The Churches of David Nye

The Bishop is supposedly keen on the concept of Borough Deans, clergy who will have regular conversations with local authorities and act as a contact between the Church and secular life. I offered to be one, and quickly learned with weary resignation that a role sold to me as involving ‘a couple of meetings a year’ actually implicates me in sundry other things, all of which so far I haven’t been able to attend. The Bishop should have written to me formally to welcome me, but hasn’t. One of these additional things was planning something called a Community Day. I came in partway through the process, wasn’t able to attend any of the meetings, and never received any notes, so I turned up at the event yesterday with no idea what was supposed to happen. It turned out to be a session encouraging churches to think about their community work as opportunities for evangelism. I was amused that the main speaker outlined a vision of encounters developing into church communities linked to the parish like the rim of a wheel to the hub, exactly the theme of my long Missiology essay at St Stephen’s House twenty years ago, while the new resources for adding spiritual content to community events pretty much mirror the things I am developing and thinking through in Swanvale Halt. But I found myself looking at the building we were meeting in, St Peter’s, Guildford, which I had neglected to visit in my great survey of the diocese over recent years. Ah, I thought, it’s another one of these.

David Nye, the architect of St Peter’s, is better known as a cinema designer, but his church work is relatively prolific too. Quite substantial buildings in Purley and Dulwich offer no clue to a personal style, but for Surrey – and a couple of other places, it seems – he developed a model of church based on pyramidal roofs, big windows, and glulam timber arches. The pattern could be scaled up to something like the Good Shepherd, Pyrford, or down, to St Stephen’s Langley Vale in Epsom, and could be adapted to a variety of church traditions; so St Peter’s is a joint Anglican-and-Methodist community, Pyrford is evangelical, while Christ the King, Salfords (which though in Surrey I haven’t seen as it’s in Southwark diocese) is Anglo-Catholic. The family resemblance, though, is very strong.

St Peter's, Guildford

Good Shepherd, Pyrford

St Stephen's, Langley Vale (from the church website)

Christ the King, Salfords (Photo © Stephen Craven (cc-by-sa/2.0))

Holy Spirit, Burpham

Some time ago, realising I would find it hard to get into another David Nye church, St Alban’s Wood Street, I went looking online for photos, and got thoroughly confused by what I found. Here is St Alban’s, from the church website:

And this was also ‘St Alban’s’:

It took me a while to twig that the second wasn't Wood Street at another stage of its development, but an entirely different St Alban’s: a church at West Leigh in Havant (so, the diocese of Portsmouth), but virtually a twin of the Surrey one. It’s not described as one of David Nye’s, but it must surely be. I wonder how many more there are? The list on the website of his practice, now Nye Saunders in Godalming, isn’t very comprehensive.

All Saints' Onslow Village in Guildford is another Nye church, but apart from being modernist stands apart from the above examples. Its roof is virtually flat with windows fitted into an upright section rather than along the walls. Neither does it have the big glulam arches:

Yet another research project for someone ... !

Locating Christians

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

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

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

Unbuttoning the Church

How do you read Caravaggio's The Calling of St Matthew? Which figure is the evangelist - the bearded man in the black hat, or the younger fellow keeping his gaze fixed on his cash rather than Christ on the right of the picture? Is the bearded man gesturing to himself, or to the other figure? I think the latter, while Canon Chris Russell, the Archbishop of Canterbury's Advisor on Evangelism and Witness, argues that it's the former, which radically changes your interpretation of the painting.

This is just one and not the most important point I disagree with in the online CofE 'Leadership for Evangelism' material I'm working through at the moment with a view to fulfilling the bit of our development plan which deals with 'faith sharing' (the overall significance of the painting is that it's an illustration of the way the encounter with Christ can take place in the midst of our everyday lives, which is fair enough). A more notable example is the episode in another passage where two commentators discuss what holds ordinary Christians back from sharing their faith. 'We've done extensive work across years in 18 countries,' says one, 'and what comes back consistently is that they're worried about rejection.' Hm. My mind goes back many years to a different context, to a Liberal Democrat meeting in Oxford where my late and lovely friend Sam was asked by the future MP for Oxford West why he didn't invite any of his friends to our meetings: 'Because I want to keep them, Evan', Sam answered reasonably, and I have always believed the situation is the same in matters religious. Nobody wants to think that their friendship is instrumental, that the relationship is actually about recruitment into an organisation, and what Christians are afraid of is not their friends or relatives saying No as such, but being thought to be fake, to be engaging in a relationship for the sake of something else. I'm not sure the Church's officials really want to think about that.

But there is a lot of useful material there, too, and it makes me reflect differently about some of our activities at Swanvale Halt. The things we’re doing at the moment to try to widen our diet of worship in ways that might provide different routes into faith for those on the edges of it – Forest Church, Compline online, and Sunday Space – are not on their own drawing in a single soul beyond the ones I could have predicted all along would take part in such things. I now doubt they will. What they might do is get some of the congregation acclimatised to the habit of being more than passive consumers of religion, but being more open and articulate about it, a little less controlled and buttoned-down. It’s not easy for me, frankly, because I rather prefer controlled and buttoned-down, but it’s absolutely necessary. So I carry on lowering my sights until they are almost level with the ground!

It Sounds So Simple

One of the actions listed in our Church Development Plan is to equip our people with more practical advice on talking about faith. When I, Grant the churchwarden and Celine from the congregation had our session with the diocesan facilitator, she asked what thought had been given to how, if possible, activities such as the Toddler Group might have scope to lead those who take part to ask questions about faith. 'Everyone will just discount what you say because you're the clergyperson', she told me reasonably, 'So it's the laypeople who have to do the work'. I think you have to be careful with the Talking Jesus stuff: some years ago there was a study - I wrote about it here at the time, but now can't find the reference - that produced the shocking result that more non-Christians reported feeling more negative towards faith as a result of talking to a Christian that those that felt more positive. But if we are even to have a fairly open and receptive conversation with a non-Christian society, somebody has to start that conversation, and it will by definition have to be us. 

