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.