Reversing decline in the Church - Is it a matter of cash?

It is not clear yet whether we have seen the last of Downton Abbey. If the series is to end on a realistic note (and realism has not been all that much in evidence so far), the fictional house will presumably be sold off to the National Trust and begin its new life as a national treasure. It seems that the Church of England is beginning a similar process. Last week the Church Commissioners announced that it would be selling off £1 billion of its historic assets for the purpose of training 50% more clergy. An additional £2 million has also been pledged for the training of senior clergy in what are presumably specialist management skills.

Downton is wearing a bit thin, as invariably happens when social history is sentimentalised, even if done in the most aesthetically pleasing way. The problem facing the Church of England is that, like the Church in Wales where I come from, it too is wearing a bit thin. This is partly because it is unclear, from the way it presents itself, what it is supposed to mean for people. This is not helped by the fact that where it is not aesthetically pleasing it now borders on the downright ugly, with a band-stand occupying the focal point for worship and the God we would like to meet in his beauty and simplicity obscured by personalities or the drive to be relevant and busy. 

Jeremy Bolwell.
 Licensed for reuse under Creative Commons License

This being said, and on their own merits alone, tradition and the beauty of ancient buildings do 

not free us from ourselves, although cold but beautiful country churches are still pilgrimage points for many. Such places proffer silence, and silence allows prayer to take over. In the words of the Welsh poet, R.S. Thomas, it makes it possible for ‘the God to speak’. Paying people to maintain and look after these churches would be money well spent.

One of the reasons for the rapid decline of the institutional Church is that its preoccupation with failing attendance and associated financial concerns makes it increasingly difficult for any of us to hear God speaking. Added to this is the fact that the old clerical culture is at best sentimental and at worst full of malice and injustice. Taken together, these two negative aspects of the institutional Church's life have deprived it of spiritual oxygen, with the result that it has nothing to say. Most of the time it talks to itself. It does not speak to the people it exists to serve.

There is a world of difference between talking and speaking. The purpose of talking is to get people to listen to you with a view to persuading them to think as you do, and then hand you the power which you crave. This is what politicians are doing in the run-up to the May election. The purpose of speaking is to allow something precious and life giving to flow out of you into the hearts of those you are speaking to, so that they can know truth. To know truth is to know God in an intimate and life-giving way.

Speaking the truth is always costly because it requires sacrificial love on the part of the speaker. In other words, it requires that the speaker does not get in the way, or ‘mess with’ God’s unconditional love for his people. These are the people who the Church exists to serve. The institutional Church is in decline because it is either not helping people encounter God, by first hearing the truth in its own life, and  then speaking it, or because it is actively preventing them from doing so by failing to live it out in its relationships.

Easter is a good time for the Church to re-consider the problem of its declining numbers. Perhaps decline, as it is currently perceived, will be less of a problem if it is seen in a new and different light, the light of the Resurrection, the dawn light which suddenly, and yet in an almost imperceptible way, banishes the institutional Church’s spiritual darkness and the darkness of our society’s spiritually bereft existence. The institutional Church, with its competitive internal politics, its lack of vision and its failure to love and cherish those who serve it, including many of its own clergy, is perhaps not the Church for which Christ died and rose again. Perhaps that Church has  died and is already in the process of de-composing. The true Church lives on, on the edge of things, where people (some of them clergy) are quietly going about the business of the Kingdom and proclaiming the truth of God’s love by the way they live their lives and minister to God’s people.

Part of the Easter liturgy contains the phrase ‘let us keep the feast; Not with the old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. 1 Cor. 5:7. This is the challenge facing the institutional Church today.