In the Waiting Room

The Infants School were in church this morning for their Harvest Service - or services, split into three year groups, and very minimal and simple. I looked at the tinies in Reception and, reflecting that this was my eleventh Harvest in Swanvale Halt, could have sworn that some of those little faces were ones I'd seen before, coming through the school for a second go.

In the evening, older and naughtier children were hanging around the church, surreptitiously smoking fags and eating radioactive foodstuffs from the kebab shop. They asked how old I was. 50. 'Whaaaat? Mate, you're on the way out!'

And sometimes, brethren, that's a comfort ...

Interfaith Diet Log

Our curate Marion is on the chaplaincy team at a nearby prison. The festivals of a variety of religious traditions are celebrated there, and the custom is that every now and again the prison kitchen prepares a particular foodstuff related to that festival. Just before Christmas it was the pagans' turn, so for Yule they made a huge chocolate Yule log decorated with sugar-paste mushrooms (because that's what the Druids would have had). Marion and the Baptist chaplain sat in the chapel and a grand total of 0 pagans turned up. After a while the silence became palpable.

Baptist minister:  It would be wrong to waste this, wouldn't it?

And so they cut the Yule log up and had a bit each.

Marion:  I don't suppose this counts as 'food sacrificed to idols' which St Paul says Christians aren't supposed to eat, does it?

Silence.

Baptist minister: Nooo, it can't do. 

That's Useful to Know

A lunch with Ms T at the Weston Library café in Oxford normally affords considerable amusement, but I wasn't expecting one of the key sources to be our dining utensils. I imagine 'Hcat' on the label is a misprint for 'Heat', but, as two people one of whom is a priest and the other an employee of a Roman Catholic monastic seminary, we agreed that having a tray which is secure against demonic influence is a distinct advantage. 'When I next have lunch with Dr Bones and she starts going on about spiritual warfare,' said Ms T, 'I can just show her the tray.'

Three Episodes of Unreason

On Wednesday, we had celebrated communion at Widelake House, the local care home. Arthur usually plays the piano on these occasions and I give him a lift home. While doing this he was in the back seat of the car – I’d already dropped someone else off who usually occupies the front passenger seat. And chatting in his customary light tone which was not all that easy to hear. I suddenly realised I was automatically tapping the volume control of my car radio to turn him up.

. . . . . . . . . . . . 

Later, Trevor called.

Trevor: Someone’s doing bread.

Me: Er, what do you mean?

Trevor: Someone’s doing bread.

Me: Yes, I heard you, but I don’t understand. Explain it to me.

Trevor: Someone is eating bread so that I will go back into Satan.

Me: No, I still don’t really get it. How can eating bread make you ‘go back into Satan’, whatever that means?

Trevor: Satan can bless and curse his people and the occult meet and eat holy bread like we do in church so that things will happen, and they’re doing it to make me go to Hell.

Me: How do you know this is happening?

Trevor (as though I’m an idiot): I can smell bread!!

. . . . . . . . . . 

Later still, it was the after-school club at the infants’ school. I was sat at the table with Lauren, who has a philosophical turn of mind for a five-year-old.

Lauren: You know everything because you’re a vicar.

Me: Oh, I don’t think I know everything.

Lauren: What don’t you know?

Me: Well, I don’t know what I don’t know. If I knew what I don’t know, I would know it and it wouldn’t be what I don’t know. 

Lauren: That doesn’t make any sense.

Vanity, Vanity, Saith the Preacher

Someone lent me a book of old postcard views of Hornington, the small town to which Swanvale Halt is appended and with which it has a somewhat conflicted relationship. Its first words are 'Hornington, like Rome, is surrounded by hills.'

And the Romans, at least educated ones who spoke Greek, would have called that setting a new bar for hubris. 

Sola Fide

Our curate Marion has reached the end of her curacy, although we breathe a huge sigh of relief that the diocese has decided she can stay on until her husband retires from his current position at a local school, which should be four years. She can do this because she is what the Church of England calls a Self-Supporting Minister: that is, she works for free. The Church likes SSMs. What she will actually be now that she's technically no longer Assistant Curate (SSM) isn't yet clear, but nomenclature is a comparatively minor matter.

This is what she gave me to celebrate the conclusion of her training, to add to my mantelpiece of religious tat 'in the interests of theological balance': a Playmobil Martin Luther. It looks distinctly more mild-mannered than the real thing would have been.

I'm very pleased to see I fall within the intended age range, otherwise I'd've had to give it back.

