 'Oh, if only he would go!'

The Archdeacon assured me that this was far from the case. 'This pattern is happening almost everywhere,' he said, explaining that there are only ten churches across the diocese that are growing in numbers at all. Ironically these tend not to be the big evangelical ones, either, as those are generally losing support to smaller independent churches. One of the most prominent culprits in this respect is Emmaus Road in the centre of Guildford, which I know has been causing consternation among some of my colleagues as they have watched significant proportions of their younger families disappear in their direction. The parish church of Swanvale Halt hasn't (although I know some families in the parish who are part of Emmaus Road - some come to our Messy Church and even, last year, to our children's Passion Service on Good Friday), but then families who want that kind of worship were very unlikely to have come to us in the first place. One incumbent, went on the Archdeacon, has asked these departing families why they've left: 'they don't make any demands on us,' was the answer, no pressure to join rotas for this and that. They come, they listen to the speakers and wave their hands in the air, and go home. I wondered whether this was really true, as people are certainly encouraged to join the church's home groups which in good Maoist manner they call Collectives; but we were due to host one of the Swanvale Halt collectives one Saturday morning a few weeks ago, and the convenors rather shamefacedly cancelled it as it became clear nobody else was coming. 

'It does raise the question of what they think "church" is about', said the Archdeacon. 'And I can't help thinking, Why have you set up a church in a town which already has more churches of more kinds and styles than almost anywhere else? Why not put one on the Wellesley Estate in Aldershot? That would actually be helpful.'

Praying Against

The monthly newsletter of Churches Together in Hornington came my way and with it the customary introduction from the chairperson. 'We need to get together more to work for the town, and to pray for the town', he said, as he does in some shape or form every month. 'I have heard', he went on, 'that there is a group of people who are meeting to pray against groups in Hornington which are not Christian.' 

I wasn't content to put that out. I presumed he was happy that said group of people was meeting, though without any context it was hard to work out. I had a suspicion he might have been thinking of the 'spiritual awareness group' which asked to use our church hall not long ago and whose money I refused on the grounds that what the organiser was actually planning to do was equip members to 'tap their psychic potential'; or the potential pagan-Wiccan-Druid meeting which is being bruited about on Facebook. He was indeed, so I altered the text to 'praying to reduce the influence of non-Christian spiritual groups', which made me a bit less uncomfortable.

I felt I could have a go, if called on, to explain my version to an ordinary secular liberal person who feels that all religions are basically alike, and can't everyone just get on with one another? You can't expect Christians to welcome people dipping into Wicca and psychic experimentation, I might say. Those people are God's beloved children who he longs to reach out to, and here they are wandering around in delusion of their own making which could even do them damage. So it makes sense to pray that the work of delusion and falsehood, as we see it, is impeded and the people who might be tempted to join in with it find their attention diverted in a more healthy direction by some conversation, some happening, some encounter. We're praying for angels to stand in their way and whisper in their ears, not for the organisers of the meetings to have a car accident or something. But that, you see, sounds less like praying against, and more like praying for.

'Don't worry,' an evangelical parishioner told me when the issue of the spiritual awareness group came up. 'We'll pray them down. We've done it before.' It's been a year and they haven't managed it yet, it must be said.

If You Go Down in the Woods

Not far away from Swanvale Halt, sequestered in the Surrey hills, is Summerstock, a medium-sized estate based around a big house set in woody grounds. Here the owners have established a sort of mini religious theme park. You visit and find the woodland and ponds scattered with grottoes and statues. There's a charitable trust supporting religious education, including a variety of open-air dramatic presentations about the life of Jesus which take place not just locally but in London. Every Friday Summerstock hosts the Stations of the Cross, following a route around the grounds; the Stations were designed by a group of art students from Italy. Local clergy are asked to come and lead the devotion, and last Friday that meant me.

