It
was a Saturday evening in July, and a fine, warm one at that: a very
strange time for any parliament to be meeting.
Still, the atmosphere in
the chamber was surprisingly informal.
The General Synod, ruling body of the Church of England,
meets three times a year – twice in London and once, in midsummer, amid
the brutalist architecture of the University of York.
I am told the
Synod is generally far more casual than it used to be: “It’s all first
names now,” one old hand said. “That would have been unthinkable 20
years ago.”
The informality is particularly marked at York. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams,
was in his regalia, of course, and the Synod’s legal adviser was in
full wig and fig. But there was hardly a tie in the chamber, and an air
of slouchy relaxation.
The York session is a sort of summer camp for
church politicians: shared canteen meals with earnest conversation and
glasses of economy-class wine. “You’re lucky it’s not really hot,”
someone said. “Bishops in shorts! Not a pretty sight.”
This was not an especially controversial Synod.
The Church’s two
(literally) sexiest issues were both, very temporarily, off the agenda:
women bishops and gay priests.
The press officers seemed a bit surprised
that I had nothing better to do with my own Saturday night.
But the issue under discussion was far more important than either
controversy. Indeed, it was absolutely fundamental to the future of the
Church.
In 40 years, attendance at Church of England services has halved
and, according to the latest figures, is still falling: down to 1.13
million a week, barely 2 per cent of the population.
Among the young,
the drop is said to be 80 per cent.
“We are faced with a stark and urgent choice: do we spend the next
few years managing decline, or do we go for growth?” asked the
background paper accompanying the motion. Indeed, we all face a similar
dilemma individually. Do we surrender to the ageing process or try to
rejuvenate ourselves? We all know the answer we want, but how – in
heaven’s name – do we achieve that? The task for the Church seems every
bit as hopeless.
There was not much to argue about.
The motion called for a “national
mission action plan” to try to reverse the fall in attendance, and was
carried by 333 votes to nine.
The only argument against was that a
national plan was unnecessary and that the individual dioceses should
get on with the job.
National plans are a bit unAnglican. England has had more than 300
years of religious harmony because the Church’s faults are also its
virtues.
It is placid, adaptable, non-doctrinaire.
It fits the nation’s
self-image: we compromise and we muddle through.
The Church’s system of governance is chaotic: at local level, the
bishop is in charge of his diocese but has no power over his HQ, the
cathedral, run by the dean and chapter – a recipe for disaster in theory
and, sometimes, in practice.
There is frustration at national level
too.
“If you could change one thing about the church?” Rowan Williams
was asked in a recent interview. “Rethink the General Synod,” he replied
at once.
Indeed, the Synod – led by its lay members – has lately proved
unusually uppity.
At York, it rejected a scheme to bring in fixed (and
higher) charges for weddings and burials and also forced a retreat by
the nominated candidate for chairman of the business committee: the
Bishop of Dover, who was seen as too close to Canterbury, geographically
and otherwise.
The rebelliousness is thought to be partly linked to the
Church’s terrifying pensions deficit (an estimated £350m) and the sense that ordinary churchgoers will end up funding it.
Yet confrontation is usually averted by the Church’s essential good
nature.
To an extent, that comes with the territory: the Church can
hardly make even a visiting journalist feel unwelcome. And the habit
seems to have been enhanced by the character of the current archbishop.
His predecessors are always referred to by their surnames: Ramsey,
Coggan, Runcie, Carey, making them sound like the defensive line-up for a
lower-division football team.
This one is always “Rowan”.
That may be
the new informality.
It may be because most of us only know of one other
Rowan.
It may also reflect a genuine affection.
But is affection enough
to save the Church of England?
. . .
The
next day, the Third Sunday after Trinity, formality did reign.
The
archbishop led the way, dressed in a gorgeous green (“to mark the
season”, I was told) for the special Synod Eucharist at York Minster.
The building was packed; the choir was on top form.