A Challenge

The small girl with her mum and little sister accosted me while we were waiting to cross the road. 

"Why do you always dress so smart?" she said. I overlooked the adverbial use of an adjective, taking the view that grammar was beside the point of this encounter. "Why", she went on, "don't you dress like me?"

I considered her spotty t-shirt and leggings. "Well", I offered, "I like the clothes I wear, just as you probably like the clothes you wear." I did think that communication might be opened up with the bishop were I to start dressing like her, but I didn't say that.

A Confident Priesthood

On Monday evening it was the Archdeacon’s Visitation service at the Cathedral, where all the churchwardens from the parish churches, of all ages, shapes, sizes and churchpersonships, go to swear undying allegiance to the Bishop and hear the Archdeacon preach a variant on his usual sermon which, he always stresses, is not about drainpipes and insurance policies. One of our Swanvale Halt churchwardens is new this year, and this was her first proper engagement. Two more would follow in quick succession this week: a safeguarding training evening and a church council meeting. Gosh.

I sat during all this and contemplated the pillar next to me, which I realised was covered for some distance up in strange, small parallel scratch marks. A mischievous angel whispered in my ear that these were, according to legend, made by Bishop Reindorp as he marked off the days until his retirement, gnawing the hem of his surplice during Evensong. I will have to spread this fact now. On reflection, I’m not completely sure it was an angel.

In fact the spiritual entity, whatever it was, was misinformed as George Reindorp went on from Guildford to be Bishop of Salisbury. But it prompted me to look him up. Some while ago his former parish of St Stephen’s, Rochester Row, Westminster produced a booklet about his time there (1946-57) bits of which found its way into an article in the Church Times. A priest who went to the parish in the mid-1950s as a curate had kept Fr Reindorp’s letter to him before he arrived. ‘I want to see your manuscripts [of sermons] not less than one week before you preach’, the prospective curate was advised (and I use ‘advised’ in its strongest sense). ‘Learn by heart a) the Ten Commandments, b) the long Exhortation at Mattins and c) the exhortation from the 1928 Prayer Book …’ and so on, through paragraphs headed ‘Money’, ‘Punctuality’, and ‘The Vicar’s Wife’. I especially like this bit:

A small point with implications. In this parish there is a Vicar, and Mr Shepherd, Mr Case and Mr Todd. Don’t be led off by high-church coddlers into Father this or that. I like the term, but it is not expedient with this parish set in the midst of Cardinal Griffin’s Mission on one side, and a very "extreme" neighbour on the other. Then there are the loveable folk who refer to Philip Case and Bill Todd. Be advised by an old hand. Look polite and say, "Do you mean Mr Case?" It only has to be done once! Only a small point, you may say, but begin as you mean to go on.

Reindorp insisted on absolute uniformity of practice among all the clergy of the parish, and absolute uniformity of opinion, at least in public. ‘Don’t let it be dreamed that you could think differently from the Vicar on any important matter, although in point of fact you could willingly murder him’. In fact, he told curates that they were in their training parish to learn and not to think.

And then there’s the bit at the heart of the whole thing:

Above all, be prepared to challenge anyone. You are not ordained to be liked. When you leave St Stephen’s more people should love God than when you came, even if they can’t remember your name, and though some may not come to that knowledge till long after your departure.

Of course the curate in question, Timothy Raphael (later an Archdeacon) ‘found this maddening’ a lot of the time, but recognised in Reindorp someone who knew what he was doing, and in whom others could have similar confidence. ‘He cared about people rather than ideas. He had no great academic ability, nor claimed any. No one has ever infuriated me more, given me more, or supported me more.’

My own practice is less directive, partly by inclination, partly because of the time we live in. I inherited my first curate at Swanvale Halt and Marion came to us as what’s known as a Self-Supporting Minister from a moderately Evangelical background: she probably won’t have a parish of her own to run, and I wouldn’t have felt it appropriate to enforce on her complete uniformity with what I do (I have put in her final appraisal, however, that her disinclination to wear a maniple is an area for development). All that stuff from Reindorp’s letter about clergy being addressed as ‘Mister’, too, comes from a very bygone age in which the authority of the ordained person was deemed to be suitably maintained by a sense of distance.

But sometimes I wonder that I am not firm enough about some things. I want to believe that I choose my battles, and the issues that are worth drawing an absolute line on are few, but that can be an excuse for a laxity that does nobody any good. You’ve got to communicate that this business of the spiritual life is important, that choices have to be made, and that they are serious; and perhaps that requires not that a parish priest be rigid about any particular thing, but give the impression that he or she might be when it matters, and has no thought of being popular. ‘When you leave Swanvale Halt, more people should love God than when you came’.