We started at 7am: gosh, it was cold. I should have brought my gloves although I was glad I thought of taking wellies. There were about ten old hands including a retired Anglican parish priest and his wife and a smattering of local Roman Catholics some of whom I knew, and they led me around rather than me them as I had no idea where to go next. It took about half an hour (I gather I was more reticent than some clergy as I kept being thanked for giving everyone 'time to reflect', which could be interpreted as a double-edged comment) and then we went back to the house for tea and hot-cross buns. I decided not to use my somewhat lacerating version of the Stations I usually employ at church, as this was Easter Week, but to have something slightly more upbeat and resurrection-focused.

The little Chapel of St Francis where we started reminded me of the similar one dedicated to St Joseph at Errwood I saw on holiday in Derbyshire some years ago: there's the same sense that you're stepping back into a style of devotion which is somewhat in the past now. 'Whenever a Catholic church closes,' the Anglican priest told me, 'Ann and Paul [the owners] buy up all the kit and move it here,' and you can tell.

Re-Emergence

By far the post on this blog which has aroused the most public interest is nothing to do with the blessed PJH or anything about Swanvale Halt parish (unsurprisingly), but my delving into the murky world of oddball Christian movements entitled 'Beyond the Fringe'. I managed to blunder into this world, or something close to it, again a few months ago via what might appear the most orthodox of routes. Someone sent me a little booklet by the well-known evangelist John Ioannou, who goes by the name of J John, and idly I decided to find out more about him, being well-acquainted with his name but little more. Among the many honours and recognitions granted Mr John, says Wikipedia, is that he was ‘ordained presbyter and Canon Missioner by Bishop David Carr OSL’. By who, what? I thought, and off I went, round the corner if not quite the bend.

Once upon a time there was an evangelical church leader in Solihull called David Carr. He started the Renewal Church in 1972 with four people and lo, the Lord blessed the work and eventually the congregation numbered some 2000 divided among a group of church centres. Mr Carr moved from the Elim Pentecostal network, in which he was ordained in 1979, into the Free Methodist connexion. He received a good deal of support from the local authorities for the church’s good work in the community, culminating in an OBE in 2016. But he'd received something else a few years before, too.

Renewal had already been working for several years with Wroxall Abbey, the site of the medieval Priory of Wroxall and since 2001 a hotel, spa, wedding venue and conference centre: it had taken on running the ancient church of St Leonard which stood in the grounds of the Victorian mansion. Mr Carr began to see ‘many parallels between the life of St Leonard and the modern day work that Renewal was engaged in’. What he received in 2009 was a word from the Lord relating to the bit from Genesis chapter 26 where Isaac reopens the wells his father Abraham had and which had been stopped up by the wicked Philistines, and calls them by their former names. Mr Carr began to perceive his mission as relating not just to the evangelisation of the local area and reopening an old church the Anglicans had relinquished, but something bigger, a mission to do with Christian unity and ecumenism.

In July 2009, Mr Carr emerged as ‘Bishop Abbot of the Order of St Leonard and Bishop of Wroxall Abbey’. I’m not sure who consecrated him a bishop, but it may have been Archbishop Charles Travis, Chancellor of Logos Christian College in Jacksonville, Florida, which in 2004 awarded Mr Carr a doctorate (as it did to his brother Anthony, who is now also a bishop based at Wroxall Abbey). I don’t know whence Abp Travis derives his orders – you can waste too much time trying to chase down these scrawny and unsatisfying hares – but he’s part of a broader network of bishops who seem to have graduated from running their own charismatic and evangelical churches to popping mitres on their heads and wearing copes, some in the US, some in Europe, some in Africa. They call themselves the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches, and claim to be broadly Anglican while not part of the Anglican Communion itself.

At the same time, the church of St Leonard was consecrated a cathedral, colloquially known as ‘Wren’s Cathedral’ (pace St Paul’s, London), as the family of Wren the architect owned the estate at one time and his wife is buried there. The Order of St Leonard is dedicated to ‘to bring together all Christians, regardless of differing denominations and streams, without leaving their distinctive groupings, in to a unified fellowship for prayer, mission and to help the disadvantaged’, which cannot be a bad thing, can it? Dr Carr, and the other members of the Order, promote connections between Christian denominations and the crossover of ideas (he’s met the Pope).

from Classicbritishhotels.com

And what of J John, with whom we started? He’s there on the OSL website right enough, so he must be happy enough to be identified with them, orthodox fellow as he is.

