Hitting the Bar

The Government’s decision to allow public worship to continue even under the current ‘lockdown’ caught me so much by surprise that, reading the details on Monday night only from the BBC website, I changed the church website to inform the public that services were suspended only to have to change it back after finding the actual regulations. I am deeply torn. If I were responsible for public health policy, I would have closed places of worship in Tier 4; but equally I know that worship at Swanvale Halt is as safe as anything else you might choose to do, including doing your shopping at the cramped village supermarket or sending your children to school. More importantly, I've argued over and over again in all sorts of contexts that private judgement is hazardous. We take decisions, these sorts of decisions anyway, as a whole society so that they carry weight and authority. People are different, so their own individual decisions will inevitably lead them in awkwardly different directions.

Not only have I met the entire range of opinions from ‘churches should have been closed since March, it’s obvious’, through to ‘churches don’t have to close, so we shouldn’t, it’s obvious’, but I also find that people almost universally find it very hard to distinguish between the risk for individuals in a particular setting, and wider considerations of public health. So I am sure that coming to worship at Swanvale Halt church carries a relatively low risk of infection, say, 1 in 300. Every time you attend, the risk is the same: it’s always 1 in 300. But add up a whole set of ‘attendance events’ over the course of a pandemic and it will be much higher. It’s like tossing a coin: every time, the chance of getting Heads is 50% (or as near to 50% as makes no odds), and always will be, but the chance of getting Tails at some stage in a long run of throws is much greater than that. Multiply the ‘attendance events’ across thousands of churches, perhaps, and someone is going to be infected, somewhere, sometime. It could be you. People in general seem to find that very hard to grasp: talk to them about it and they almost invariably gravitate back to the question of how safe it is to do this particular thing in this particular setting.

Not only did the Government throw the choice whether to stay open or close back to us, so did the hierarchy of the Church of England. The Church’s response to the lockdown announcement came from the Bishop of London, former Chief Nurse Sarah Mullaly: ‘the government has chosen to allow public worship to continue’, she said, a weird phrase which sort of implied that the bishops wanted to disassociate themselves from the decision without publicly dissenting from it, ‘but we understand any churches that decide to suspend it’. I was frankly furious at being put in this position. I’m not a virologist, and, going back to the previous paragraph, while I might be qualified to decide on the safety of the venue I’m responsible for, I am definitely not qualified to take decisions on matters of public health. That’s the government’s job, and at least the bishops could give me a steer.

It took a day before the bishops began writing to their clergy. ‘The government has calculated that only a tiny number of infections have occurred in worship settings’, +Andrew told us in an ad clerum. Other bishops were prepared to quote figures: 47 since the pandemic began, apparently. This at least drew a little of my anger as it demonstrated that there was evidence behind the decision, and someone was asking the question I wanted asked. But it didn’t resolve the matter. First, the figure of 47 is misleading as very few people know how they were infected; secondly, we don’t know how the new version of the virus changes things; and third, there’s still the public-health landscape to take into account.

I proposed – and the PCC accepted – that we should suspend public worship when local infection rates topped 500 per 100,000, and then resume when they fell below 300 for a fortnight. Then a church member pointed out that you can drill down to a lower level of data than the local authority here and that shows, in our area, that infections are considerably lower in Swanvale Halt’s immediate vicinity than elsewhere in the district. So I ended up defining a region of seven Middle-layer Super Output Areas (basically, postcode areas amended to net roughly 7000 souls each) based on Hornington, the local ‘catchment area’ that includes everyone who uses the supermarkets and other facilities in town. That’s our Valley of Decision.

Up the figures tick every day: we’re at 401 today, as opposed to 368 yesterday. We celebrated the Holy Epiphany today, but I suspect Sunday will be our last face-to-face worship for some time. 

A Final Word (for 2020)

At Lamford, they have shut up shop and resorted to online worship only. COVID case rates in that area are nearly twice what they are here, but the hair-raising reports of ambulance queues and escalating infections have made me, and not just me, wobble. Are our churches contributing to national disaster?

Swanvale Halt services are as COVID-compliant as they can be, even if I have to keep reminding people (including myself) not to have social conversations inside the church building, and opening the doors when helpful souls close them 'to keep the warmth in' when of course at the moment that isn't the only thing you keep in. But it's not just the safety of the event: the event is surrounded by ancillary risks, of people moving in and out of a vestry, handling things (not matter how careful they may be), and travelling to and from church. Multiply these risk-events by thousands of churches across the country, and there is almost bound to be some infection arising from them somewhere. If the focus is not on making discrete events tolerably safe, but reducing infection by reducing general interaction, you should shut up everything you can, and in Tier 4 there's precious little left to shut up except worship settings.

