Further decline in church attendance at C of E churches is now confidently predicted for the foreseeable future. It’s pretty obvious that the Church can’t just carry on as it is. Or apply a few band-aids and tweaks that enable essentially the same to go on as before. It’s time to face up to a total rethink or become a dwindling marginal sect of no significance to the country whatever.
In my previous posts, I quoted John Robinson, the famous Bishop of Woolwich, with approval. That doesn’t mean that I think that every word he said was profitable or workable. His most notable (or notorious) book, Honest to God, relies on some seriously flawed philosophical assumptions, as even friendly critics pointed out. And parts of his theology really do seem (as I was taught to call it in my evangelical youth) rather woolly.
But he was right to ask challenging questions, he was right to be radical, and he was right to warn that a completely new approach was needed if the C of E was to have any significant future. And it seems as if nobody took any notice. The High Church went on with their rituals, the Evos went on bashing at the Bible, the Liberals went on being woolly and well-intentioned. All the vaunted schemes for reunion with other churches ran into the ground. The mischievous and stupid wars over women’s ordination and gay priests were zealously waged while the membership deserted the Church in droves.
One important thing that Robinson pointed out was that most contemporary people can’t make head or tail of religious language—and of course this doesn’t simply mean the words, it means the concepts that they conjure up in people’s heads. And if the church insists on the absolute truth of them, it simply invites ridicule. We bring our own beliefs into contempt. Robinson’s answer— ‘our image of God must go’, and all that—may not be the right one, but the ‘shout louder if they don’t listen’ approach is counterproductive and in fact destructive, since it alienates many who might have possessed a glimmer of sympathy.
A second thing already true in 1963 was that ordinary people showed a dislike of what is called ‘organized religion’; and they are far more averse to it in 2016. It really is no good saying ‘well that’s because the god of this world has blinded the eyes of the unbelievers’. Or ‘never mind, we’ll show them what a nice club the Church is to belong to.’ We need to try to understand what is meant by organized religion and why it turns them off so very decisively. At the same time we need to reckon with the enormous growth of Spirituality Without Religion. Rather than condemning it as ‘New Age’ or worse ‘Satanic’, we need to try to build bridges to it. This, I think is what Andrew Brown and Linda Woodhead are saying in That Was The Church That Was.
A third consideration, which links the aversion to religious language and the aversion to organized religion, is the hypocrisy that the mass of ordinary human beings detect among the religious. We don’t think we are hypocrites, and perhaps we aren’t in ultimate terms, but there is some way in which our profession and practice strike outsiders as out of sync. We need to get to the bottom of it.
One of the worst characteristics of Christians is protectiveness, or defensiveness. We are absolutely terrified of criticism, as if it might demolish our faith. We would rather that the others were wrong. We are, it seems, too timid to listen to, hear, or try to understand criticism. It’s as if we feel that God is vulnerable and we have to take care of him. We believe that our mission is to fix other people and other people have no business trying to fix us; after all, haven’t we been fixed by God already? This, at bottom, is arrogance. It seems odd to think that a weak and foolish minority movement such as the Church of England could be arrogant, but it is.
The arrogance of the C of E is centred in the clergy. I don’t mean that individual priests are arrogant; they are (mostly) self-effacing creatures, and this is (mostly) unwitting and innocent arrogance. The training of clergy imparts a professional esprit de corps and superiority complex which to them seems natural. Their unreflecting attitude is that they are the possessors of the knowledge and functions of the Christian church, and the laity are to be recipients or at best subordinate participants. Above all, lay initiative is not treated as a serious part of church life. It makes no difference which end of the spectrum of churchmanship you look. Evangelicals are theoretically enthusiastic about training the laity ‘for the work of the ministry’, but somehow the leading-strings are never quite cut: clerical oversight hovers in the background like an overanxious mother, alert for a step out of doctrinal line.
And because the clergy see themselves as the sole guardians of religious truth, they are also the main generators of sectarianism. Whichever branch of churchmanship they belong to, it is central to their self-conceived role that they must assertively uphold and defend that set of doctrines and practices. True, there are laity who share in this crusading tendency, but these are chiefly the ‘clericalized’ laity, the people whose main interest outside their job is the church. The rest of the laity may pay lipservice to the distinctive doctrines of the church they attend, but they don’t really invest heavily in them, and for the most part have only a superficial understanding of them. They attend the church because of the activities, the fellowship, and the style (rather than content) of the teaching.
The old joke ‘If we don’t hang together, we shall all hang separately’ applies grimly to the Church of England. If we cling to our sectarian shibboleths, Anglo-Catholic, liberal, or evangelical, we are doomed to extinction. We need each other. We have simply got to drop our fear of other forms of churchmanship and work together. It is the only way of survival, but that’s not the most important thing. It’s the only way to be the true Body of Christ, with all members accepting and supporting each other. It’s the only way to begin to manifest the real presence of Unity in Christ which our wilful sectarianism has attempted to destroy. And it’s the only way to show the outside world that there is some actuality in our tattered professions of faith.
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