Autistic, ADHD, bi, enby, they/he, GenXer
O Lord, who through spiritual discipline strengthened your servant Monica to persevere in offering her love and prayers and tears for the conversion of her husband and of Augustine their son: Deepen our devotion, we pray, and use us in accordance with your will to bring others, even our own kindred, to acknowledge Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Painting by Rain Ririn
The Church would look a lot more attractive if it was not continually yearning, like a neglected lover, over those who stay away. It could try celebrating the clientele it has got.
Finished #reading That Was The Church That Was: How the Church of England Lost the English People, by Andrew Brown and Linda Woodhead.
This book tells the story of how the Church of England moved, in the space of three decades, from a position close to the heart of national life to an increasingly precarious existence on the margins. it’s a mixture of pacy, racy, gossipy journalistic history (Brown) and sociological analysis (Woodhead). It’s also the second attempt at publishing the volume, after review copies of the first edition were withdrawn following unspecified legal threats.
It’s not taking anything away from Brown’s skills as a writer (and his eye for a story) to observe that the gossipy history could almost write itself: the ructions over the ordination of women and over homosexuality; the cackhanded managerialism of George Carey (”He genuinely believed that fiddling with a few levers in a simulated cockpit was going to pull the Church out of its tailspin”); the catastrophic failure of Rowan Williams’ archbishopric (distressing to read for those of us who maintain an affectionate respect for Williams), as the Jeffrey John affair destroyed his moral authority (”this was Rowan, saint and scholar. He couldn’t be a shit – and yet he had been one”) and then his musings on sharia law destroyed his credibility with the wider public; the disintegration of the Anglican Communion amid a chaos of gay exorcisms and mutual excommunications.
The sociology has to be picked out from among the more livelier revelations, but is in many ways equally interesting. Based on Woodhead’s previous research, the authors have two main arguments. First is that the Church of England has been moving from being a “societal” church (to which people in wider society feel attached with varying degrees of strength and clarity) to being a “congregational” one (in which self-consciously Christian worshippers define themselves against the surrounding culture). The second is that, in the process, the Church has come unmoored from a changing English culture, and in particular has alienated the women whose unpaid and unrecognised work provided its backbone for generations. The women who would once have been running parish life can now be found running the grassroots “spirituality” activities that Woodhead identified in research carried out in Kendal in the early 2000s.
There is much that is stimulating and thought-provoking in this book, and the writers certainly land some well-aimed blows. There is also, alas, much that is tendentious, reflecting the authors’ own prejudices. They clearly loathe evangelicalism, devoting most of a chapter to attacking John Stott, whose adherence to the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement is ascribed to spending his adolescence “lonely, beaten, and constantly preached at from the Prayer Book.” (Contrary to what early reviews suggested, though, the book does not claim that Stott was the author of the tortured, celibate gay evangelical memoir published in 1970 under the pseudonym “Alex Davidson”. Maybe this is a change from the review copies, though it’s hard to see why, given that Stott died in 2011 and hence cannot be libelled. The claim seems unconvincing in any case.)
Similarly, they can’t even bring themselves to name N.T. Wright, let alone to acknowledge that he might have an international scholarly reputation rather than just banging on “self-importantly” about St Paul to uncomfortable and incredulous audiences. And they are just plain nasty about David Watson, leading figure in the 1970s Anglican charismatic movement, who prayed to be healed of liver cancer: “But he died anyway.”
All this rather undermines their case. They criticise leaders of the various parties in the Church of England for having “succumbed to the temptation of thinking that their brand of churchmanship held the solution, if only it could be imposed on the others” – but then they set out to do exactly the same thing, with their clear belief that the C of E would have been just fine if it had just turned itself into a liberal, “societal” church of undemanding theology and ethics, in the manner of the Scandinavian state churches which Brown and Woodhead clearly admire.
That said, they do see some grounds for hope in the election of Justin Welby to archbishop of Canterbury. While Welby’s theology and churchmanship may not be to their taste, they credit him with at least understanding the nature of the problems the church faces. They suggest that the best hope for the Church of England’s future lies in handing over management to “well-qualified and properly paid laity,” freeing up the diminishing number of full-time paid clergy to “be treated as scarce resources for jobs only they can do.” They also argue that both sides in the divisions of sexuality and feminism need to learn to coexist with the other (to “concede – or, better, freely grant – that the other is actually Christian”) – which is easier said than done, for both sides.