(Most of the nicest pictures of George Reindorp available online seem to come from his famous Christmas cards, which usually showed him doing something priestly (including talking to the Queen), but they’re copyright to Getty. This one is from Guildford Cathedral, and shows him keeping an eye on the Supreme Governor of the Church of England signing the deed during the consecration of the Cathedral in 1961. He only wore his fantastically gigantic mitre once, on this occasion, before Mrs Reindorp told him it looked ridiculous. ‘The vicar’s wife’, he wrote in his letter to Timothy Raphael, ‘seldom interferes’; but, one might add, when she does … ).

Palm Sunday Scenes

On a gorgeous Palm Sunday morning we gathered at the Recreation Ground to process along the main street to church. The sky was a perfect, undifferentiated blue, so that the café opposite the church was busy with breakfasting customers who gawped rather satisfyingly as the Swanvale Halt parishioners made their way past singing ‘All glory, laud and honour’.

At Mass I was about to begin the prayer of consecration when a wasp plopped onto the altar in front of me. That could be distracting, I thought, I’ll be constantly looking at it to see what it’s doing. So I popped a ciborium lid on it until I could dispose of it, which I did as soon as communion was over, slipping a bit of paper under it and taking it out of the church. Apparently some people assumed it was an obscure liturgical action specific to the day.

At noon a baptism, with three little girls handing me the necessary kit from the table – shell, towel, oil, candles. Amazingly once they’d told me their names I managed to remember.

In the evening I took a member of the congregation being confirmed to a service at a modern church building in Woking. The font amazed: a wee glass bowl supported by three pillars (one steel, two wood, for some unknown reason) set into concrete feet below a strange boxy structure. The whole thing reminded me subliminally of Robbie the Robot. The communion bread came in the form of rolls which resulted in bits spraying everywhere: the vicar of a neighbouring church to Swanvale Halt hissed to me ‘Our Lord is all over the carpet’. I waited until the throng left for cake and coffee, borrowed a dustpan and brush, and swept Him up. There wasn’t as much left as there should have been, trodden, I assume, and taken elsewhere on people’s shoes. I took the remnants home and buried them in the garden.

And a post-Palm Sunday scene: I went to the Cathedral to make my confession, and found the duty canon, the vergers and volunteers all sat on the grass outside because the refurbishment works had closed the building due to ‘unacceptably low air quality’. And that was before I’d even started. 

Bona Beyond Belief

Like most people who weren’t gay men in London in the 1950s and early ‘60s, my first introduction to Polari was Julian & Sandy on Round the Horne. Bona to vada your dolly old eek, and so on, all very amusing in context and radical in its day, even though Kenneth Williams was, as far as mainstream audiences were concerned, so far into the closet he was virtually in Narnia. I almost felt like greeting the congregation in Polari this morning, but wasn’t sure very many people would get the joke. Still, I have been known to use the word ‘bona’ in a wide variety of inappropriate situations. It confuses my American friends, I can tell you.

What a fuss there’s been about the Polari Evensong service celebrated a couple of weeks ago at the august Anglican vicar-factory, Westcott House in Cambridge. So much so that the College authorities have apologised, crawlingly, for this ‘experiment in queering the liturgy’, which seems a bit rough on the students who put the service together. No, I wouldn’t have felt very comfortable addressing the Holy Trinity as ‘the Auntie, the Omi Chavvie, and the Fantabulosa Fairy’, but it’s not as though it was some kind of officially-sanctioned liturgy that’s going to be added to Common Worship in the next revision. It really doesn’t matter that much. I’ve had to grit my teeth through an act of worship in which the Lord’s Prayer was ‘re-gendered’ and the focus of our adoration was a pebble in a bowl of water, and I still survived the experience. It’s fine.

Others have defended the jokey service in vigorous terms. ‘What’s the difference between a service in Polari and one in Cockney Rhyming Slang?’ they ask at the parish of Kilburn and West Hampstead. ‘A: The Church wishes gay people didn’t exist.’ This blog argues that ‘what makes people cringe’ about the Polari-rendering of religious language and imagery, changing the mode of addressing God from Lord to Duchess, is gender, and reveals the profound discomfort the Church has not so much with gays as with the Female.