So I've begun looking through a set of resources on the diocesan website which is intended to help church leaders think about evangelism. Now to me the word 'leader' is one that gets my back up instantly, but in fact the material I've scanned rapidly through so far seems quite honest, modest and straightforward; it may turn out to be like the full-on Alpha Course and go batshitcrazy before the end, but for now I'm surprisingly favourable. In one short video Dr Sandra Millar of Gloucester Diocese outlines some findings of the research on how people outside the Church of England perceive it and, when discussing how contacts made through the occasional offices can affect those perceptions, advised us always to offer to pray with people. After all, she says, the worst people can say is 'No thank you', and no one else is going to.

Strangely for someone who gets paid to devote their attention to the spiritual life, I have always found this really hard to do. Occasionally if there has seemed to be an issue I particularly want to lay before God - a funeral with circumstances which may prove difficult, for instance - I do pray in my meeting with the next-of-kin, but mainly I'm acutely aware that the people I'm dealing with probably won't be used to praying, and fight shy of doing so, leaving me with the feeling that I've short-changed the Lord and them. 

Prayer starts not from what you think you ought to say, but what you want to say. What do I want to say to God about the souls I meet? How can I put it simply - because simplicity is what they will need, not a display of eloquence and would-be insight? I might say something like this:

    Lord, please bless these good people.

    Please hear their hopes and fears.

    Please strengthen them in all they have to do. 

Perhaps it's always been that straightforward.

Over the Threshold

Last week I was saying Evensong when I became aware someone had come in. It turned out to be a gentleman of about 40, who was sitting in a pew on his own when I finished. He was Ted, and had come to church because he'd successfully come home from hospital after a medical emergency, and wanted to say thank you. I introduced myself: 'I know who you are, my kids have been through the infant school', he said. Ted made it to the 8am service on Sunday - and, even more to my surprise, came back for the 10am, saying that he was trying to get used to church and how it worked. He stayed for coffee afterwards - I do hope someone spoke to him, as I was dealing with all sorts of things and couldn't. 

Meanwhile, Jessie has been to the church a number of times now. She's a neighbour of Sandra who coordinates so much of our children's activities, and originally attended with her, but now has made it on her own enough to think she might stick. She's been in to coffee-time too, and seems able to have friendly conversations with the folk around her. She's had a tough time with many things to work through, and I'm glad she might think the Church could be part of that. 

Making it through the door of a church when you have no real experience of doing so is a daunting business and I applaud anyone who manages it. It took me, I think, five years between standing in the porch of Christchurch Priory listening to the Tre Ore on Good Friday - hardly the most accessible of services! - to attending the 100th anniversary Mass at St Paul's Kirby Road in Leicester, and a couple of weeks later the Mass for St Lucy's Day at St Mary de Castro in that city on a snowy December night - and, remember, I knew all the stuff before I ever set foot inside a real live church. Up and down and round about, turn to this page, speech and silence, singing at this service but not this one: well done all those souls who make it through, and God bless you!

Lion Cubs Den

Widelake Secondary School has been almost uncharted territory for me in all the time I've been in Swanvale Halt. There is a Christian ecumenical youth work charity in the area that goes in to run a Christian Union and do seasonal assemblies, but paradoxically I suspect that means I have less contact with the school than I would have if they didn't exist at all. So I was delighted to be asked to visit by the RE coordinator to speak to two classes, bring some kit, and answer questions, last Friday. The younger group were studying Christianity as part of their general RE course, while the older ones were at a more philosophical level, and so it proved. I really enjoyed the experience. They were (mainly) interested and engaged and the second group provided some genuine intellectual stimulation. The very first question I was offered by them came from a girl whose opening gambit was 'I don't mean this with any kind of disrespect ...', which made everyone laugh, and who went on not to tackle the Church's attitude to same-sex relationships or child abuse but to ask, 'You spoke about prayer and how it works. How can you tell that what you experience isn't just the effect of long-term self-analysis and examination?' I thought that was rather brilliant, because of course it could be and (as I said) there's no way of proving it isn't. I feel hugely encouraged to think there are such thoughtful young people in our community (even if they don't come anywhere near the church).

Into the Woods

 

Would anyone come to our first attempt at Forest Church? In the end there were 15 doughty souls (including me) who took the path through the little area of woodland between two estates in the warm if breezy, dappled sunshine of Sunday afternoon, including Arthur, who thought it was great, and he can't see. Millicent his wife led him, and the journey wasn't arduous. I'd already told them they wouldn't need survival skills and we wouldn't have to draw lots to see who would get eaten first. Almost everyone said they didn't even know the woods were there. The exception was Council environmental officer Amelie, who knew all about them, which is why she and her children brought along a litter-picker and a bin bag: they weren't to know I'd done a recce and filled a bag with trash on Wednesday morning. 

My investigations have shown that the only common factor uniting Forest Church events, which have become increasingly popular over the last five years or so, is that they take place outside. Some are hikes across a landscape that give people a chance to interact with each other and their environment in a deliberately contemplative way. Others major on children's crafts and are basically Messy Church outdoors. Others, again, are tree-hugging hippy flimflam. I've bought guru Bruce Stanley's book Forest Church, which is full of ideas but a lot of it veers much too far away from anything orthodoxly Christian for me. There's also weird stuff like drumming. I assured our participants they wouldn't be expected to do anything weird, or at least no weirder than we normally get up to in a church building. 

