ABC: I remember people sometimes say about the Church, especially the Church of England. I remember one of my students saying, It’s still a place where you put the stuff that won’t go anywhere else. And I find that quite a moving definition of the Church because it suggests our society still has a great deal of belief, hope, need, confusion, which a lot of our social life simply does not give any vehicles for dealing with. It’s got to go somewhere. And I don’t think that’s dead yet.
IH: What strikes me is that we have quite a conspicuous secular drive at the moment. We also have a fundamental drive. So people are driven to be believing in absolutely everything, or nothing at all and being fiercely proud of it. My entire relationship with the Church of England was based is that it didn’t question too closely what I believed in. I was told by someone I was in a long tradition of CofE agnosticism, which is basically the old Flanders and Swann joke: Religion? Don’t know. I’ll put you down as CofE. And I wonder if the Church is not making it clear enough that it is still there in the middle, that you don’t have to be an American evangelical, you do not have to be a Muslim fundamentalist, you do not have to be Richard Dawkins. At the Edinburgh festival this year there were at least four comedians selling out on the basis that Genesis isn’t literal. Extraordinary perception by these young men. They’ve caught up with 19th century theology. That does suggest the Church is slightly failing to say, do you know anything about us any more? It isn’t that.
ABC: That is one of the anxieties that many people in the Church feel, that a period of cultural legacy of knowing a bit about it has vanished and that therefore what people know is what high-profile headlines say and what the conflicts communicate. This is where the Church of England in particular does have quite a complicated balancing act. The Church as someone said decades ago, has to be something, has to be itself. The question is how to be itself with integrity in a way that doesn’t barricade the doors. I think understanding that the language of our theology the language of our hymns the symbolism of our worship is invitation before it’s anything else, it’s not a set of conditions before you come through the door… In the world of the imagination, of the arts, time was when the Christian faith was bound in with a lot of that. You couldn’t really say that now, easily. And yet that’s where a lot of people find the depth they want, the dimensionality they want.’
To read this interview is to understand everything that is wrong with the CoE, and the ACB, and the AC bureaucracy. Especially this:
[blockquote] It’s still a place where you put the stuff that won’t go anywhere else. And I find that quite a moving definition of the Church because it suggests our society still has a great deal of belief, hope, need, confusion, which a lot of our social life simply does not give any vehicles for dealing with.[/blockquote]
In other words, God exists in the interstitials of life. He meets a particlar subset of needs. He is a useful tool for managing life. But God is primary, not secondary. Our faith is supposed to be the place we put the first things in our life. But who would get this from the timidity on display in this interview? Heaven forfend that we should ever speak a message that might offend the current zeitgeist. Far better to crouch in fear, and shape our castrated message to the culture.
Perhaps the good Archbishop should learn from the only expression of courage in the article:
[blockquote]IH: Sometimes in the media it would be good to remind ourselves that quite a lot of the time, people don’t care. Those of us who write columns or appear on television, people are quite likely to say, Oh no I didn’t watch it, or, I wrap my fish and chips in that. And they are right. There is an imbalance. I remember being a friend of mine who was a priest, I said, You don’t seem to have got this message into the media. He said I’m not trying to convert the media, you lot are irredeemable. He said I’m trying to convert the people in my parish. His point was, everyone else has shipped out of these areas. The State’s not here any more, the social workers barely ship in. There’s me. And I’m doing what I can. You’re not interested in that, but it doesn’t matter that you’re not interested. Which is quite a good point.[/blockquote]
Exactly so. “I don’t care what you think.” The ABC should try using those words.
carl
The thing is, for what the ABC to be hinting at (that if journalists are correct that the church is irrelevant, why are they bothering to report it) to be true, there needs to be something deeper going on in the church than what the journalists are reporting, right? Is there? No. Basically, my thought is that if all people know about the Church of England and/or Christianity is what journalists say, whose fault is that, really? Shouldn’t there be thousands upon thousands (and if we are to believe the church stats, even millions) who could testify through personal experience that they have found the “depth” and “dimensionality” the church (theoretically) has to offer? The church is responsible for its own demise and for the perception that it lacks relevance in modern society. Not journalists. In my opinion, the Archbishop’s responses here are shallow and self-serving. No extra points for cool and nuanced thinking. Get on the forefront with the Truth of the Gospel and stop making excuses.
