At St. Swithuns Church in Retford, services have dropped to a maximum of 20 people, most of them retired.
St. Swithuns Team Rector Rev. Tony Walker said the biggest challenge is that people no longer feel a commitment to be a regular part of the church community.
“There are plenty of people who still see St. Swithuns as their church, but it’s their church that they don’t come to very often,” he said. “But they want it there for weddings and funerals and baptisms.”
[blockquote]But within a year, their new vicar Rev. Cris Rogers helped turn things around. The church has multiplied tenfold to around 70 members.
“The agenda was we’re going to… teach the Good News of what it’s like to be in a relationship with Him,” Rogers said.
“And we’re wanting to be a church that is an explosion of joy, an embodiment of the good news,” he said.
“I think it’s actually becoming part of the community has really helped,” one All Hallows member said. “Actually going to meet people in the surrounding area.”[/blockquote]
Isn’t that the truth? But this month has caused me to ask whether we are faced with a seemingly insurmountable job when our leaders have lost confidence in the Gospel?
Who in their right mind wants to get up and go to church on a Sunday morning to be told:
1. about Robin Hood taxes;
2. about Millenium Development Goals; or
3. That we can develop greater understanding of the nature of God and of what it means to dwell with and in him by studying …. the Hindu scriptures.
We have no leadership at the top; so many of our top bishops have lost confidence in the Christian message, and in those circumstances, is it any wonder that so many parishes are struggling? If we have no Good News to impart, why should anyone bother to come?
Please pray for us that God will give our leaders the confidence back to believe in, or if they have never had it, revelation of the reliability and efficacy of, the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Ah, Pageantmaster, you speak an uncomfortable truth. The Anglican leadership in Britain (not all but the majority, I fear) have managed to do in less than a century what it took the Muslim Arab conquerors of Egypt and North Africa 600 years or more to do: to undermine and dissipate the somnolent faith of the people. Even when tolerably orthodox men like John Pritchard of Oxford become bishops, they soon become Establishment figures; notice how Pritchard bizzarely wants to REDUCE the number of churchgoers in church schools. What incense are these people breathing?
The Anglican leadership “at the top” is a largely self-selecting nomenklatura which is trying to maintain the status quo, but the problem in the UK doesn’t lie only there. It’s in the second-rate state education system that is the despair of the middle classes, in the cultural dominance in broadcasting of the secular-liberal BBC, and in the anti-Christian forces in the Labour Party and Liberal Party (with their own disproportionately strong gay sub-culture)
The All Hallows parish website is fascinating, with a semi-rap take on Revelations (‘I saw a new heaven and a new earth’) from the vicar, who I see is ordained to something new called pioneer ministry.
http://allhallowsbow.withtank.com/
In the 1920s and 1930s it was Anglo-Catholics who brought hope through Christian faith to the poorest and toughest areas of Britain. Today it is more likely to be a charismatic evangelical.
#3 Fr Tee
I believe All Hallows, Bow has a vicar and congregation planted by Holy Trinity Brompton last year, so your last para is sadly, from an Anglo-Catholic point of view, probably correct.