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.

Any Future for the Church of England? Part II

In my previous blog, I talked about Andrew Brown and Linda Woodhead’s recent book, That was the Church, that was (which I’ll refer to as TWC): its gloomy portrait of the present state of the Church of England and its summary of the things which the church will have to consider seriously if there is to be any hope of recovery. Among these considerations were:

Congregations, as the paymasters, need to be given a full say in the running of the Church, and that members who hardly ever show up but value the Church’s services need to be respected and included.

The job of clergy needs to be radically rethought (because they are expected essentially to do everything), and many of their functions need to be transferred to, or shared with, lay people, while self-supporting clergy should become the norm.

The Church of England needs to recover its mixed nature, with mutual recognition of value between all forms of churchmanship, and once more be a church for the nation rather than for itself.

I have by me another book, which for reasons which will become apparent I will for the moment call the White Book (WB). This consists of a number of papers given at what sounds like a very stimulating and radical conference focused on the role of the laity. Coming from within the ranks of C of E members, rather than investigative journalists or experts on religious practice, WB is very different in scope, coverage, and feel from TWC, but its arguments are likewise expressed in pretty plain language, not theologese. What strikes me is that, despite its quite different origins and aims, WB shows so many points of agreement with TWC.

One very important overlap is the subject of the clericalization of the Church of England, about which several contributors to WB are emphatic. They make the same points as TWC about lay involvement having declined since the days when the parish vestry had local government responsibilities, so that the C of E has come to be regarded as just ‘provided’. Meanwhile, they point out, the clergy think and act as a professional group who have all the know-how while the laity are powerless.

They insist that there must no longer be a sense that the clergy person is the leader and the lay person the passive receiver and helper; both ought to be  working together and learning from each other; the laity should take their rightful place of leadership with and not below the clergy. They quote with approval another writer’s critical words: ‘The picture of the parish in action which the Anglican Church wishes to emphasize and perpetuate: a struggling vicar grappling with an impossible task, visiting, organizing, evangelizing, preaching, praying, teaching, celebrating, while his churchwardens, and those of the faithful who can be persuaded, help him.’ They also insist that the church should recognize the value of those who rarely appear in church, but whose commitment is expressed through their involvement in the ordinary world, and in fact recommend that such involvement should be rated above the kind of absorption in churchy activities which mark out the ‘clericalized’ lay person. One contributor even says: ‘It is a serious question for the lay person whether they can really exercise their discipleship primarily within the religious organization or not.’

As regards church partisanship, a contributor says that the church should not be a ‘place where religion of a certain brand brings people together at stated times for stated activities, but a brotherhood where everybody finds his or her place and his or her task and where the creative fact is the living Christ’—this is expressed in a more ‘religious’ way than TWC would put it, but places the same emphasis as it does on tolerance and the abandonment of infighting. And again: ‘A church which is not outward-looking has ceased to be a church as the Body of Christ and has become a club for the benefit of its members’.

In fact in some ways WB is a lot more radical in its critique of the C of E than TWC is. For example, one contributor considers (in defiance of the mantra that there is a shortage of clergy) that too many priests are ordained, and that a bad priest is worse than no priest (certainly TWC features some classic bad ones). Another says ‘There will need to be a radical reorientation of the way in which Church spends its time and a ruthless elimination of many activities, especially a radical re-examination of those which seek to concern themselves exclusively with membership of the church.’ And one contributor calls for a movement of lay people that is initiated and led by lay people without clergy sponsorship: ‘The next great transformation could be over the role of the laity, though I don’t say necessarily that it will be. I think it ought to be.’

There is a great deal of powerful language in WB about what the church ought to be like, moving inevitably into areas with which TWC doesn’t concern itself, while not of course dealing with the kind of scandalous activities which the other book exposes. But enough has been quoted here to give you a flavour.

Now what is remarkable is this. Here we have TWC in 2016 laying bare the rottenness of the C of E and giving a wake-up call—which may possibly be too late, who knows. And we have WB speaking out in similar, but, if anything, stronger terms; but WB was published in 1963. The conference it reports was held in 1962, at the instigation of J. A. T. Robinson, the notorious Bishop of Woolwich. (The book’s real name is engagingly un-PC: Layman’s Church.)

We should take a moment to reflect on this. Many of the fundamental weaknesses in the workings of the Church of England highlighted by Brown and Woodhead in 2016 had already had been set out, with suggested remedial action,  fifty-four years ago. A whole generation of Anglicans has gone from confirmation (I was confirmed in 1966) to retirement while virtually nothing has been done to address these problems. It seems that Bishop Robinson and his associates had minimal influence on the counsels of the church and their voices went unheard. What is so tragic is that they write, back in 1963, with an air of optimism and enthusiasm. Their language, despite some dated expressions, is fresh and agile, free from the managerial and theological cliches that populate the prose of today’s church people.