Just before the
Sacrament, everyone recited the Nicene Creed: “We believe in one God ...
one Lord, Jesus Christ ... eternally begotten of the Father ...
incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary ... crucified ... on
the third day he rose again ... ascended into heaven and is seated at
the right hand of the Father ...”
Two days earlier, I had been in Durham Cathedral for choral evensong,
where the crowd was altogether smaller though the service – to my ear –
even lovelier, including Harold Darke’s arrangement of the Magnificat
in A Minor.
The Creed there was the Apostles’ Creed, from The Book of Common Prayer,
which is subtly different and less sanitised, adding the detail that
Jesus spent three days in Hell, as if on remand, before ascending to his
Father’s right hand.
Looking round the Minster, I wondered if the highly sophisticated and
intelligent people reciting the Creed really believed everything they
were saying.
Everyone was in full voice; I failed to spot anyone with
their fingers crossed.
But the answer seemed to be: not exactly.
“What we’re doing is identifying back to a distant past,” explained
Michael Sadgrove, the Dean of Durham.
“When we say he descended to Hell,
I think, if people identify with it at all, they’re identifying with a
tradition. The Latin for Nicene Creed is Symbolum Nicaenum. And I think these statements of faith have a symbolic function.
“I don’t think the way to understand them is to dissect them clause
by clause. The fundamental of Christian faith is that Jesus Christ is
our Lord and Christians will argue for ever about how you put boundaries
round that.”
It was a former bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, who most
clearly, and controversially, articulated the revisionist view of gospel
truth. His heirs are more circumspect but not necessarily in major
disagreement.
Not many now believe Heaven and Earth were created in six days. And,
in the words of Christina Rees, a lay member of the Archbishops’
Council: “There are very few Anglicans who believe that God zaps planet
Earth when there are a few too many gay orgies.”
Like all authority, the
Church maintained its grip by a mixture of promise and threat: do as we
tell you and go to Heaven; disobey and it’s Hell. When that fades, it
has a much harder job.
The world’s religions are in general turmoil. Catholicism was in
crisis across Europe – its teachings on birth control simply ignored –
even before the paedophilia scandals.
Diaspora Judaism is in demographic
meltdown as its sons marry out of the faith.
Islam is in the worst
crisis of all because adherents of different branches are killing each
other in the name of the deity, in a way that Christians gave up four
centuries ago.
Anglicanism’s problems are less dramatic but more
intractable.
There is, however, a peculiar delight to be had researching this
subject.
It seems to me no coincidence that so many English churchmen
enjoy cricket, another field of activity which offers the pleasures of
aesthetics, arcana and anomalies (not to mention an inscrutable umpire
to deliver a final and immutable verdict).
Anyone with a certain cast of
mind can easily become fixated on the exact difference between a canon
and a prebendary.
The English still love old churches and even the unbelievers will get
agitated if they are threatened.
(As Churchill reputedly said: “I’m not
a pillar of the Church, I’m a buttress. I support it from the
outside.”)
Cathedrals are especially popular, with good reason.
And
their services have actually become more popular in recent years – why
go to the local am-dram if you have the ecclesiastical equivalent of
West End theatre only a short drive away?
For instance, Durham Cathedral, perched defiantly on its hilltop, is
one of the outstanding buildings of the world – never mind England.
But,
unlike some of its southern equivalents, it does not attempt to charge
admission, even though it needs the money.
In part, that’s a matter of
principle, says the dean: “You can’t ever know why people are there.”
Even the sternest pay-up-or-elsers such as St Paul’s (£14.50) and Ely
(£6.50) try to avoid fleecing genuine worshippers.
But it’s also a question of demographics.
A high percentage of
visitors are local, and the cathedral is fearful of upsetting them.
Historically, the church here, ruled by Oxbridge men, has had a complex
relationship with the industrial working class who populated the area.