The trouble is that this is not a decision about the management of a particular church - as deciding you can't comply with the rules would be - but about public health. It is to say that the Government should be closing churches. If I were them I might well decide to do so, but I'm not. I'm not taking decisions about public health. In this blog I've stressed the vital importance of rule-based orders, societal norms and legal structures over individual preference over and over again: I feel deeply uncomfortable about making my own choices on these matters based on what must surely be arbitrary and very personal factors.

People are different, and we need people to be different for society to change and progress. Human difference is an absolute social necessity. It’s also an uncomfortable necessity because the behaviour that arises from difference is not necessarily morally neutral and often even when it is it can be couched in moral terms. For instance, people are more or less risk-tolerant. Most of the time the effects are marginal, and we can debate whether mountain-climbers are responsible or whether it’s acceptable to drive faster than the speed limit safely, without much at stake.

These decisions can have radical consequences but they affect very few people at any one time. During an outbreak of infection, however, everyone is faced by the same situation, and thus everyone has a stake in each other’s behaviour. But this behaviour is still conditioned by personality more than pure reason. Because those differences remain, what may seem to one person to be a rational response to risk appears reckless to another. This is why relying on ‘common sense’ to guide behaviour is problematic: what appears to be ‘common sense’ differs from one person to another, sometimes quite radically. Ultimately there is little that is ‘common’. We end up justifying our own behaviour and by implication criticising the next person’s when, in rational terms, there’s little to choose between them.

This is why, in the current circumstances, we absolutely must set, and stick by, common rules and standards, which means they are settled by Government. Today the Government kept the Tier 4 rules as they are, and the Bishop told me that he couldn't give any positive direction as that would mean being out of step with other dioceses. So I will keep the church open for those that want to use it.

Although I am sort-of off work, we were open today for a quiet midweek mass. At first the readings (1John 2.12-17 and Luke 2.36-40) befuddled me but then I remembered Fr Montgomery-Wright and his description of how the Prayer at the Foot of the Altar, introibo ad altarem Dei, helped him enter into a place where age seemed immaterial, where youth was eternally renewed by the Spirit. So I found myself saying:

1. Here is this character Quintin Montgomery-Wright and what he said.

2. Here is what St John said. Why is he addressing these three groups within the Christian community ('children', 'fathers', 'young people') and what does it say to those of us who are none of them?

3. In fact seen in the eyes of God we are all of them, spiritually, and at different times. However old we might feel, he renews our youth. That's part of what it means, as John says, not to be attached to the world, but to the Spirit.

4. Anna the prophetess discovers the fulfilment of her life right at the end of it, when the longed-for Messiah comes to the Temple and she greets him. God still has work for us all as he renews us day by day!

So that is my last homily for this year, but not, apparently, my last at Swanvale Halt for a while. And, just to round things off, the mower is now working:

PS. However there is also the possibility that the Government is actually giving no thought to this specific matter at all, and the bishops are not wanting to give any lead because that would be to criticise the Government in turn. In which case, the balance of conflicting considerations becomes different.

"Bishop Apologises for Accidentally Voting the Right Way"

The figures from the General Synod's vote on the bishops' report yesterday were as follows (just for those not versed in the ways of Anglican decision-making, the Synod votes by 'houses' - bishops, clergy, and laypeople):

House of Clergy: 93 for, 100 against, 2 abstentions.
House of Laity: 106 for, 83 against, 4 abstentions.
House of Bishops: 43 for, 1 against.

The one errant member of the episcopal bench was the very middle-of-the-road figure of the Bishop of Coventry. Now, it might not unfairly be commented that the Rt Revd Christopher Cocksworth not only is unaccustomed to rocking the boat, he may not be completely confident of where the boat is. It turned out that he'd pressed the wrong button when he was voting. It could happen to anyone, but let's hope a similar imprecision doesn't afflict President Trump regarding a different button which is never far away from him.

Again, for those not familiar with these things, even though the Houses of Bishops and Laity voted in favour of the report, it fails because the House of Clergy voted against it: all three have to be in agreement, on some matters with a two-thirds majority in each. I wonder whether ordained people in the Synod voted against the report more strongly because the existing practice, which it endorses, affects them more than the laity. The report justifies barring homosexual clergy from marrying (even though they do, and nothing happens to them) and prying into the sexual habits of ordinands on the grounds that clergy have an 'exemplary' role and therefore different standards of behaviour are expected of them than laypeople. I think this is ludicrous. The moral standards expected of laypeople and clergy are surely exactly the same. It makes no sense whatever to suggest that something which is right for a layperson to do is wrong for an ordained one. The difference is the sacramental nature of the ordained life: the ordained person has promised to try to live by certain standards, whereas the layperson hasn't.

