In the annual Good Friday procession when leaders of all three churches come together to march from Methodist Central Hall to Westminster Cathedral and then Westminster Abbey, the drum beat has sometimes seemed to signal the slow rhythm of the churches’ own inexorable march towards crucifixion on the mount modern secularism.
Yet there are signs of resurrection.
In their new book, That Was The Church That Was, published July 2016, the journalist Andrew Brown and sociology professor Linda Woodhead argue that the Church of England is lost because the England of which it was the Church has disappeared. ‘The Church of England, if it is to return to reality and survive, must somehow recover the exuberant incoherence of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,’ they write.
Emerging data suggests that while ‘exuberant incoherence’ might not be precisely the right term, something new is indeed occurring that suggests the Church might not be quite the doomed entity Brown and Woodhead suggest it is.
Read it all.
Ruth Gledhill– Signs of Resurrection amid the Church of England's Good Friday
In the annual Good Friday procession when leaders of all three churches come together to march from Methodist Central Hall to Westminster Cathedral and then Westminster Abbey, the drum beat has sometimes seemed to signal the slow rhythm of the churches’ own inexorable march towards crucifixion on the mount modern secularism.
Yet there are signs of resurrection.
In their new book, That Was The Church That Was, published July 2016, the journalist Andrew Brown and sociology professor Linda Woodhead argue that the Church of England is lost because the England of which it was the Church has disappeared. ‘The Church of England, if it is to return to reality and survive, must somehow recover the exuberant incoherence of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,’ they write.
Emerging data suggests that while ‘exuberant incoherence’ might not be precisely the right term, something new is indeed occurring that suggests the Church might not be quite the doomed entity Brown and Woodhead suggest it is.
Read it all.