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. 

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