Autistic, ADHD, bi, enby, they/he, GenXer
All Saints, Margaret Street, is a Grade I listed Anglican church in London. The church was designed by the architect William Butterfield and built between 1850 and 1859. It has been hailed as Butterfield’s masterpiece and a pioneering building of the High Victorian Gothic style that would characterize British architecture from around 1850 to 1870. [1]
Photos: David Nicholls
Polychromatastic!
As early as 1635, the Congregational churches of New England had more female than male members. Our stereotypical image of the Puritan is a man; but the test of church membership tells us that most Puritans were women. One historian infers from the gender ratio that ‘many Puritans brought their wives along’; it would be statistically more correct to say that many Puritans led their husbands to America.
The continuing strength of popular protestantism is worth emphasizing. In the 1650s the English Army in occupation of Ireland and Scotland did its best to detach the Irish from the Church of Rome, the Scots from the Presbyterian Kirk. It was completely unsuccessful: the native churches were popular institutions, with deep roots. But the episcopal Church of England? When in 1640 it lost the support of the state, it collapsed without trace; its few defenders argued on social rather than religious or patriotic lines, in 1641 and in 1660. But though bishops disappeared unlamented, protestantism did not: through all the confusion and changes of the 1640s and 1650s anti-popery remained synonymous with patriotism. […] In moments of crisis—1640, 1688—this protestant solidarity proved an irresistible force.
SORRY!
THE LIFESTYLE YOU
ORDERED IS CURRENTLY
OUT OF STOCK.
Banksy, East India Dock Road, London, England, UK
CC: jordi.martorell
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?
What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.
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.
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.)
A few years ago, I heard an interview with the British theologian John Milbank, where he said, ‘I believe in all this fantastic stuff. I’m really bitterly opposed to… disenchantment in the modern churches, including I think among most modern evangelicals.’
He told a story about the Nottingham diocese in England, which he described as ‘a very evangelical diocese.’ They had received a request to participate in a radio show about angels. They surveyed their clergy, asking, ‘Is there anyone around who still believes in angels enough to talk about this?’
Milbank chastised the diocese saying, ‘Now in my view, this is scandalous. They shouldn’t even be ordained if they can’t give a cogent account of the angelic and its place in the divine economy.’
Finished #reading The Hanging Tree, by Ben Aaronovitch.
Sixth instalment in the Rivers of London series, this sees PC Peter Grant return to London (after Foxglove Summer’s foray into rural Hertfordshire). His ongoing investigation into the Faceless Man takes him into the world of the London super-rich, following the death of a teenage girl at a party in One Hyde Park.
This “grown-up-Harry-Potter-meets-police-procedural” series continues to be great fun. Looking forward to the next one, which I suspect will be the series finale.
Alice Thomas Ellis once said the easiest way to find the Catholic church in an English town you’ve never visited before is to stop the first person you meet and ask them to direct you to the ugliest building in town.
And behold…
Sadly not just Catholic churches, I think (at least in Aus).
The ‘life and peace’ goes a fair way toward redeeming this one though.
Oh, I should certainly have acknowledged that Lutherans in the UK are in no position to throw stones. Most of our church buildings belong to what I call “the breezeblock school of architecture”.