I don’t know: I wonder if a part of the malaise in the C of E is due to the fact that all these people overseas – you in America, and others in Nigeria, particularly, are over-obsessed with it. Surely, the leaders of the Church of England need first and foremost to address contemporary English society and its needs, which are different from those of America or Nigeria. Perhaps all the over-analysis of every word which droppeth from an English bishop by sites such as this one only serves to skew the course the English Church must chart if it is ever to reconnect with English society?
The purpose of the Church is to make society relevant to Jesus, not to hack and split Christianity to become relevant to a culture with the attention span of a gnat.
Oh come now, FrMark, where’s the fun in that? Verily it gladdeneth the heart of most English bishops that any attention be paid to them; and peradventure it giveth I and thee something to do…
pageantmaster: it wasn’t the need for analysis I was questioning so much as whether every ecclesiastical action in England is best undertaken with an eye on international reaction, especially as so few English people beyond a few angry old men have any interest at all in the institution now. Is the C of E running a show exclusively for the interest of the non-English? It sometimes seems that way in the current controversies. If the C of E were really interested in connecting with English society, no intelligent leaders would have allowed it to develop its current highly homophobic public profile, for example: it is socially suicidal for the institution to behave as it is doing in England at the moment.
6. Fr Mark wrote:
[blockquote] If the C of E were really interested in connecting with English society, no intelligent leaders would have allowed it to develop its current highly homophobic public profile, for example: it is socially suicidal for the institution to behave as it is doing in England at the moment. [/blockquote]
Yes, and we all know that the purpose of the church is to conform itself to the desires of the current age. Whom do we serve? God or man?
carl
The Church may be irrelevent but the gospel is not. Look at Holy Trinity Brompton and other churches which are growing. And learn, if you can.
Pb: conservtive Evangelicals in the UK having been talking up their success and confidently predicting great breakthroughs for the whole of my life so far. It hasn’t happened; they are not all successful. All the studies done on this show that they are not breaking through into the unchurched in any significant numbers at all (unlike, for example the Anglo-Catholic Ritualists a century ago). HTB is the least typical of any church you could cite: ministry to the upper class and wannabe upper class in South Ken (and Sth Ken wannabes) is not a good model to extrapolate anything from.
So please do not patronise me with “learn, if you can.”
And Carl, how familiar are you with how the average Brit looks at the C of E? It’s not a flattering view, I can assure you.
[blockquote] [H]ow familiar are you with how the average Brit looks at the C of E? It’s not a flattering view, I can assure you. [/blockquote]
The average Brit is an unbeliever. Why should I expect an unbeliever to have a positive view of a church? And why should I rejoice if an unbeliever does have a positive view of the church? It would mean the church had warped its message to tickle the ears of an unbeliever. The Gospel is [i]offensive[/i] to those who are perishing. They aren’t going to like it, and it is foolish to expect otherwise.
carl
Carl: “Why should I expect an unbeliever to have a positive view of a church? … The Gospel is offensive to those who are perishing”
But this is the shock-Jock school of Christianity as a licence to be offensive. That’s not a tactic likely to succeed in Europe. Pope John Paul adopted it as his favoured means of discourse, with disastrous results for the further alienation of Europeans from his church during his reign; and the current Pope, having watched his predecessor at close quarters, and dealt with the fall-out, has modified and softened his own approach considerably.
Churches, at the end of the day, need to see themselves as serving their society. Being at constant war with someone endlessly pointing out thair faults, while it may appeal to old school Puritans, is not a way to endear oneself to anyone. I think the challenge of having to work hard to be attractive to people is evidently something the churches are finding difficult in the new Europe, where the churches’ traditional exercise of social power is increasingly (and rightly, in my view) opposed.