(Some earlier information on this may be found here).
The Archbishop used last night’s talk to highlight what the rural Church represents in today’s modern society.
He said: “The rural Church is a reminder of what the human experience is like in this place, in this time.
“The community is not just the people who are there at any given moment. Who you are is bound up by far more than you can see and even imagine. History, death, belonging; great truths of humanity which are encoded in this building.”
The Archbishop also took a swipe at the modern preoccupation with online social networking sites like Facebook.
He said: “There are people who believe their real person is what they concentrate on creating on the internet. There are some really central questions there that we are not considering enough.”
Having spent nearly all of my adult life in quite rural areas, I believe the only long-term sustainable gospel presence in these areas is monastic in some form. Most rural churches quite simply do not have — and never again will have — the critical mass to cover their overhead and do any thing of value.
Rural counties in America have been depopulating for four generations. That particular trend should be expected to continue indefinitely.
Informal home churches in rural areas are definitely increasing in the Kansas – Missouri region, though I would not extrapolate that trend elsewhere, owing to complete lack of knowledge.
Too many rural vicars are getting little done because they are stretched too thinly racing between as many as six different churches each with less than ten worshippers. It is nigh time they bit the bullet, closed five, invested in transport (a minibus with volunteer drivers for elderly etc) and gathered a larger presence under one roof. It would then have the critical mass to do more than say evensong with damp copies of the BCP and keep the roof together.
The objection is always that people would not go. Well they drive to supermarkets these days and if they will not drive a few miles for Mass- or prefer one ancient building to another- what value the faith?
The photo appearing in the article may or may not truly represent the demographic make-up of this parish. If it does then they are mostly elderly and the average attendance is about a dozen. They may or may not have a full-time rector or may be served by a team of clergy who serve several such rural parishes. The article goes on to say that they are closing for eight months, during which they will spend one hundred thousand pounds to renovate the Church’s Victorian ceiling. I support the maintenance of old churches, but isn’t this a wee bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?
What he has said about facebook is on target. There are now far too many people who think of the real as the distant and secondary and who are unawake to the near and primary. Larry