The basic assumption is that lots of people find it easier to talk to God, and listen to him, outside than in the surroundings of church buildings, and that he can speak through the natural world if we take time to listen, and pay attention to his works. Even coming from a relatively moderate Anglo-Catholic stance, I think this is not unreasonable, and that was what our Forest Church was designed to do. 

We had a brief gathering prayer (a bit of Psalm 119), and then went on our little journey, turning a couple of times and noticing what was around us, including the occasional butterfly flitting across the path. We soon arrived at a more open area, in front of the root-bole of a fallen willow tree. As I thought they would, people automatically formed a circle, so I asked them to turn outwards and spend a couple of minutes simply listening and looking - and smelling, for that matter. I used a compass to tell them what direction they were facing in. Then we cut a little sprig from one of the trees, which happened to be a hawthorn, and little William helped me put a prayer on it in recompense for taking the twig, something I borrowed from Shinto, my second favourite religion, with its ceremonies for pruning the like. I read from George Grigson's The Englishman's Flora about some of the properties and folklore of the hawthorn (Jean the Sacristan said her husband calls hawthorn bread-and-cheese, a name Grigson mentions as arising from the habit of young children nibbling the leaves); we followed with a Bible reading somehow relating to the Summer, Psalm 8, a few verses of 'All Creatures of Our God and King' and a bit of open prayer to which a surprising number of people contributed. Amelie wanted to pray for the firefighters battling a wildfire on Hankley Common. Then we left and had a blessing back at the entrance to the woods.

Now, this is supposed to be an outreach event, but all the attenders were folk we knew from either Swanvale Halt church or, in Arthur and Millicent's case, others. But it's a helpful start, and we will have another go in October. It may go nowhere in the end, but I'm glad we tried. 

Amelie noted smoke visible over the hilltop to the west, and thought this was probably from Hankley Common. It also turns out she spent some time working with the ranger team responsible for Turbary Common, round the corner from my childhood home!

Harvest 2021

I am still on leave but I don't mind breaking into the succession of holiday snaps to report briefly on what we did for Harvest this year. In fact it was all very modest. The Infants School came to the church on Wednesday at the end of September for two short services, one for Reception and one for the older children, with no parents present, as they did last year, so it was very low-key. They sang, brought their gifts, listened to me talk in very short order, said a couple of prayers, and went away taking their gifts with them to be taken up to the Food Bank. No other organisation made its presence felt at all.

For the Sunday we kept our Harvest Festival, as such, at the first resumed Sunday Space service. Before the first lockdown last year we'd already decided to experiment with a non-eucharistic service once a month which wasn't consciously directed at children, and thus wasn't a 'Family Service', because no families had been there for quite a long time; but we'd only managed to do one when everything was shut up, and that was really the old Family Service pattern. For the resumed and renewed version, I shrunk the liturgy down to the very bare minimum which required the congregation to do nothing more than respond to the Kyrie, say 'Amen', 'thanks be to God' and 'hear our prayer' at appropriate points. We had one reading, and I talked about it. The much-reduced music group accompanied five hymns, and, for the prayers, aside from blessing the Harvest gifts, I brought the Blessed Sacrament from the aumbry in a monstrance, and placed it on the altar on the simple Step-Pyramid-like stand helpfully made from a nice bit of oak by Jack ('Just don't drop it on your foot'). Prayers done, we sand 'God be in my head' a couple of times, and back the Sacrament went. That is what will happen in the future. 

It was short, simple, and focused on Scripture and prayer, but the addition of low-key sacramental adoration adds the Catholic element I am anxious to preserve. There are two main problems: first, it's a bit heavy on contributions from me, the only other voice being a reader's: I want that to change. Secondly, we don't have anyone to serve refreshments afterwards, which I think is quite vital. That's got to be a priority!

The Archbishop Flies In

The hall at the independent school not far away was full enough not to make the Archbishop's 'Big Questions' event in our deanery too awkward - but I could tell looking around that the majority of people there were already church members, not the souls on the fringes of faith that the session was originally intended for. I'd faced a quandary: should I come in clericals to demonstrate I was there to show willing, or dress in mufti to pretend to be a real person? In the end I kept my clerical collar more because there was no time to change rather than anything else. I spotted colleagues who had taken either position. The questions were just the ones you could predict people would ask, and nothing Archbishop Justin said in response was any surprise, it has to be said: the only left-field query was one which asked what the Church can do to help the people of Afghanistan and ++Justin's response was that, whatever it might be, he couldn't really tell anyone about it publicly.  The Archbishop left the platform and our Area Dean then spoke to his aides who 'gave their testimony' of coming to faith earlier in life, again quite comfortingly undramatic. It was all quite short and low-key; worthy, but hardly earthshaking.

The whole event was supposed to provide a springboard for evangelism. Churches would invite people on the edges of their worshipping communities to these sessions, and then follow up with enquirers' courses. In a moment of weakness I'd told the organising committee about the one we were planning and there it was, one of only three such courses mentioned in the Big Questions leaflet given out to the audience. I don't know whether I would have been more annoyed to be ignored than I was horrified at the prospect of actually having to do it.

Return to Mess

Messy Church in March 2020 was the last special event we staged before the first lockdown, going ahead only after a lot of indecision. We'd cut our activities down to Sunday services alone after that, I'd already decided before the decision was taken out of our hands. As anxiety and uncertainty swirled around, many people said how good it was to do something 'normal'; and they said that again on Saturday as Swanvale Halt Messy Church met for the first time since then. The team had decided on the theme of the Good Shepherd, which suited me as I'd done that four years ago and so could virtually recycle what I did then (none of the twenty children who came this time had been there in 2017). We asked people to confirm they were coming beforehand: only one did, meaning we set the bar of expectations comfortingly low, and the fact that we had a reasonable number of attenders goes to show how hard it is to expect families with small children to plan anything at all. Reasonable: but still on the low side compared with what we are used to. I wonder whether the Messy model will have to rebuild as much as any other aspect of our Church life. 