Many of them found Methodism more egalitarian. “You could go a long time
without hearing anything other than a local accent,” said Tom Thubron,
retired vicar of the old pit village of Wheatley Hill.
“Except from the
pulpit.”
Thubron
was an exception: a shipworker and merchant seaman who found his
vocation when he was 30.
He then spent 12 years as a missionary.
Before
he went, churchgoing was still part of a child’s routine, as was Sunday
school.
“That was partly because if you lived in a two-bedroom cottage
with a lot of kids it was the only time in the week mum and dad could go
to bed together in peace. But it was part of people’s lives. Fifty
years ago, there would be five charabancs for the annual Sunday school
treat. When I came back, in 1980, that had all gone. We might still get
30 for the Sunday service, but hardly any children.”
Across the diocese, some of today’s vicars have to work extra hard to
catch up.
Reverend Richard Deimel arrived last year from Warwickshire
to take over five parishes – a normal workload these days.
He has two
big advantages: firstly, his wife, Margaret, is also ordained and helps
out, unpaid; secondly, his home parish of Escomb has an astonishing
church: an almost perfect Saxon building where services have been held
since about 670 AD, perhaps 50 generations ago.
Contemplating that is
like contemplating the ineffability of God.
Even so, he has a tough job. All summer the Deimels have been holding
sessions called “Celtic Springs”: meditations, chanting, celebrations
to mark the ancient landmarks such as midsummer and Lammastide (August
1). It’s an attempt to touch feelings that predate the church in
potential worshippers the vicar describes as “post-church”.
He has a role in the diocese involving new spiritual movements (“like
what to do if someone turns up and says, ‘I’m a witch but want to come
to church’, which does happen”).
“People are put off by hierarchies,”
says the vicar.
“They want to be spiritual but not under authority. Our
job is to be in the community where they are, rather than getting them
to come to church.”
Just
down the road, Reverend Brenda Jones is trying to put that even more
spectacularly into practice at Woodhouse Close, a tough estate on the
edge of Bishop Auckland, said to have the second-highest teen pregnancy
rate in Europe.
Her church is not Saxon (it’s in the postwar Barbarian
style) but, in partnership with the Methodists, she immerses herself in
the problems of the area.
The church-run community centre
offers a credit union, thrift shop, furniture collection service, lunch
club, meals on wheels, baby and toddler groups, youth drama... “We’ve
been doing the Big Society for 50 years,” she says.
“The problem is that we have such a low economic base we can’t
generate the finance. We’ve got pockets of funding that will last for
about three years, but I don’t know where we go in the future.”
Is this
what the church ought to be doing?
“It’s seeing every person as a person
of value, and that’s what Christ taught.”
. . .
And so across the country – across the vast spectrum of Church of
England style, from incense-burning High to happy-clappy Low –
enthusiastic priests and congregations try to fulfil their own mission
action plans.
In the little Norman church at Farleigh, Surrey, there are
Sunday cream teas and then compline-by-candlelight with guest speakers.
In my own very rural part of Herefordshire our vicar, Nicholas Lowton,
borrowed a donkey for Palm Sunday.
A week later, Easter Day, he led his
congregation on the stiff climb up Black Hill, our own Mount of Olives,
and was rewarded with a turnout of 60.
Religion always works best when
it remembers it is first cousin to theatre.
The benchmark for this approach is the west London church of Holy Trinity, Brompton
(so famous it’s known as HTB), which is in a totally different league.
This is the birthplace of the Alpha courses in basic Christianity,
reputedly attended by two and a half million people in Britain alone
over the past two decades, and 15 million worldwide.
Alpha reaches way
beyond Anglicanism to places cream teas and donkeys cannot reach.
HTB operates with complete propriety inside the Church of England but
there is about it just the teeniest whiff of a cult.
There are worse
dating agencies for the young, lost and lonely in the city.
It offers
them fellowship and a degree of certitude. The rest of the Church looks
on with a mixture of admiration, jealousy and wariness.
