The C of E—where now?

Further decline in church attendance at C of E churches is now confidently predicted for the foreseeable future. It’s pretty obvious that the Church can’t just carry on as it is. Or apply a few band-aids and tweaks that enable essentially the same to go on as before. It’s time to face up to a total rethink or become a dwindling marginal sect of no significance to the country whatever.

In my previous posts, I quoted John Robinson, the famous Bishop of Woolwich, with approval. That doesn’t mean that I think that every word he said was profitable or workable. His most notable (or notorious) book, Honest to God, relies on some seriously flawed philosophical assumptions, as even friendly critics pointed out. And parts of his theology really do seem (as I was taught to call it in my evangelical youth) rather woolly.

Embed from Getty Images

But he was right to ask challenging questions, he was right to be radical, and he was right to warn that a completely new approach was needed if the C of E was to have any significant future. And it seems as if nobody took any notice. The High Church went on with their rituals, the Evos went on bashing at the Bible, the Liberals went on being woolly and well-intentioned. All the vaunted schemes for reunion with other churches ran into the ground. The mischievous and stupid wars over women’s ordination and gay priests were zealously waged while the membership deserted the Church in droves.

One important thing that Robinson pointed out was that most contemporary people can’t make head or tail of religious language—and of course this doesn’t simply mean the words, it means the concepts that they conjure up in people’s heads. And if the church insists on the absolute truth of them, it simply invites ridicule. We bring our own beliefs into contempt. Robinson’s answer— ‘our image of God must go’, and all that—may not be the right one, but the ‘shout louder if they don’t listen’ approach is counterproductive and in fact destructive, since it alienates many who might have possessed a glimmer of sympathy.

A second thing already true in 1963 was that ordinary people showed a dislike of what is called ‘organized religion’; and they are far more averse to it in 2016. It really is no good saying ‘well that’s because the god of this world has blinded the eyes of the unbelievers’. Or ‘never mind, we’ll show them what a nice club the Church is to belong to.’ We need to try to understand what is meant by organized religion and why it turns them off so very decisively. At the same time we need to reckon with the enormous growth of Spirituality Without Religion. Rather than condemning it as ‘New Age’ or worse ‘Satanic’, we need to try to build bridges to it. This, I think is what Andrew Brown and Linda Woodhead are saying in That Was The Church That Was.

A third consideration, which links the aversion to religious language and the aversion to organized religion, is the hypocrisy that the mass of ordinary human beings detect among the religious. We don’t think we are hypocrites, and perhaps we aren’t in ultimate terms, but there is some way in which our profession and practice strike outsiders as out of sync. We need to get to the bottom of it.

One of the worst characteristics of Christians is protectiveness, or defensiveness. We are absolutely terrified of criticism, as if it might demolish our faith. We would rather that the others were wrong. We are, it seems, too timid to listen to, hear, or try to understand criticism. It’s as if we feel that God is vulnerable and we have to take care of him. We believe that our mission is to fix other people and other people have no business trying to fix us; after all, haven’t we been fixed by God already? This, at bottom, is arrogance. It seems odd to think that a weak and foolish minority movement such as the Church of England could be arrogant, but it is.

The arrogance of the C of E is centred in the clergy. I don’t mean that individual priests are arrogant; they are (mostly) self-effacing creatures, and this is (mostly) unwitting and innocent arrogance. The training of clergy imparts a professional esprit de corps and superiority complex which to them seems natural. Their unreflecting attitude is that they are the possessors of the knowledge and functions of the Christian church, and the laity are to be recipients or at best subordinate participants. Above all, lay initiative is not treated as a serious part of church life. It makes no difference which end of the spectrum of churchmanship you look. Evangelicals are theoretically enthusiastic about training the laity ‘for the work of the ministry’, but somehow the leading-strings are never quite cut: clerical oversight hovers in the background like an overanxious mother, alert for a step out of doctrinal line.

And because the clergy see themselves as the sole guardians of religious truth, they are also the main generators of sectarianism. Whichever branch of churchmanship they belong to, it is central to their self-conceived role that they must assertively uphold and defend that set of doctrines and practices. True, there are laity who share in this crusading tendency, but these are chiefly the ‘clericalized’ laity, the people whose main interest outside their job is the church. The rest of the laity may pay lipservice to the distinctive doctrines of the church they attend, but they don’t really invest heavily in them, and for the most part have only a superficial understanding of them. They attend the church because of the activities, the fellowship, and the style (rather than content) of the teaching.

The old joke ‘If we don’t hang together, we shall all hang separately’ applies grimly to the Church of England. If we cling to our sectarian shibboleths, Anglo-Catholic, liberal, or evangelical, we are doomed to extinction. We need each other. We have simply got to drop our fear of other forms of churchmanship and work together. It is the only way of survival, but that’s not the most important thing. It’s the only way to be the true Body of Christ, with all members accepting and supporting each other. It’s the only way to begin to manifest the real presence of Unity in Christ which our wilful sectarianism has attempted to destroy. And it’s the only way to show the outside world that there is some actuality in our tattered professions of faith.

The Church of England—what went wrong?

I have written two posts about the parlous state of the Church of England. The first, Any future for the Church of England, Part I, looked at the diagnosis given in the recent book That Was The Church That Was. It considered a set of recommendations made by the book’s authors that might help to put things right, if the will exists to do so. The second post, Any Future for the Church of England, Part II, told of a not dissimilar set of recommendations made, as long ago as 1962, by J. A. T. Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, and some associates, in their symposium Layman’s Church.