Tradition Resumed

In March 2020, I went doorknocking - visiting houses which had recently changed hands - for what would turn out to be the last time in seventeen months. Even when theoretically it became possible (and houses have been bought and sold throughout the pandemic) I decided new residents might not welcome an unknown person on their doorstep. Only today have I dared to resumed what is, I'm afraid, my chiefest expression of outreach in the community. I have no reason to believe that ten years of this, even done as diligently as I can, has resulted in a mass of conversions. What it does it to keep me in touch with what is happening in a way I would not be otherwise - inreach, you might call it. Once upon a time I would try and spot the estate agents' boards when they went up and came down, until Dr Abacus pointed out all the data about property sales were on Rightmove and that was where the Government itself gets its information!

I only had five properties to visit today. First, a house in a small close at the top of the hill (Hannah the churchwarden happens to live opposite); that was owned by a young family who'd come from London. Second, a modern terraced house in a yard just off the main street, and adjoining another congregation member's: nobody in. Third, a little Victorian cottage set back from one of the village streets in a row which I didn't know existed even after nearly twelve years here. That was being refurbished, but a neighbour helpfully told me the young woman who's bought it will be moving in from Brighton later in the year. Fourth, a 1930s bungalow: nobody in. Fifth, a new house right on the edge of the village (the last on its road, in fact), where I met a grandmother who moved initially into another house in the village to be closer to her grandchildren just as the lockdown started, but before that was living about five miles away.

She pointed out to me a group of people, children and grown-ups, in the paddock opposite, saying they were setting up a garden. And so it proved: they were part of the community action group which works on the private rental estate in that part of the parish (about 150 houses and flats), planting raised beds in old tyres, making bug hotels and bird feeders. Now there you are, you see, without my somewhat fond evangelistic efforts I would never have found out about that. And I wouldn't have made the transition, which I rather needed to do that morning, from feeling completely useless and superfluous to the life of the world in general to seeing myself as quite blessed. 

Ten Thousand Churches?

It is the infelicitous description of trained, paid clergy as ‘limiting factors’ on church growth in a recent report on church planting which General Synod is set to debate that has many people I know fulminating on social media. This is not surprising: nobody likes to be told that they are worthless, in fact retarding the very thing they want to facilitate, and I find myself as aggrieved as anyone. (Predictably, the report is written by a trained, paid clergyman in the form of Canon John McGinley of Leicester, who I very much doubt sees himself as a limiting factor on growth).

For myself, I would be delighted to see my parish speckled with little lay-organised church cells that I could pastor and plug into the historic ministry and tradition of a sacramental Church, but I see precious few of the laypeople I interact with (no – this is historian’s caution – I see none) who really want or are able to do anything of the kind. Even the most active and committed of them have extra-Church lives to lead which take up quite a lot of time. ‘Many of the 10,000 [planned] churches would start small’, says the article, ‘and some would remain as 20 or 30 people meeting in a home’. They’re not going to be led by the poor, then, who are unlikely to have homes that 20 or 30 people could meet in.

There is so very, very much one could object to in this ‘vision’ but I will rest content with pointing out the fantasy at the heart of it. It’s another project, destined, I fear, to join the abject failure of every other such vision: Archbishop George Carey’s ‘Decade for Evangelism’; ‘Mission-Shaped Church’ ten years later; even Reinhard Bonnke’s mid-1990s mission which the German evangelist was insistent was going to result in a million converts (‘we know God is calling us to do this’) and which our rector in Chatham tried to get us interested in. Perhaps we might eventually face the idea that God might actually not want these vainglorious initiatives which are more about us and our ideas of success and self-validation than about him. Studies of small-scale successes in local churches, which are perfectly real, miss out the bigger picture that only becomes clear when you draw back. We know that, in the late-capitalist West, the great bulk of church growth is not driven by conversion, but by people moving between congregations. Zoom out even further than that, and you can see how Christian growth across the world is largely determined by non-religious factors: church membership is, mainly, an index of something else which the individuals concerned actually care about more. In the USA church allegiance is a cultural and political statement, and no church is growing faster than the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation at all. In China to be a Christian is to have an internal life which is not under the day-to-day control of the Communist Party, but not in open opposition to it, and therefore safe. In Africa to be a Christian is not to be a Muslim, the religious division mapped onto cultural, economic and national or tribal ones. In Eastern Europe, to be Orthodox is to subscribe to nostalgic nationalism, rebuilding a sense of social identity after the collapse of Communist hegemony. In Western Europe, though – I say, ironically but sincerely, ‘thank God’ – religion is mainly decoupled from anything like this. It exists on its own, in the chilly waters of secular societies, swimming without political water-wings to hold it up. Though I have my gripes against him, to his great credit Archbishop Stephen Cottrell does seem to hint at understanding this: ‘it would be foolish to ignore the huge shift in the tectonic plates of European and world culture that have shaped the world in which we serve and witness’, he is quoted as saying.

We can find our clerical amour-propre outraged and our Anglo-Catholic convictions about sacraments and tradition provoked by all this stuff. But the real blood-chilling statement in this report comes at the end of Canon McGinley’s statement to the Church Times: ‘in church planting’, he says, ‘there are no passengers’. You, worshipper, will not be allowed simply to turn up. You will be expected to get on board with the project. There is no sense here that a layperson could be pursuing their vocation in some other way than in church: that they could be a carer, or a young mum, or a harassed worker, or a weary elderly person who has striven all their life and needs a rest, who needs to bathe in the presence of God just in order to get through the rest of their week, to put one foot spiritually in front of another. I am taken spinning back a couple of years to our bishop, denouncing a diocesan finance system that ‘punishes success and rewards failure’. When I see clergy described as ‘leaders’ (I have never seen myself as a ‘leader’, just as someone called sometimes to exercise leadership. People who see themselves as leaders shouldn't be allowed to lead anything), I know that this comes from somewhere other than the Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth, who came not to be served but to serve.