Now, I went to a theological college where male students were referred to by girls’ names and the moniker awarded to our Father Principal when he was a student was a whispered secret, revealed to us by a visiting priest who’d known him in those days (it was Sylvia Stardust, allegedly). I am, therefore, no stranger to camp, and recognise its dangers. What the defenders of the Polari Evensong miss is that it isn’t actually an exercise in homosexuality or femaleness, but camp. The use of feminine titles for God is a different argument which we can have another time: the issue with calling God ‘Duchess’ or ‘Auntie’ is that it arises from a culture whose self-defensive humour involves not actual femaleness, but the burlesquing of femaleness by men. It’s intentionally parodic, exaggerated, ludicrous. Camp is a complex mode of humour which is used to negotiate ambiguity, discomfort, and dichotomies between ideals and realities: no wonder it finds an honoured place among those training for the priesthood. The Christian life involves an inevitably painful awareness of the distance between what we are and what we are supposed to be. But let camp anywhere near actual matters of faith and its humour becomes less a way of defending oneself against outside persecution – which is what Polari was supposed to do – than defending oneself against truth, avoiding dealing with painful matters, not engaging with anything that might demand we change and develop. Of pushing God as far away from us as we can manage, making him (sic) safe and controlled, locking him in our own box. That's the problem.

I’m not telling you what my ‘name in religion’ was, by the way.

What Happens When Priests Get Together

It's like an episode of Father Ted, of course.

- Were you ordained in Guildford diocese?

- No, I used to be at Wantage.

- Ah, were you there when Frank Frinton was there?

- No, he'd already gone to Birmingham by my time. My rector was Fr Bendybus.

- Is that the same Fr Bendybus who was at St Frottage-by-the-Gasworks with old Doddy Manhole?'

- No, there was a curate who looked like him though. But you can tell Fr Bendybus because he's got the, y'now, the thing.

- Of course, the thing, I'd forgotten.

- How could you forget the thing?

Tell Me Another

An atmosphere of nigh-hysterical hilarity prevailed at our Deanery Chapter meeting on Wednesday. Our curate Marion's account of the Pet Service we had last Sunday led to repeated references to animal-related news from our colleagues around the area, and I was able to point another vicar whose church is plagued by bats to the service of Cursing Against Pests and Vermin contained in the 1962 Rituale Romanum. The Rural Dean announced that Rural Deans are to be retitled because our new bishop has trouble pronouncing the letter 'R'. The vicar of Ashlake recounted how one member of the PCC is threatening to leave the church over the establishment of a Mens' Group. Apparently she put her name on the list of those who might be interested in attending, only to have it crossed out by some unknown person who inscribed the words 'MEN ONLY' next to the erasure, all in green crayon. We agreed that all church members should be issued with green crayons for just such emergencies. Had I not fallen off my bicycle on the way to the meeting I might have quite enjoyed it.

Noster Est Episcopus

On Saturday Marion our curate and I were in attendance at the Cathedral for the enthronement of our new bishop, Andrew Watson. I was very fond of our previous bishop, Christopher, who was a moderate Catholic where Bishop Andrew is a moderate Evangelical (no other kind get made bishops, or want to be). But he preached rather succinctly and clearly and we'll see what we get. I hope I can be fond of him, too, as well as have due regard for him as my Father in Christ.

Here you see Bishop Ian, the suffragan, about to anoint Bishop Andrew on head, lips and hands. The anointing is a very Cahtholic observance you see at the inauguration of bishops nowadays. In fact until scanning the service notes I hadn't realised, or even given any thought to, how recent the motif of enthronement of bishops is in the Church of England, having only crept back into use under the impact of the Oxford Movement from the mid-nineteenth century onwards; I suppose before that, the Letters Patent would just have been read out and that would have been it, and not necessarily read in the new bishop's cathedral church, either. Two things strike me: how even Evangelical members of the episcopate now gaily (and even reverently, as Bishop Andrew clearly did) take part in superstitious usages their predecessors of yesteryear would have shrunk from in horror; and how notwithstanding the objections of trad Anglo-Catholics to its innovations, the Church of England clearly understands itself in an infinitely more Catholic way than it once did. This ceremony very obviously expresses the nature of the bishop as bearer of the charisma of the Holy Spirit and sign of apostolic continuity in his diocese - as opposed to being an ecclesiastical civil servant having a letter of congratulation from the reigning monarch read at him.