The vote clearly shows how the Church of England - or at least those it elects as its representatives to Synod - is still divided about this, apparently roughly evenly. It may not be as simple as that, though. Some of those who voted to 'take note' of the report may not be opponents of further advances in the position of homosexual people in the Church, but rather supporters who felt that this was the best they could get at the moment (I might have felt like that). Some of those who voted not to 'take note' of it may not be supporters of greater rights for same-sex Christians, but rather those who are dissatisfied even with the limited concessions it makes. 

'We haven't coalesced around an end point', said the Bishop of Willesden after the vote, 'we haven't even begun to find a place where we can coalesce ... We don't know the next stage, nor when or whether we can bring another report to Synod.' Such indeterminacy will make the Bench of Bishops extremely uncomfortable, but at least this result shows them the direction they should be going in. 

Conflict of Interest

The Swanvale Halt Mothers’ Union branch is celebrating its 125^th anniversary this year, but is not in a flourishing state, finding it hard to maintain its meetings and fill its committee. The Branch holds a couple of meetings through the month. About 18 months ago they agreed to adopt the midweek mass after their Prayer Group meeting as their ‘corporate communion’, and get together for coffee afterwards, with the hope that that gathering might grow into a bigger one to which a speaker might come every now and again. That hasn’t happened, so the members present have some tea and biscuits in the church hall and then go home within the hour.

Now a local theatre group wants to make a long-term booking on one afternoon a week that would bring the church £3000 per year in hiring fees. One week per month that potential booking would clash with the MU - who could move to the back of the church itself to have tea (as we used to do in Goremead, where there was no church hall), but don’t want to. ‘If we have to move this meeting we’ll be made to move the other one’, the committee says.

Dispassionately viewed there is no contest between income of great value to an organisation which finds it hard to pay its way on the one hand, and on the other half-a-dozen elderly ladies drinking tea in one place rather than another a few yards away. But the venerable MU feels raw and demoralised in Swanvale Halt, and even if it mainly functions now as a support group for its members rather than the crusading network it was intended to be, that’s a function that is at the centre of what the Church is called to be. Were I the chief executive of a company I’d have no compunction (or very little) about simply telling them to do what was in the best interests of the organisation as a whole – but I’m not, am I?

Drink Drink Drink

Here's an issue. Swanvale Halt church has for some years hosted a Music Club which organises concerts (usually in the folk-rock genre, not my sort of thing but others like it) in the church. They commonly draw audiences of a couple of hundred and are increasingly successful. Now when I came to the parish this was what it said in the Parish Profile, under the 'Community' heading:

Swanvale Halt Music Club: Organised by members of the Roman Catholic congregation, this is a monthly music club that hosts live concerts at the church featuring national and international artists.  Performances take place in the church with a Fair Trade cafe bar run in the Church Room.  The profits from the concerts are donated to the church.  

You'd have thought from that that the Music Club is a volunteer-organised, not-for-profit venture. It isn't. It's actually part of the business of a local music promoter who happens to be a member of the Roman Catholic congregation, and doesn't donate all its profits to the church at all - it's just that in its first couple of years the events weren't really making a profit. Now they are, as the events and the venue have become better known. It took me quite a while to work out what the real situation was, and I remember one member of the church in my first year here getting very angry when I referred to the Music Club as 'a community organisation'. I'd forgotten what the Profile had said until I looked it up again this morning. 

Almost every time we have a PCC meeting, or any other discussion that touches on the matter, there's a real feeling of resentment at our interactions with the Music Club. We don't get enough money from it, we're being exploited, we're bending over backwards to accommodate them, people say. I suspect that some of this is down to the confusion that you can see reflected in the Parish Profile; is the Music Club just a commercial booking like any other, or is it a commercial booking which happens to form an element in the life of the community that brings us benefits as a church and which we want to support by treating it differently?

Last night we had a lengthy PCC meeting which discussed the new draft hiring policy, drawn up by me as an attempt to use theological principles to guide our thinking over what sort of organisations or events we'll allow to use our facilities. Part of this is the question of the use of alcohol, and that touches on all the raw nerves relating to the Music Club. Drink is sold at the concerts, but originally the church stipulated that it was not to be taken into the church itself. The Music Club promoter argued very strongly that his customers couldn't understand this and strongly resented it, and said that he would arrange for plastic tumblers to be used for drinks and pay us extra per concert for cleaning, as this seemed to be what people were most concerned about. He pointed out that many other churches which host music events don't make this distinction. We eventually, but certainly not unanimously, agreed to allow his customers to take alcohol into the church space for a trial 3-month period. There weren't any obvious problems at the end of that, so the new arrangements carried on. 

