Shifting the Product

Several conversations about the same subject over the last few days – the decline of the Church and what might be done about it – led me back to some thoughts prompted by driving past a closed branch of Blockbuster Videos a few weeks ago. A business dedicated to an obsolete technology, overtaken by change and economic stress. What does that say to the Church, I wondered.

The Church Times has been running a series of articles analysing change in the Church (of England, specifically, but it applies more broadly) and ideas for the future. It always strikes me looking back at the history of Anglicanism over the last century and a half or so that we’ve been saying the same sort of thing for a very long while. Last year I acquired a fascinating book from the Methodist stable, called Towards a Radical Church: it bears so strongly the stamp of its time (1970), and yet rehearses the same arguments and complaints that we go through now. I like the way it blithely assumes that most married women will continue to eschew paid work and therefore will, once their children are at school, be available to run the new, shiny, radical church's activities. Visions of the future so soon become overtaken by reality.

Capitalist businesses sell a product or range of products for profit, and a particular business defines itself around its product. If things change and that product becomes harder to sell, the business faces the challenge of what to do. Now, there is nothing inherent about a business which marries it inextricably to its product; it could survive in a time of change by deciding to sell something else, and sometimes this happens. Practically, though, there are constraints, because at least in the short term a business has to use the skills and experience of the staff it has and the capabilities of the equipment it has, and even if it does want to revolutionise the business it’s in, it’s normally a process that takes some time and so the new line, whatever it is, will exist alongside the old until it takes over. Most often, however, what stymies business change is not these practical considerations but simply not seeing what’s happening, and the inertia that comes from not being able to imagine radical change. It’s much easier to think that you can make your business succeed by better marketing, internal reorganisation, or things like that, rather than actually rethinking the whole enterprise, by recognising that your business isn’t really defined by what you’re selling, just by institutional continuity.

Thinking about the Church in these terms is an interesting exercise. What is the product we’re selling, and how might that change? How much change is possible, even – because, whereas a business, if it looks at things in a hard-headed way, isn’t essentially about its product, the Church is an ideological organisation whose form is related to its principles.

It seems to me that what the Church sells is relationship with God, expressed uniquely in Jesus of Nazareth, mediated by committed communities of people engaged in various activities. That’s its product, essentially. What about that might be open to change?

The part about God and Jesus clearly isn’t capable of being changed without the Church ceasing to be Christian. It could choose to do so, but a) it would no longer be committed to the same ideology that now gives it meaning, and b) it isn’t clear that it’s that bit of the product which is the problem. It’s the community and activity elements which seem to be under the most challenge: churches with too few people and too little money to carry on their traditional work, traditional subgroups such as Sunday Schools and Mothers’ Union branches unable to operate, social change making it very hard even for people who want to be part of a physical, geographical church community and its life actually to get involved.

It seems to me that most churches focus on the activity element of their product as the one changing which involves least pain and upset (though not none). They try doing new stuff and, if they’re exceptionally brave, stopping doing old stuff, in an attempt to get more people interested: outreach, social action, new sorts of services, ‘fresh expressions of church’. Sometimes these do work, but they’re limited in scope, and don’t touch the core nature of the business.

Now, Blockbuster (for instance) managed the technological shift from video to DVD rental fairly smoothly, but has been done in by not adapting to a world in which too few people want to rent films on physical media to make that business model feasible. The shift to an online and virtual economy is one of the great facts of our time. Might the Church learn from that? There have been experiments in this area for about ten years, online churches and internet chaplains and so on, but they’ve never really caught on, and I don’t know whether any thinking has been done as to why they haven’t worked. It may be that such online communities don’t actually provide people with enough of what they want from a church, that it brings a degree of face-to-face, physical relationship; that they recognise it for not being the real thing. At the moment Swanvale Halt uses its (limited) online presence as a marketing tool, telling people what’s going on and acting as a shop window for the real church. What if we could devise something which functioned in the same way as Messy Church does: that is, another means of allowing people to maintain contact with the core church of physical relationship and commitment in social circumstances which make doing that very difficult? It’s a possibility.

Yet even that doesn’t really break free from the idea of the physical church community being at the centre of the life of Christians. I’m not sure it’s possible to do so; I suspect that relationship is an essential element of the core ideological product which we can’t jettison without ceasing to be what we are.

None of this results in much clarity, I’m afraid. During its series of articles, The Church Times printed many comments and letters saying things along the lines of, ‘The Church needs to wake up to what’s happening and change or it’ll die’. Such statements do annoy me. The truth is that the Church is perfectly aware of the problems it faces; it’s just that nobody really has the faintest idea what to do about them.