There are many echoes here of other fringe churches, though curiously not the ones I’ve dealt with before. Abps Sean Manchester, Jonathan Blake et al have ended up where they are via a variety of eccentric routes and function more-or-less on their own, heading churches for the most part without laypeople or structures. No, the echoes I hear in the OSL come from longer ago. There are the Irvingites, that very peculiar outburst of Victorian piety in which the evangelical church leader Henry Irving found himself at Mass in Rouen Cathedral and heard an angel telling him ‘these are the vestments in which the Lord desires his priests to serve him’ – a visionary experience out of which came one of the weirdest Christian denominations in history, which I know is quite a claim to make (there’s an Irvingite church not far away from me, though no Irvingites to worship in it). Then there’s Hugh George de Wilmott Newman, who came from an Irvingite background but by the 1940s had decided God wanted him to reunite all the quarrelling factions of episcopi vagantes in his own person, had himself reconsecrated by whatever Archbishops he could find and eventually restyled himself ‘Mar Georgius’, thus paving the way for the British Orthodox Church under his cousin, Mar Seraphim, Archbishop of Glastonbury, which flourishes (sort of) today. It was Mar Georgius’s lifelong regret that Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher of Canterbury so disdained his sincere offer to reconsecrate him and thus bring ‘legitimate’ orders into the Church of England.

There are similarities here, but Bp Carr and the OSL don’t seem really to be bothered by such technicalities as who consecrates who. I do not want to mock them, either, because what it seems we have here is a sudden – you might even say miraculous – irruption of a Catholic sensibility within evangelical church forms. The fact of taking over that old church in the middle of Warwickshire and doing things that have been done there for centuries appears to have had a very genuine and profound effect on Renewal and on Dr David Carr, and I can’t gainsay that. The past reaches forward to the present, and the present back to the past: I view this as a true movement of the Spirit. But then I think Catholicism is the inner dynamic of Christianity, its shape continually re-emerging over time, so I would view it like that.

The cover of Dr Carr's autobiography arguably shows at least some degree of self-aware humour.

Ecclesiastical Tourism

On Monday S.D. heard my confession and approved of a conclusion I’d come to about some of my repeating forms of behaviour, asked what my stay in Malling Abbey had been like, and then moved on to tea and gossip. He’d just been to Venice for a few days with a friend and marvelled at the state of the Catholic Church there.

‘We went to St Eufemia mid-week and the congregation was four old ladies, two old men, and us. The priest hadn’t prepared the service and spent ages flicking through the altar book to find the right eucharistic prayer, huffing and puffing. At another church – similar congregation – there was a Nigerian priest who sat with his hands in his lap and kept yawning all the way through Mass. At least with the Tridentine service you had a sense of reverence and care; what we saw was just sloppiness and boredom. There’s a church of the neo-Catechumenate round the corner with a gigantic full-immersion font and a communion table the size of this room, and that’s where all the young people are supposed to go, but people told us none of them do. We went in during Stations of the Cross – the priest stood around clearly irritated waiting for his elderly ladies to clamber their way around these huge fittings. They were singing the Stabat Mater but it took us quite a while to identify what it was. At one point a nice young Venetian man came in and stood watching for a bit, and he clearly would probably have joined in if anyone had spoken to him but nobody did. I think a sort of hopelessness and depression has set in.’ (Although we agreed that people have never really gone to church much in Venice).

At his own local church of St Saviour Pimlico, S.D. said, ‘We get about 60-70 on a Sunday, and it’s not a huge number, but I look around and there are a few young families with children and some solicitors and professionals and so on, and a group of old ladies from the housing estate, and that seems wholesome. It doesn’t feel like a weird pastime for an isolated group of people: new people still arrive. And there’s hope and life in that.’