That Was The Church That Was begins its story in 1986, when the church was still being run by pipe-smoking liberal bishops with a laid-back sense of entitlement to lead. They were aware of an impending conflict with the new Thatcherite establishment, but nothing like ready enough for the Kulturkampf that was to follow over women priests and gay clergy. Just as England was waking up to the destruction of the post-war political consensus, so the Church was about to undergo the dissolution of that broad consensus across the spectrum of churchmanship that the Church of England was the church for the whole nation.

I am wondering what went wrong between 1962, when the Robinsonites were so optimistic and buoyant, and 1986, when Robert Runcie, in mid-career at Canterbury, was falling out with the Government over the Faith in the City report.

I suppose you could argue that Robinson and people like him were contributors to the disaster. Having posed constructive challenges to the Church to recover its true nature as a body of lay people, assisted and represented by clergy, why did Robinson have to go on and write Honest to God in 1963? Wasn’t that a really destructive blow to people’s faith and to the authority and unity of the Church?

I don’t think so. Some of the clerical establishment and their clericalized associates may have been upset by it. But lay Christians in their hundreds wrote to Robinson to thank him for recognizing and validating the doubts and difficulties that undermined their allegiance to the Church but which they had felt unable to admit to. Robinson said that the book was written in order to make the thinking of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Paul Tillich available to ordinary people. It was treating lay Christians as adults, able to think sensibly about theology, rather than as children whose thinking must be directed by the clergy. So Robinson’s book was quite in keeping with the principles of Layman’s Church: it crossed the so-called ‘clergy line’, putting power into the hands of the laity. Doubt about doctrine was already there; Robinson merely brought it into the open and allowed people to be ‘honest to God’.

Robinson died in 1983, just before the fateful year when That Was The Church That Was begins its story. Towards the end of his life, in 1977, a collection of his essays called On Being The Church In The World was reissued for the third time. These had been written in the 1950s and first published in 1960. In the Preface to the second edition, published in 1970, he quoted from the 1960 Preface, and surveyed what had happened in the intervening decade. This preface was reprinted in the 1977 edition with a further look backwards in the Preface and Epilogue. Piecing these fragments together we get some clues to the way things developed in those years before the 1980s.

The 1960 preface expresses both Robinson’s characteristic optimism and a significant warning in a pair of sentences:

The conception of ‘being the Church’, as opposed simply to ‘going to Church’, is one that has brought new vision and vitality to many a congregation in recent years. But the rallying cry ‘let the Church be the Church!’ can be perilous if it turns the Church in upon itself and allows it to forget that it exists always and only as an instrument of the Kingdom.

We’ll come back to this shortly.

In the 1970 preface Robinson can be almost heard gasping. He quotes himself predicting, in a 1959 Confirmation sermon, great things about to happen: ‘we may be at the turning of the tide’, but goes on

How wrong can one be? The tide was indeed imperceptibly on the turn. But 1960 was to represent the high-water mark not the low-water mark!

The C of E in the fifties had been putting its house in order: but, as he says

This can be an inward-looking preoccupation. It can allow us to evade the question whether what we live in is the right or relevant house or indeed whether we should be living in a house of our own at all. For if the first task of the Church is, like its Master, to be the servant of the world, then the first mark of a servant is that he lives in the house of another.

Then, in the Epilogue to the 1977 edition he looks back over twenty-five years and sees a very mixed picture; one or two points stand out.

Talking about the ‘new morality’ and the radical publications of the 1960s like Honest to God he says ‘the opportunity was largely lost. Overall there has been no “new reformation”.’ Surveying changes in patterns of ministry he says ‘I observe that the radicals of the ’60s have not become the leaders of the ’70s.’ But, he adds

The vital question, I believe, is whether this [change] will mean further clericalization of laity (male or female) or a declericalization of the priesthood of the whole people of God.

And in the Preface to this edition he speaks of ‘that travelling light with which the Church must be prepared to face the ’80s’.

Robinson’s first warning about inward-looking church activity would seem to me to have been prophetic. All branches of the church by concentrating mainly on their core values have effectively lost touch with the world they are meant to be part of. His cri de coeur about the failure of radicalism may be a clue to how and why this has happened. His second warning, about clericalization, has also come to pass with a vengeance. The most important change, namely the ordination of women (which he over-optimistically expected to happen by 1987), vital though it was, only served to clericalize more of the laity instead of declericalizing the Church. And ‘travelling light’, whatever exactly he meant by it, does not seem in any significant way to have been the flavour of the 1980s.

But he had already said it all in Honest to God, six paragraphs from the end (pp. 139–140).

Anything that helps to keep [the Church of England’s] frontiers open to the world as the Church of the nation should be strengthened and reformed: anything that turns it in upon itself as a religious organization or episcopalian sect I suspect and deplore. For the true radical is not the man [sic] who wants to root out the tares from the wheat so as to make the Church perfect: it is only too easy to reform the Church into a walled garden. The true radical is the man who continually subjects the Church to the judgement of the Kingdom, to the claims of God in the increasingly non-religious world which the Church exists to serve.

Certainly the first two of these three sentences chime very closely with the message of That Was The Church That Was.