Good evangelical that I am, I sat as ever with my Bible this morning and – simply following through sequentially as I always do – I read 1Thessalonians 2 and 3. I had never properly registered Paul commiserating with the Thessalonians in their ‘persecutions’; ‘you suffered from your own compatriots the same thing those churches [in Judaea] suffered from the Jews’, he sympathises. We live in a time when God’s Church is penetrated by the understandings of the flesh – I suppose it ever is! – by the standards and the expectations of the world, and yet does not know it. Those of us who disagree suffer nothing worse than marginalisation and insults, not fire and rack. But, remember, the Apostle writes ‘so that no one will be unsettled by these persecutions’, and unsettlement should be alien to the faithful. We keep going, not in our own strength but in the Lord’s.

Bish Mish

Before the webinar on Monday evening, I thought the Archbishop of Canterbury's visit to the Guildford Diocese scheduled for September was merely an opportunity for him to share with his clergy his opinions about cheese (I jest: had that been the case I wouldn't have minded going). But it is not. It is a Mission. It is Welby as John Wesley come among us again. There will be a launch for clergy and selected congregation members followed by a series of local mass meetings to which churches are supposed to bring along souls they have been praying for over preceding months. They will go away, enthused, to take part in enquirers' courses run in the parishes, and at some point in 2022 His Grace will return to confirm all the new Christians this process will produce.

I have, I'm afraid, questions to ask. I am not convinced that Archbishop Welby is as down with the kids as he imagines given what he has said in the past; I have never really conceived of him as someone who communicates easily with the world beyond the Church, but perhaps this is how he pictures himself. Are we sure that this is not the good primate trying, perhaps with some desperation, to make a contribution to the Church he heads and identifying this as a way of doing so - that it is more about bolstering his sense of mission than the Church's? 

Then I recalled the Talking Jesus report which also came out in 2015 and which shocked General Synod with its research suggesting that Christians talking about their faith to non-Christians was more likely to put people off belief rather than attract them. Clearly it wasn't the whole story, but have we actually engaged with it, or have we chosen simply to ignore it? I've never heard it referred to since it was published.

Finally I wish I could reformulate in some way my discomfort at praying for people to come to faith. If I had, say, a Muslim or a pagan friend and discovered that they'd mentally identified me as someone who might convert and were praying about it - or whatever it is a pagan might do - I could well feel a bit differently about that person, no matter how much they might simply be acting in what they thought was my best interests. I do know people who I have had conversations of a spiritual nature with and it might not be completely weird to pray for those enquiries to develop into something more, but such people will have identified themselves rather than being targeted by me. 

Of course we wait to hear more. In the meantime I try to work out what I can conscientiously ask the Swanvale Halt congregation to do.

Wrestling with the Digital World

'The problem is with this unit', said the man from the security company to myself and Hannah the churchwarden yesterday morning, tapping the newly-installed bit of kit, 'and what's happening is that custard flapdoodle velveteen theodolite round the back of the ionised abalone'. At least he might as well have done. The take-away message was that our long-awaited CCTV system wasn't going to work because one of the components had been supplied with a fault and would have to be replaced. He'd put in an order the moment he got back to the office, he promised. And after that he was going on holiday.

In a similar vein, several years ago we ran a short course for people interested in finding out more about Christianity. I didn't want to do what Alpha or even Emmaus did and try to impart a short version of what Christians are supposed to believe, but rather examine what it was like to be a Christian, to share experience in an effort to encourage understanding as much as anyone else. I did a couple of sessions and Marion the curate and Lillian the lay reader did one each. We had a sole, single attender. She became a Christian, though: 100% success rate, suck on that, Nicky Gumbel. 

Under the current restrictions I had the idea of perhaps adapting these sessions into video form so they could be used remotely, a first step towards online evangelism. Somehow I managed to find out that Powerpoint presentations could be converted into videos: and thus an adventure began. Powerpoint shows themselves provoke no fear in me but when I came to try to record audio and timings things got more complex. I found out how to play a single audio file all the way through the slideshow. At first I got hideous echoes rendering the audio unlistenable, then kept erasing the timings. I copied and recopied, recorded and re-recorded a slideshow using a variety of formats and methods, and found the apparent length of the show stretching when it was converted into a video, as though there was a law of relativity governing the nature of time which applied in this circumstance and which had remained unknown to Einstein, unsurprisingly as he didn't have Powerpoint, or indeed any Microsoft application. The diocesan evangelism advisor told me you can use Zoom to record slideshows (why not, as Zoom does everything else) and that seemed to offer a way forward, but try as I might I couldn't get the audio and the visual to marry up.

I suspect at the root of the matter is the antiquity of my laptop which probably has to be replaced: as so much of our lives has moved online over recent months, its limitations have been revealed in distressing detail. Finally, and in some despair, I split the audio up into chunks to be started at different points in the slideshow, and that seems to work, producing something which is basically watchable. Whether I'll be able to remember what I did to get there is another matter.

People will advise me on the best way of achieving this: you are kind. But refrain, as I don't think I can bear it ...