Marion pointed out to me some of the titles of the dignitaries in the order of service. 'Surely the Provincial Apparitor and the Vesturer of Canterbury are characters from Harry Potter?' she asked. I immediately conjured up images of the Bishop having to wear a Sorting Mitre to discover what kind of bishop he was going to be. But perhaps the better joke came from Marion's (Roman Catholic) husband who, when she described how the moment when the bishop seeks admission to the cathedral by striking the door with his crozier was robbed of some of its solemnity by the fact the Guildford Cathedral has glass doors which have to be struck somewhat carefully, asked whether, in such a modern cathedral, it wouldn't have been much more in keeping if he'd just rung the doorbell.

Baby Go Boom

There are few things that arouse my ire more than spending my time on toilets, boilers and sound systems, dull practical things which should work in churches at least as well as the equivalent sorts of things we have at home. Yesterday I came in to the hall while our curate was setting up for the Toddler Group to be told the boiler was howling an alarm and was it all right to carry on? Eventually I found the number of the engineer and he advised that no, the boiler was not about to explode and the problem was probably that the pressurisation unit (the new, thousand-pound pressurisation unit) had malfunctioned and was showing a different and far higher pressure than was actually the case within the boilers. I relayed this information to our curate who was clearly relieved. 'I could just see the Surrey Advertiser reporting, "Tots Totalled in Toddler Tragedy" '. 'You've been working on that,' I said.

Perhaps Not

'We don't want Geoff's funeral to be too solemn,' his family told me. 'What was that song we talked about?' asked his daughter-in-law. 'We thought how it was just like him, he liked everything done just so. The Bernard Cribbins one. Don't dig it here, dig it there.'

'I can't remember', I asked, 'Are we going from the church to the crematorium, or the cemetery?'

'The cemetery', they said.

'In that case', I suggested, 'Are you sure that a song about digging a hole is what you want to go out to?'

They decided, on reflection, it probably wasn't.

Spiritual Counsel

So, as I said before, I did eventually get to speak to S.D. Here are a couple of nuggets from the conversation.

"How appropriate that from my angle, you should be sitting directly in front of the spire of the great Forward in Faith citadel of St Raphael's, framed in the window. They are in the process of getting a new incumbent, who comes from a successful time emptying his previous church in Kent. I am calling him Fr Bigot. Even before his installation he has already written to the PCC to tell them how disappointed he is that during the interregnum they have allowed the marriage of a divorcee to take place in the church. He says he can't stop it happening, but will make sure he is absent from the parish that day as a protest."

"I can't discover a single bishop who's willing to defend the House of Bishops' letter about same-sex marriage. Most of them claim not to have been there when it was drafted. They all say things like, 'I had to wait for the boiler man', or 'I couldn't get into London', or 'I had to go to Doris's funeral'. The closest anyone I've spoken to came to defending the letter was one bishop who said, 'Well, it would have been much worse if I hadn't been there'."

"They said to me, If you do the christening Brian Cox will agree to be one of the godparents. So I pointed out that he really is a bit of an atheist and probably couldn't make the promises with a clear conscience. Then I brought out the Order of Thanksgiving For the Gift of a Child and we agreed to do that rather than a baptism. In the service I asked Professor Cox, 'Do you, Brian, undertake, in so far as in you lies, to unfold to Abbie the mysteries of the universe?' and he replied 'I do promise so to do'. We should have done it in trad-language, really."

Cream City

The Old Testament reading for the morning eucharist at a local sheltered accommodation development yesterday was from the Book of Jonah. Jonah the prophet has escaped from the great fish and has finally done what God wants him to, to go to the mighty city of Nineveh and warn it of its forthcoming destruction.

Bill always does the reading for this service. He consistently read 'Nineveh' as 'Nivea', which I'm sorry to say provoked all sorts of unScriptural reflections, at least in me.

What A Find

This was lurking, positively lurking, in a binful of cut-price DVDs in a charity shop in Guildford, just waiting for me to come along. I remember the fuss about Popetown when it first came out. Actually I don't, strictly, what I remember is the article in The Guardian's media section at the time reporting on the fuss; the fuss itself was a different matter. I occasionally found my mind turning to it over subsequent years, and usually got the impression hardly anyone else knew it had existed. Coming across this was a complete surprise.

It only cost a pound, which was just as well. 'The banned TV series they didn't want you to see!' enthuses the cover; one episode is enough to make the point that 'they' had your interests very much at heart. It does rather make Father Ted look like it was written by Franz Kafka. The 'Ted' figure in Popetown, Fr Nicholas the Pope's handler, isn't normal enough to contrast with the lunatic figures around him, who are either impossibly ludicrous (the Pope) or too stereotypical to be amusing (the moneygrabbing cardinals). It may just be that the jokes aren't funny enough, though.