However trying to work through the hiring policy last night threw up deeper ideological issues. Several PCC members feel very strongly that allowing alcohol which has been purchased to be brought into the church space is 'turning the church into a pub'. The trouble is that they can't really work out why they think this. In the hiring policy I tried to work through the matter and suggested that the sacramental space of the church should be considered separate from the hall adjoining, and that because of the problematic role alcohol plays in society and the idea of the church as a place of peace and serenity we shouldn't allow alcohol to be sold in the church space though we would allow it to be consumed. This doesn't seem to be enough for the PCC. However a couple of weeks ago a baptism family offered to bring some champagne for refreshments after the service: because the hall was out-of-action due to decorating we had the refreshments in the church itself. Everyone seemed OK with that. Furthermore, only one of the PCC is a teetotaler, and to make a big point out of alcohol as a church when you drink in your private life makes it pretty hard, it seems to me, to make the case to outsiders. 

This is the thing that worries me more than anything else. The concerts are arguably the most high-profile point at which the church interacts with non-churchy people, and what we decide has to make sense to those secular concertgoers in terms they can understand, or we risk simply being seen as bigots. I am not sure what I think: instinctively I don't have a problem with alcohol in the church space, although I can see how you could put together an argument against it, and that's what I seem to be doing. I find myself acting almost as a kind of ecclesiastical therapist, trying to help the church work out what they feel and why. 

Terra Infirma

I'm still catching up with posts here, but I leap ahead of myself a bit to think about yesterday's General Synod vote, very emphatically, to support the proposed legislation allowing women to be consecrated bishops in the Church of England. Because I know too many people on the anti side of the question, I don't regard the decision with any joy as such, but I am thoroughly relieved it's done. Once you ordain women as deacons and priests, to insist they can never occupy the episcopal order is silly, illogical and shameful, and sweeping that distinction away can do the Church nothing but good.

I find the arguments against ordaining women very weak indeed. The arguments from Scripture sound uncompromising, until you dig into all the things in Holy Writ even the soundest of Evangelicals among us do not adhere to, and all the interminable questions over which bits of what you say you regard as God's Word you nevertheless put to one side, and which you enshrine as essential, open up unconvincingly. What you are left with is a series of specious justifications for the distinctions you make, drawn not from Christ but from earthly prejudice. It would be better to say no more than 'We think God wants men to do this and women to do that, but we don't know why.' The answer to that question can only become clear by experience.

I opened the Bible as usual this morning, and at the moment I'm going through the Psalms. 'How pleasant it is when brothers dwell together in unity', Psalm 133 informed me. One astonishing aspect of yesterday's vote is that of a Church making sincere efforts to accommodate difference in an unprecedented way. You may argue that this is a foolhardy venture, but it is a dramatic and impressive one. Of course, this is what Anglicans have said they've been doing since the vote to ordain women in 1992, but they haven't really meant it; instead that decision was veiled in dishonesty all round, in that its proponents believed the antis would all change their minds, leave, or die, and the antis believed they could deflect the next step in the process, and neither side actually made any of this clear. Even before this particular issue became pressing, the Anglican Church's much-vaunted 'broadness' has always been a bit fake. Except on national bodies and committees, Anglo-Catholics, Liberals and Evangelicals have been able to exist within their own little bubbles, actually having a minimal amount to do with each other and being effectively able to ignore one another's existence, able to pretend that the Church is really them and other congregations like them. We can't pull off that trick any more, and it could be, could be, that we could actually begin learning from those who are different from us rather than merely pretending that that's what we do. But we'll have to be determined to do it. Can we?

Heartless

The former incumbent of our next-door parish once made the more sensitive members of Chapter gulp with a statement that 'a parish priest needs to know when to be a bastard'. I suppose the corollary of that is that they need to know when not to be, too.

I found myself in the bastard's position last week over Micky. Micky had taken up residence a couple of weeks before in the churchyard, initially with a bicycle, although that had mysteriously disappeared. He had a habit of grasping my hand in a vice-like grip which belied his appalling aroma, clouds of accompanying flies, and incomprehensible speech (which, however, I discovered could be effectively deciphered by various local residents). He lived in the big rhododendron bush and had been observed by the denizens of the old people's flats on the other side of the churchyard taking a dump there, which I'd already upbraided him for. I had swabbed down the benches in the churchyard after he'd wee-ed over them, and been very grateful for the fact that he never tried to sleep in the church itself. I was not sure quite where responsibility for the piles of lager cans lay between Micky or the other drinkers who were magnetically drawn to the Garden of Remembrance to accompany him. I was rather more sure of the complaints I had from people whose relatives' ashes were buried there.