An Age of Delusion, Yet Again

You might have thought, given what I’ve said in the past and my interest in the interior arrangements of church buildings, that I am a steadfast defender of the stone and brick steeple houses we Anglicans inhabit. I mainly am, but I also recognise that they are burdens as well. The Body of Christ needs somewhere to meet, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be so large, so old, or so expensive as it often is. While at theological college I remember writing about the notion of ‘cell church’ which had a vogue at one time – a form of Christian community in which small groups become not adjuncts to the church which allow greater discipleship, but the basic structure in which people live their Christian lives, only gathering together in larger numbers on special occasions. Some evangelical Anglican churches went for that, although I don’t know that any actually disposed of their old church buildings; they did, after all, still need them, and might not have been allowed simply to abandon them anyway. I heard a story of a church in Coventry diocese which, driven from their old building after a fire, found their new home in a school hall so congenial that they refused to return once the church was repaired. The diocese didn’t like that at all. But ‘selecting cell’ (as Mission-Shaped Church – remember that? put it) would shift the focus towards a different way of doing things in which the building becomes less important. I remember writing an essay on ecclesiology at Staggers and musing how historic parish churches might turn into ‘network cathedrals’ linking a variety of forms of Church life into the Apostolic structure. Certainly that might mean not needing as many of them.

I’ve long thought a reckoning was coming, driven by strain on resources; not even I think that decades of numerical and therefore financial reduction can go unrecognised indefinitely.  In our diocese the line is now that if a church can’t cover the costs of a stipendiary clergyperson, it won’t get one unless the diocese decides there are special circumstances, and had it not been for the unnecessarily punitive and capitalist language our bishop used when introducing the new policy (‘we must move away from a system that penalises success and rewards failure’) I wouldn’t have minded so much.

This is also the strategy adopted in Chelmsford, where Stephen Cottrell has been bishop for ten years. Becoming Bishop of Reading by accident in 2004 when the Oxford Diocese’s evangelical powerhouses played merry hell at the prospect of celebrity gay parson Jeffrey John taking up that post, +Stephen’s first episcopal task was coming to St Stephen’s House for our Founder’s Day. He comes from the Catholic tradition, but most of us don’t practice being bishops before the pointy hat drops on our head and it was most amusing to see him being pointed in the right direction by the House Sacristans who knew more about being a bishop than he did.

Now in the process of being translated to York, future Archbishop Cottrell is, we learned over the weekend, being charged with running a commission to restructure the Anglican Church. The Sunday Times had spoken to ‘a source familiar with Cottrell’s thinking’ and reported them as saying ‘The crisis is going to lead to a massive shrinkage in the number of cathedrals, dioceses and parish churches … [the COVID emergency] has vastly accelerated a dramatic change in the way the Church of England will do its stuff because of declining attendance and declining revenues.’ The photograph of +Stephen shows him looking unconscionably smug, which he never used to be, unless sixteen years of bishoping have made him so. It was a shame we had to find out this way, and shows yet again that the bishops really have very little idea how to manage the system of which they are in charge or the people who make it up. Bishop Philip North (him again) Tweeted that he didn’t recognise the report, and that discussing closing dioceses ‘would lead to years of pointless debate and introspection at a time when we need to be looking outwards, naming injustice and addressing a nation with a message of hope’. The cynic in me whispers that, this being the Church of England, ‘years of pointless debate and introspection’ is presumably just what we will opt for.

‘We are at a crossroads,’ an unnamed bishop told the Sunday Times, ‘everything’s a blank sheet of paper. It is allowing us to get back to that question of first principle, what it means to be the church. People haven’t stopped gathering for worship. They’ve been doing it over Zoom or over YouTube’. I want to scream, This isn’t ‘gathering’! It’s a replacement for gathering, a weak, etiolated stopgap, a plug in the hole left by the shutting-down of genuine Christian community. People hate it, and they only do it because it’s the best they’ve got. Getting back to first principles is fine, but you wouldn’t have thought that one of the principles in question would be that of human beings actually physically being together.

What I think ‘the Church’ means is something like ‘the community called into existence by the saving work of Jesus Christ, organised around the sacraments and gathering to proclaim his coming Kingdom’. There is no 'new way of being church' which doesn't include those things. No, you don’t need lovely old buildings to do them, but I wonder what the Body of Christ here in Swanvale Halt might look like without the Steeple House. It’s worth thinking about, but, I suspect, far from a panacea. We would presumably meet in houses or pub rooms. Instead of the infants school and other institutions coming to us for their celebratory events, we would have to beg use of their facilities when they’re not using them, the same as Slimming World or a pilates class. We would instantly lose our visibility; and I’m far from convinced that a lot of reticent Anglicans are suddenly going to become the Durutti Column of guerrilla evangelists that the theory envisages. We know that even the most outgoing evangelical churches rarely bring any new souls to faith, but largely shuffle them around between each other, or breed them. I worry that I am deluded in thinking I can have much effect through my work to communicate the Gospel, but if I am I’m not alone. Bishops keep talking as though our current situation is something wonderful rather than a mutilation of what we are supposed to be: ‘Now’s our chance to reimagine church’ that article Bishop Graham Tomlin Tweeted the day the churches were locked to the communities in which they sit. I think the bishops are in for a rude awakening if they think that shutting that inconvenient Gothic building in the centre of the estate is going to revive the Faith in England any time soon.

In this mood I sat with my early-morning tea and read John 22. ‘It is the Lord!’ cries Peter, and leaps into the water of the Sea of Galilee to swim to the beach where he’s glimpsed Jesus. It is indeed, I found myself thinking, and that’s what matters. As Jesus speaks to Peter over breakfast, joking whether he loves him more than he does the fish – that’s my take on the text, anyway – I thought of Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, and other desperate atheist attempts to shut the experience of the apostles into a box they can understand, and to defuse its danger. Christ is risen and everything else is relative. I will carry on doing what I can do here to tell everyone that, to proclaim the Kingdom, to make sure Swanvale Halt Church makes its contribution to its parish and the wider Church as long as it can. Sometimes I weary of it; sometimes I think I’ve barely started. 