Not worth anyone banning, is my opinion. Shame, because the opening (live action) sequence of the desperate-to-please young priest doing animal impressions in a secondary school is actually rather fine.

Justin Welby's sense of the ridiculous is completely incompatible with the dignity of the Archiepiscopal office. Good

One of the nice things about British religion is that nobody goes to church but they still take an unhealthy interest in who the Archbishop of Canterbury is. People have even asked me what I think about Justin Welby, as though it matters at all what I think. So here is what I think.

I think Bishop Welby is about the best we could hope for, given that the tradition in the Church of England, at least since the War, is that the primatial office alternates between Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals and that it's the Evos' turn. The previous Evangelical incumbents of the job haven't had a glittering record. When Geoffrey Fisher became ABC in 1944 'evangelicalism' was very much a slumbering force in the Church and so he was more a sort of crusty Low Churchman rather than a tambourine-banger, so you could argue he doesn't count. Nobody remembers who Donald Coggan was, and as for George Carey ... But Justin Welby, converted though he may have been by the great Evangelical hothouse system of Holy Trinity Brompton and its Alpha CourseTM, has some surprisingly unEvangelical aspects to him. He makes a regular confession. He is an oblate of the Order of St Benedict. (He has the customary evangelical's utter lack of aesthetic sense but presumably can get advice on that). He illustrates the fact that the boundaries between the wings of the CofE are no longer as clear as they once were.

There are three things which make me quite hopeful about this new archiepiscopate. Firstly, there is Bp Welby's much talked-about experience in the oil industry. Of course as an industry there is, shall we say, a certain amount of moral ambiguity about the oil business, but it means that he's not been cloistered within the confines of the CofE all his life, and has some relatively recent experience (he's only been ordained three years longer than me) in what we laughingly call the real world. Furthermore, it's a bit of the real world - industry, finance, capitalism in all its glory - which is very relevant currently.

Secondly. There is his experience in the ministry of reconciliation, gained from five years at Coventry Cathedral and trying to get Muslim and Christian Nigerians talking to one another. One might hope that he might even be able to get Christians talking to one another.

Thirdly. He may not be a very archbishoply archbishop. Since the announcement of his appointment, he has:
       - informed a press conference that he is not a horse and that's a really important point to make;
       - Tweeted that he isn't a woman;
       - swapped his mitre for a policeman's helmet at a photo-call.
And over at Heresy Corner the Heresiarch has called attention to his inability to take some of the more bizarre juxtapositions of the Christian religion with entirely po-faced seriousness.
This bodes well because it suggests that Bp Welby is not going to be the kind of person who expects to command and be obeyed.

There are more than just liturgical contrasts between Bp Welby's two predecessors. Abp Carey had had an extremely successful ministry as a parish priest, and was then sucked into the Anglican System as a theological college principal and Bishop of Bath & Wells. Something happened to the priest whose infectious and enthusiastic faith trebled the congregation of St Nicholas's Durham in two years; he became a humourless, sour man bewildered by the refusal of other people to do what he, and as he thought, God, wanted them to. Since retiring he has continued to plough the same furrow, carping, criticising, increasingly a caricature of the bitter Christian pursing his lips at everything the modern world brings. Rowan Williams's great virtue, on the other hand, was to realise that the command-and-control mode simply wouldn't work either inside the Church or regarding the Church's relationship with the world. Instead he wrote simple books and warm mini-lectures (you can find them on Youtube) about trust or holiness and what they might mean. Relinquishing the ambitions of power meant Rowan was bound to disappoint virtually everyone, but that's reality.

It's clear that there are many Anglicans who want Justin Welby to be a sort of Mrs Thatcher in a mitre, writing articles for the Daily Mail about how wicked everything is, shaking his crozier and moaning 'down with this kind of thing'. But I don't think he will be.

Procedure

A story the Rural Dean told me.

It's a meeting of the Rural Deans with the two Archdeacons. One R.D. is just about to move out of his parish. He's a very Low Churchman who inherited a rather more Catholic church.

R.D.: Before I go I want to get rid of a load of vestments. I never used them, I just wear a suit. What should I do, do you think?

Archdeacon: You need to apply for a faculty.

R.D.: Great, who do I apply to for that?

Archdeacon: Me.

R.D.: Right, and who do I send it to?

Archdeacon: Me. And then I reject it.