On Sunday morning a week ago I came to church to take the 8am mass on a hot, bright day. Micky was rather harmlessly sat on a bench minding his own business. However on going home for breakfast I spotted him enthusiastically urinating up the wall of Boots the Chemist as families went by on their way to the Roman Catholic mass at 8.45. People live in the flats above that, I thought.
Coming down again for the 10am I found him lying in the church porch, his lager cans on the ground. I said it was time for him to move on. 'You look on me as a lower form of life' he said.

Now let us not be falsely sentimental, for Christ is the enemy of false sentiment. Micky's life - a life he doesn't want to leave as there is a very pleasant and well-resourced hostel four miles away he could go to if he wanted -  is just incompatible with the life my parishioners lead, and I can be of no good to him. But being bounced into being the representative of communal self-righteousness is not at all congenial.

Church Work Again

Two pictures of the inside of Swanvale Halt church this week. About half the final layer of the flooring has now been laid and it looks amazing! I had worried as the plywood layer had been down for a couple of weeks that it felt very hollow and stage-like as you walked across it; but the addition of the oak veneer has changed that completely and it feels and sounds very solid and compact underfoot. You'd never guess that it was, across most of the building, raised several inches above the level of the original floor beneath.

We had a bit of a panic before the first planks went down over which way the grain should run. In my

mind's eye I'd always envisaged the planking running east-to-west, directing the eye up the church to the altar, but I found the architect and main contractor had agreed exactly the opposite. Consultation with everyone available to be consulted that morning (church administrator, one of the wardens, a variety of ladies) and some experimentation led to the conclusion that they were probably right, so off the chaps went and began laying the planks.  I keep walking around inside the building and getting used to the incredible way it looks and feels.

Drat Already

On the way to the induction of the new Rector of Hornington (the people of Swanvale Halt are so delighted we got in before them) I learned to my distress more about the Paschal arrangements in the area. I'd heard that there was an 'early service' near a local convent, though I thought describing this as a 'sunrise service' when it takes place at 7am - not sunrise even in mid-March - was pushing it. At Swanvale Halt we then have a bog-standard communion at 8 and an 'Easter liturgy' at 10am. It's absurd bringing a lighted Paschal Candle into a church in the middle of the morning, and my predecessor tried to dress it up with having children carry in flowers and some sort of embroidery at the same time. Restoring the integrity of the Paschal Liturgy at its proper time and in its proper form has been one of my ambitions in my mind.

Now it was revealed to me that the 'sunrise service' is an ecumenical effort assembled by all the local churches. Of course being an ecumenical event it can include nothing more committed than hymns and prayers - all ecumenical services are nothing but hymns and prayers because anything else will annoy someone, and most of the time you're not completely safe even with them. The full Paschal Liturgy therefore cannot happen in any of our local churches, and it's just assumed that I will sign up to this. Breaking ranks will turn me into the anti-ecumenical monster, the big bad bigot who won't play the game. I could live with that, but I can't put our evangelically-minded curate in the position of having to pick loyalties. So the restoration will almost certainly have to wait.

Structural Conundra

The lady I spoke to in two long conversations last night was in a terrible state. Her beloved pet dog has a brain tumour, and she faced the decision of letting him die or having him treated, which, because she'd faffed about for a month, had to be taken now or never. Eventually my advice, in so far as it meant anything from someone who doesn't care much for animals and has an active antipathy to the canine, was to go for the treatment: I thought it would cause her less pain than allowing him to die and forever suffering from guilt.

So many of our moral decisions are structurally the same as this. I was reminded of a couple of weeks ago when I had to decide whether to go for a parish I'd been asked to look at, once I leave Lamford; I didn't want to, but wondered whether I ought to, and couldn't see a clear way forward. The elements are the same: instinct points in one direction, a sense of duty in another, advice is perhaps unanimous but not satisfying, and the one thing that would enable us to decide without any ambiguity or regret - knowing what's going to happen if we take one course of action or the other - is the one thing we have no access to. Those of us who are believers want God to tell us what he would like us to do, but he very seldom does, and in the end we have to risk those indeterminate futures, plump for one thing or the other, and deal with the consequences. Might be right, might be wrong, God help us. Quite literally. It will all be revealed in the end, but until then - we live with it.