Two slogans for you:

Not for the first time, Considering Children

I had the sequence of the changes we'd made to our children's ministry at Swanvale Halt in my mind, but, when I looked back in preparation for a meeting on Monday evening, I'd forgotten how long it had taken. By 2014, though attendance at our Family Service was spiralling up regularly in the direction of 100 a fifth of whom were children, the Junior Church had dwindled to the point where there was often only one forlorn little lad there, so in February that year we suspended it, convinced it wasn't what people wanted any more. Mid-2016 saw us having another go, but offering Junior Church only on the 3rd Sunday each month so that the first-Sunday Family Service wasn't the only time families felt they could safely bring their children. Now, we find ourselves in possession of a Family Service to which no families have come for a long while, and a Junior Church which sometimes gets feasible figures but is hard going: you really need five or six children of similar abilities. When it works, it feels great, and when it doesn't, it's miserable for all concerned.

'Over the twenty years I've been here, we've tried virtually every configuration,' said Erica, 'and can't find a way to crack it.' We're not sure whether our Catholic-end worship puts people off - given the experience of Anglo-Catholic churches with very flourishing children's work, I suspect not, and that the experience of coming into a church full of grey and white heads in which you are virtually the only young family is far more influential on what people do. What people tell me is that they'll choose a church where they feel their children will be catered for, whatever it is, over their own liturgical preferences. The Roman Catholic congregation we share the building with has a well-supported Junior Church which they run every week, led by one member of the congregation but with parent helpers. Marion our curate is convinced that we really have to offer children's provision more often in order to build up support - but can we manage it? Can we drum up enough assistance to get that far? We're also thinking about ways of including children in the liturgy, and beefing up the music so they could be part of the choir (needs money, that). 

My friend Fr Thesis shared pictures on LiberFaciorum of him surrounded by children for the Candlemas mass at his church. He wore a biretta, gold cope and a crossed stole, and his deacon and subdeacon were keeping control of their maniples. There were candles (obviously), incense, aspersed water, and loads of youngsters with their families. He told me:

We definitely benefit from having an excellent parish school, that can’t be denied. However, above and beyond the detail of all the various theories and strategies one can adopt, I think the most important thing is a question of culture. Do kids feel welcomed and included and at home in church? I think that makes the biggest difference and has to underpin whatever projects and plans you adopt. I hope that’s the most significant thing we’ve managed to achieve at all levels of what we do. I rarely if ever hear moaning about children at St Benet’s and try to exemplify that in my own attitude. 

And crucially, I think:

Also - kids don’t want rubbish religion. They like the proper thing and don’t want to be talked down to. Religion should be fundamentally different from school and clubs and all the other things they do.

Perhaps we need more liturgy rather than less!

'The Ace was tea ... chips ... and speed'

Amazing what you can find in churches. On the same day that I called in at Shere Church I also visited St Thomas's, Chilworth, an odd little building that didn't begin life as a church at all. But we can talk about that another time. They had a secondhand bookstall with some oddities scattered among the commonplace popular novels and cookbooks. I found this for a pound - Winston Ramsey's 2002 account of the Ace, the bikers' café on the North Circular Road, and its role in the popular culture of the 1950s and early '60s. It was not a waste, it turned out. I had a vague memory of having heard a radio programme mention the 'ton-up boys' (and occasionally girls) who raced their customised bikes around the night-time North Circular in the Ace's vicinity in those years, and this densely-packed book put a lot of flesh on that uncertain recollection. Beginning with an account of early motorcycle gatherings in the area and how the North Circular developed (talk about covering all the bases), the volume is largely based around personal recollections and news reports, and there is an awful lot in it. It brings home both the excitement of racing at high speeds around rather hazardous suburban roads and the dangers of doing so in the records of accidents, court cases, and lists of deaths - the media hype, the errors in reporting, the nostalgia of remembering being part of an exclusive club. One section is based on the memories of one of the few girl bikers, and one on those of a traffic policeman who chased them round the roads, which rounds off the perspective neatly: the last page has a photo from 2002 of him with an old antagonist, Barry, who he'd last met when arresting him 41 years before.

My Dad had a bike in his younger days, which was one of the reasons his prospective father-in-law, my grandad, wasn't too sure about him at first, but remember he was a Ted rather than adopting the leathers of the ton-up boys. Teds wouldn't have driven too fast for fear of messing up their gear!

A big chunk of the book is devoted to an unexpected figure, the 'biker priest' Bill Shergold who reacquainted himself with motorcycling in 1959 having moved to the parish of the Eton Mission in Hackney Wick and finding it the best way of getting around. Earlier that year the curate at the Mission had inaugurated a new church youth club and somehow cajoled Cliff Richard into playing at its opening night. This '59 Club' was a great success in its own right, but from 1962 Fr Shergold edged it in a different direction. 

Having heard about a special service held for motorcyclists at (of all places) Guildford Cathedral Fr Shergold decided to do the same. In the course of the planning, someone from a local motorcycle club said to him the fateful words, 'of course the people you really ought to invite are those young hooligans who go blasting along the North Circular Road', and so he set off on his bike on a Sunday afternoon for the Ace Café armed with a roll of posters and flyers - not, he admits in the book, the most auspicious time of the week for going if he actually wanted to speak to anyone. He was so nervous at going to what he had been led to believe would be a den of Hells' Angels that he covered up his dog collar with a scarf and drove past it twice too afraid to go in. Finally he screwed up his courage, pulled onto the dreaded forecourt, parked up and entered. The place was almost empty. He sat with a cup of tea, finished it and left without speaking to anyone apart from the barman, a middle-aged clergyman panting with nerves. 