In short, this book does a good job of providing a readable account of the church’s failings over the past thirty years, and of identifying how deep a crisis it faces over its future. It also, at times, leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. There are, perhaps, better and more charitable books to be written which develop further the ways in which the authors sketch out a viable future for the Church of England. As they observe in passing towards the end:
all the traditional church parties at their best had something which a surviving church will need. The enthusiasm, flexibility and organizational pragmatism of the evangelicals, the love of humanity and the clever interest in the outside world of the liberals, and the slightly unnerving because other-worldly spirituality of the Anglo-Catholics: all these helped the Church engage with the world, and supply things that the world, and not just the most committed churchgoers and clergy, wanted, and recognized that they needed. (pp.221f.)
The ‘Great Ejection’ [of Puritan clergy] confirmed that England’s established church had become something new: Anglicanism, the largest of the new sects, albeit with a residual ambition to be a comprehensive national church. The resulting tug-of-war has persisted to the present. Is England’s established church the Church of England, an inclusive and rather shapeless church defined primarily by nationality? Or is it the Anglican Church, a more narrowly defined denomination with its own distinct identity?
Started #reading That Was The Church That Was: How the Church of England Lost the English People, by Andrew Brown and Linda Woodhead.
Started #reading History of the Moravian Church, by Joseph E. Hutton.
Hutton was minister of the Moravian congregation in Heckmondwike. I mention that solely to use the name Heckmondwike: classic West Riding place name. Close to Batley and Cleckheaton. :-)
St Bride’s RC church, East Kilbride, Scotland (via bestmodernchurches.org.uk)
The interior is quite something, too:
East Kilbride also has a Lutheran church. Not to everyone’s taste, but notable as the only non-Roman Catholic church designed by Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, the architects’ firm best known for St Peter’s Seminary.
The further that England drifted from the Church of England, the more it required a deliberate leap to move between them: not just a leap of faith, but one of social positioning as well. In 1986 it would have been – it was in fact – remarkable for a bishop to have had a conversion experience though, curiously, the two men most hated by the evangelical party, Habgood and Jenkins, had both had such experiences in their late teens. But even in those cases, what happened was an assent to something which had always seemed reasonable and potentially true, just not very urgent. Most bishops had simply grown up Christian. They didn’t need to be be converted any more than they needed to be told to drive on the left. By 2016 this was not true at all. Most bishops had had identifiable conversions. They had not grown up as Christians. This might be the result of a bias in the selection process towards evangelicals, and perhaps there was an element of that. But it also and more importantly reflected the way in which Christians generally were becoming more self-conscious about their beliefs and their identity, more at odds with the rest of England.
Misericord from the church in Les Andelys (which, sadly, was locked throughout my stay in Les Andelys last year).
From Wikipedia, via this Metafilter discussion on “mercy seats”.
Some other photos of this building on its website, including this vintage aerial shot:
And this shot of the interior:
The church was built in 1869, and replaced a chapel built in 1824 by followers of one Joseph Cooke, who was expelled from the Methodist church in 1806 over his heretical opinions – though it seems it was only after Cooke’s death in 1811 that his followers formally adopted the Unitarian (or “Arian”) faith. (src)
The congregation folded in 1987, though the “warden’s letter” written at the time of the church’s centenary makes it clear that decline was already well under way in the late 1960s:
The church building is now used for weddings and local functions.
I am neither a Unitarian nor the son of a Unitarian, but I still found this an interesting (and rather moving) snapshot from a world of prosperous north of England Non-conformism which my maternal grandparents (though themselves Anglicans) knew well, whose last embers could still be seen in my childhood, but which is now largely extinct.
Reblogging as it has been called to mind by my recent reading on Dissenting sects. (I’d misremembered it as a Muggletonian establishment rather than Unitarian, but by all accounts the Muggletonians wouldn’t have gone in for buildings like this at all…)
Two studies of St Monica (tapestry and oil painting) by John Nava.