Any Future for the Church of England? Part I

Andrew Brown and Linda Woodhead’s recent book, That Was The Church That Was, makes pretty depressing reading for any committed member of the Church of England, and indeed for anyone who still cares about the Church. It has been criticized, and several inaccuracies pointed out. But for all that, the main message rings true, even for an ordinary reader ignorant of the inner machinations of leading Church bodies. Essentially, over the past thirty years, the Church of England has lost touch with the English people. And this has not been simply because people have drifted away of their own accord, but because the Church, by a series of follies, has alienated large numbers of people who had no particular quarrel with it before.

The book details in particular the years of ridiculous antics about women priests, women bishops, and homosexual clergy, which would be farcical if so much human cost were not involved. It details political manoeuvrings of the most scandalous kind carried on by various extremist parties, unworthy of any body claiming to be Christian. And it describes the leadership’s pathetic attempts to turn a body held together by consensus and idealism into a managerially run organization, which have so far (thankfully) been unsuccessful.

The most alarming thing to my mind that the book shows is the increasing clericalization of the Church of England. While most other bodies within our national life have steadily moved towards greater democracy and openness, embracing cooperation and collaboration between specialist organizers and involved supporters, the Church of England seems to have moved determinedly in the opposite direction.

Some relief comes in the final chapter (pp. 216ff.) when the authors discuss the courses of action which the Church of England might take in the future. There are two possibilities which they strongly deprecate. First, there is the option of becoming a ‘congregational’ rather than ‘societal’ church. This is the general direction in which some of the more extreme evangelical Anglican churches are moving. The C of E would become ‘one voluntary society among many’. It would concentrate on fostering growth in the ‘markets’ where it could succeed. Nonviable buildings could be abandoned to the care of the Church Commissioners. But, Brown and Woodhead suggest, the result would be a marginal denomination without any national anchor, which would effectively be disestablishment.

Second, there is the option of turning the C of E into a unitary organization with clearly defined worldly goals. Its leaders would be ‘clerical executives’ overseeing a disciplined corps of priests, the whole to be financed by laypeople. The result of this, they say, would be to alienate the laity, remove all the moral idealism which is such a mark of the Church, and close off the range of possibilities which are present within the amorphous, open-ended collection of bodies which make up the C of E at present.

For the C of E to have some kind of future recognizably like its past, the authors highlight three vital sets of considerations.

1. Congregations
1. Congregations matter. This is where the activists are; and they pay for the church
2. Congregations, despite paying the bills, at present have no power, except to leave (which is of course what is happening)
3. Congregations therefore must be given a stake; the laity should no longer be treated as just followers, supplying money with no choice in how or why it is used
4. Church decline results from young people not following their parents, so the question of how children become Christians needs to be taken seriously
5. ‘The vast life-giving penumbra of the Church’—who want its services only occasionally and do not need regular community experience—must once more be persuaded that the Church exists for them
2. Clergy
1. The present clergy role is impossible: the priest can no longer combine the roles of manager, leader, pastoral carer, and spiritual figure
2. The role needs to be split into different jobs
3. The managerial, organizational roles should be given to qualified, properly paid laity
4. Leadership should be exercised by ministry teams (on the tried and tested evangelical model) relying on genuine partnership between laity and clergy
5. Pastoral care, too, should probably be primarily carried out by laity, as it largely has been in many churches.
6. Clergy who support themselves through their own jobs must become the norm, rather than second-class citizens; this will save money and end difficulties for clergy families
7. Full-time paid clergy (who are expensive) should be treated as scarce resources for jobs only they can do
3. Ethos
1. The C of E must be a church for England, not for itself; it must ‘somehow recover the exuberant incoherence of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’
2. Partisanship must be laid aside; unless the sides in the current disagreements concede that the other is actually Christian ‘there will soon be no one but historians to care’
3. There should be a recovery of the best qualities that the traditional church parties had to offer—all helped to supply things that the world wanted, and a surviving church will need all of them; e.g.
1. Evangelicals: enthusiasm, flexibility, organizational pragmatism
2. Liberals: love of humanity, clever interest in the outside world
3. Anglo-Catholics: other-worldly spirituality
4. The Church is going to have to reconcile itself with its heritage, i.e. the vast stock of churches which local parishioners believe belong to them.