I can recognise myself in the fact that Fr Shergold's next attempt to penetrate the Ace was the night before the service was due to take place. He must have fretted himself into resolution and made a last- minute decision with no time to change his mind. This occasion, at 8 o'clock on a Saturday night, the café was jammed: but apart from one youngster suggesting he 'rev up and fuck off', to be reprimanded by a mate, everyone was remarkably interested and Shergold didn't actually make it inside as so many people spoke to him. Far from 'losing my trousers or landing up in the canal' it was instead 'the most fantastic evening I have ever spent' and he didn't get away until midnight. That was the start of the 59 Club becoming a dedicated Church motorcycle club, as it still is today (sort of). 

The story of how this came about (a great and unsung instance of Anglo-Catholic mission, by the way) is a fine example to all clergy, for four reasons. First, because of Fr Shergold's non-judgemental care for the bikers as individuals - very incarnational. Second, because he was able to connect with them not as a patronising outsider, but because he had something demonstrably in common with them. Third, because of his persistence; and fourth, because of his sheer terror at dipping into an unknown world. What an encouragement to all us cowards!

Ashes to Go

'The Archbishop of York has pinched your idea!' said Marion the curate in an email to me this Monday. Of course it wasn't my idea: I got it from my friend His Grace of Hoxton and he got it from some Episcopal churches in the USA where it seems to have started. The idea is that you take the ash prepared from last year's palm crosses and used in the Ash Wednesday services out of the church and into the places where people actually find themselves. My Hoxton colleague administered ash to bewildered commuters on the way to Old Street Station. I was going to offer it at the approach to the railway station here in Swanvale Halt, but my chicken heart got the better of me and instead I trialled it in the relatively benign surroundings of the infant school. I got half-a-dozen adult takers in the course of 15 minutes, including one of the staff, which wasn't bad. The children were fascinated. At Church Club in the afternoon the majority positively demanded I do it to them, and their generally boisterous mood, resulting from being kept in all day because of the rain, became positively solemn. I said the traditional words remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return: repent and hear the Gospel and then got them to repeat them over me. It was rather moving really.

The trouble with outreach is that it necessarily involves taking things that are familiar in one context into unexpected places and that always runs the risk of discomfort. My mind goes back to an occasion at Wycombe Museum when we had the bright idea of taking the finds from the local Roman villa down to the meadow east of the town where they were found to celebrate National Archaeology Day. We had some good interpretation, games and activities for children, and a tent we borrowed from the Council. We set up shop next to the main path across the field, and for the next few hours watched everyone crossing the meadow describe an enormous arc as they did their best not to come anywhere near us. 

At least it went better than some other Ash Wednesday efforts ...

(Photo from the Diocese of York website). 

Escaping the Void

Years ago in Goremead I met Hari and Peter. They didn't worship at Goremead Church but had been members of a tiny independent chapel at the far side of the village. Peter had been a teacher and missionary many years before, but had lost his faith and by the time I met him had the beginnings of dementia. I had a couple of conversations with him about what Jesus had actually been on about. 'I don't believe in him any more,' said Peter, 'but I just can't forget about this man. I still love him.' His eyes glistened. Peter recovered his faith a few weeks before he died, and how much this must have been a relief to him and probably those around him too became clear from a volume of poetry Hari sent me after Christmas, compiled from Peter's papers after his death. I began reading them as a break in the middle of the Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown, whose relentless Orkney-ness does wear one down after 250 pages. But Peter's verse is not light relief. In fact it makes Thomas Hardy read like Spike Milligan. Meaninglessness and existential angst sprawl over every page: the Void doesn't so much stare back from the book as leap out and shake you round the neck. 

On the train taking me towards my meeting with S.D. last week I found myself trying to answer the question I encourage every Christian to try to answer for themselves, that is, What is it Jesus has done for you? There are general theological answers to this involving sin and redemption, but they didn't play a great role in my conversion, shockingly. If I'm honest, I can't say my sense of the cussedness and wrongness of things, the dark fault line that runs through all our human endeavours and so often turns them to the bad, formed a problem over which I fretted and to which God was 'the answer'. In fact, what Jesus rescued me from, if anything, was the horror of meaninglessness, and reassured me that I and everything around me mattered, on a cosmic level.

I knew about that, but sitting waiting for my connection at Clapham Junction revealed something else. I often say that without Christ we would not know what love truly is, but I hadn't seen the connection between this theme and the existential one. There was a time (very occasionally there still is) when I would look around at my fellow human beings and see what Dr Bones would once have called a parade of meat-puppets, busy microbes doomed to die and striving to ignore the fact. A lot of Peter's poems were about that. But if there was a God, and meaning, and love was possible, and he loved me, then he loved all these silly beings too despite their frailty, frail and silly in ways not much different from the ways in which I am frail and silly. And that meant I couldn't regard them so negatively any more. Jesus not only gave me an example of love, not only taught me what love is, but even made it possible. He made it possible for me to sit at a busy railway station and smile, and dance inside for joy. He not only rescued me from meaninglessness, he rescued me from contempt. 

God knows how I explain that to anyone, though.

Cutting Edge

The rain held off just long enough for us to gather at the Grassward Park estate to sing twenty minutes' worth of carols this evening. In the end I thought a top hat would be a bit de trop but hung a lantern off a beech branch I pruned from the tree in the garden because my head kept bumping into it, lending a little bit of Dickensian atmosphere to proceedings. There were a dozen of us, including Daniel with his trumpet adding some instrumental oomph beneath the more or less wavering voices. I said that delivering the leaflets the other day was probably the evangelistic point, but having made that point we did actually have to do some singing, and was prepared for absolutely no reaction on the part of the residents at all. However we gradually gathered an audience framed in their warm doorways and even some applause when we finished. That's a fresh expression of Church for you.