“They do very
good work,” says one observer. “But they grip you a bit too firmly by
the hand, their teeth are a bit too white and their smile a bit too
wide.”
But certitude is what most of the Church of England so palpably
lacks.
The trumpet gives an uncertain sound.
And no one embodies the
tortured doubt more than its leader.
Rowan Williams can perhaps be seen
as an ecclesiastical Obama, a beacon of hope for the liberals who has
turned out to be a pragmatist/compromiser/prevaricator (delete to taste)
without ever quite losing the admiration of his original constituency.
‘You’re lucky it’s not really hot,’ someone said. ‘Bishops in shorts! Not a pretty sight’
Nearly
20 years after its first women priests, the Church of England is
inching towards its first women bishops.
The crucial vote is due at the
2012 York Synod.
The ginger group Reform (inappropriately named, say its
opponents) still talks about “the divine order of male headship”, but
the argument is now about the terms of surrender and whether the
arrangements made to pacify the refuseniks will stop them marching off
towards Rome.
Christina Rees (who is, understandably, pro-women bishops) conducts a
sort of Punch and Judy show on platforms with a leading opponent,
Prebendary David Houlding: “He’s a friend of mine,” she said. “He’s
stayed in my house. We often have the same views.”
But not on this.
“There’s nothing in scripture that supports women bishops, rather the
opposite,” Houlding insists to me. “Jesus had a radically different
view of women compared to the society around him. But he did not choose
them to be his apostles.”
“But everything’s changed,” I protest.
“So what? This is not about the place of women in society. It’s about how Jesus shaped his church.”
“We cannot put ourselves into the mindset of first-century
Palestine,” responds Rees. And she refers me to the 16th-century debate
that convulsed the church in Germany: “Are women human?”
But the issue that really convulses the modern church, almost
obsesses it, is that of homosexuality.
It isn’t a secret that a lot of
the clergy are gay: Stephen Bates, in his book A Church at War
, guesstimated the figure, in cities anyway, at 20 to 25 per cent.
The race has been on to see who would become a bishop first: a woman or
an openly gay man.
Uneasiness about homosexuality, however, unites some of the
conservatives, Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical, who might not agree on
much else, and attracts many moderates, too: “You can’t suggest that
anything goes,” one small-town vicar said to me. “There has to be a
line.”
This last group appears to include the archbishop, who has lately
tried to park the issue by saying that gay clergy are OK, if they
remain celibate.
Which is parking the issue not just on a double yellow
line, but in the fast lane of a motorway.
There’s bound to be a crash.
However, the real dilemma is that Anglicanism is not just about the
million or so English churchgoers or even the 20 million who call
themselves Church of England when pushed.
There are more than 85 million
Anglicans worldwide, and 20 million of them are in Nigeria, whose
leaders are appalled by tolerance of homosexuality.
There is a fairly easy way out: bash out some hypocritical English
compromise and let the Africans go hang.
But in his presidential address
to the Synod, Rowan Williams took wing when he talked about his visit
to the Congo, where he had spoken to young soldiers forced to commit
atrocities: “One after another, they kept saying, ‘The Church didn’t
abandon us,’” he reported.
And one can see that, although Anglicanism may touch barely one per
cent of the world, it is the lingering sense of universality that gives
it what bite and purpose and dynamism it still has.
Its problems need to
be resolved in a global context; in the words of Paul Handley, editor
of the Church Times, “You can’t have a Surrey solution”. The Church has
to be about improving life here on Earth, and not just a bet on the
existence of Heaven.
“If, at the end of my life,” said Tom Thubron at Wheatley Hill,
“there’s a kind of blind coming down and that’s all there is, I wouldn’t
have thought I’d have wasted my time. It isn’t that religion has made
me holy. But it’s kept me honest with myself. I think my influence has
been in trying to make the world better. And that in itself is
worthwhile.”