Dreaming Up a Church

At school, when it was too wet to play lacrosse (O happy day), we did country dancing in the gym. One of the dances involved going to the back of the line and partnering the last person on it, so that you would both eventually end up at the front. I think the dance was called ‘Strip the Willow’. Correct me if I’m wrong. But if I am right in my recollection of ‘Strip the Willow’, or even if I am confusing it with another dance, the basic pattern has stayed with me as a blue print for ecclesial life; how the Church could yet be, and how this new joyous way of being could liberate it into becoming the kind of Church which the Lord of the Dance might like to be a part of.

I think he probably is a part of it. It’s just that the Dance has moved on. Reels and country dances have a way of moving on by shifting the focus and altering the plane of action, so transforming the action itself. It is this shifting and re-focusing which the institutional Church needs to allow itself to do, if it is to keep dancing with its Lord, and if it is to survive at all. I say allow, because the movement is not a plan to be decided upon by those at the top and then enacted by those at the bottom as best they can. It is not a strategy for keeping going. It is the energy in which the Church should live and move, the energy which it breathes and then releases into the world. Or which it wilfully refuses to breathe because it is afraid of the risks entailed.

This is not as abstract as it sounds, any more than the Dance is itself an abstraction. Nevertheless, it does require some right side of the brain thinking, to acknowledge and borrow from a much more complex line of thought.[1] The Dance is a pattern, a collective creation, energised by the measure of its music which is its heart beat. The music is too fast, too compellingly joyous, to allow for strategy, for watching one’s back lest a fellow dancer fill our place unobserved. The Dance is not a competition in which one person or group feels threatened by another. Fear plays no part in it.

What makes the Dance a living Church, as opposed to a fearful and disconnected institution, is the will to love, at least for the duration of the Dance itself, in other words on this side of eternity. It moves in tandem with the changes, chances and inexplicable suffering (seemingly allowed by God) of this transient world. Given such a fluid, and at times frightening, situation, there is little time to do anything other than love. This is another skill which the institutional Church seems to be in danger of losing. The momentum of its collective inner life is slowing down because it has forgotten how to love. So it is losing the measure of the Dance.

Part of the problem, indeed most of the problem, is one of separation. Jesus, in Matthew’s Gospel puts it well ‘To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market places and calling to one another, “We played the flute for you and you did not dance; we wailed and you did not mourn”'. (Matt.11:16) One half of the dance, the clergy hierarchy (especially those at the top of the line), has become dislocated from the other, from the people who the clergy exist to serve, the people at the bottom of the line who are ‘playing’ and ‘mourning’. So it feels to those who are either at the bottom of the line or outside the Church altogether, that the clerical hierarchy is doing its own thing, its own private dance, one which is completely detached from the people, despite the fact that the people are the other partners in the Dance.

What practical solutions can we offer to save the Church’s true life in the Dance? We could begin, perhaps, by breaking the existing clerical caste system, which is still redolent of class and privilege, though not restricted to either, and which is currently stuck in a mould, or cast, of its own making.

The cast reveals striations of love which have become set in stony hearts. In order to break these hearts – and they do need to be broken, so that those called to be bishops, priests and deacons, can relearn to love their people, the people at the top end of the line need to link up and partner with those at the bottom. This is fundamental to the sacramental commission given to them. We love in and through our sacramental ministry, particularly in the celebration of the Eucharist which we take from the altar to the world.

In terms of ecclesial life, such a partnering would require two ‘givens’; the first that no ordained person should be doing a desk job and the second, that every ordained person should be mentored, or partnered, by a lay person. All clergy would be non-stipendiary. In regard to mentoring, we would begin by drawing on the skills, life experience and wisdom of older lay members of our churches, who might well be paid. These older members (aged at least 60, but preferably older) would mentor those clergy from whom current leadership expectations are the greatest; in other words, bishops, archdeacons, area deans and/or ministry area leaders. These expectations ought, one hopes, to diminish as the existing hierarchical structure is gradually dismantled. We could begin this dismantling process with all clergy being elected or sponsored by the members of their church (as happens already in some denominations) and bishops being elected for a fixed term by clergy.

But what, the reader is now probably asking, is to be done about the running, or management, of the fabric of the institution, its buildings, real estate and pension schemes, to name only a few? To which the answer might be, is it too hard to believe that there are not willing, and perfectly able, retired people who could do this (remunerated) work? Perhaps someone reading this post could make some practical suggestions in this area. Meanwhile, let’s dream of a Church which recognises and honours its Lord when He turns up unexpectedly, hoping to join in the Dance.[2]

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[1] I am indebted to Ian McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emmisary – The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press, London (2009)

[2] This post is a development of some of the ideas I shared in an interview with Mark Tully for the BBC’s Radio 4 ‘Something Understood’ July 16^th, 2017

Women bishops and the Church of England - from death to life

In the week that the arch-traditionalist Revd. Philip North refused Episcopal consecration from ‘tainted’ hands, including those of his own archbishop, we also see the Revd. Libby

Lane consecrated as the first woman bishop in the Church of England. ‘What a piece of work is man’ – forever trying to square the circle in order to keep the show on the road, if you will pardon the mixed metaphor.

The Church, in its effort to keep going in the face of tacit or open misogyny and homophobia, has become a squared circle and is in danger of grinding to a halt. Wanting to please everyone all of the time, in the interest of maintaining a spurious unity, leads to a standstill situation.  We are trying to keep going without first having done the hard work of reparation, the servicing of the Church which involves listening, hearing, understanding and loving one another unconditionally. This is what brings life and enables real unity and, later, forward movement.

However, there is a sense in which trying to please everyone all of the time does enable a little forward movement to begin. It does so when the desire and the collective will is for a shared life in God. This is not bland piety. It is the hard reality which faces us when we place our humanity ahead of our concerns for the institutional church or for the individual’s professional advancement in that institution. Our humanity consists in who we are as persons before God, and as we are known to one another.

As far as I know, Bishop Libby Lane was not a ‘key player’ in the inside deliberations of who would be the first woman bishop for the Church of England. She is, to many of us, an unknown, a King David figure. The young David was sought out and anointed while he was in the fields tending the sheep, over the heads of his elder brothers. Like David, she is a bit of a surprise.

Bishop Libby Lane’s consecration is a major step in the right direction when it comes to forward movement, but more is needed – not just more women bishops, but a re-humanising of the Church and a re-ordering of its priorities, priorities which until now have consisted of the upkeep of safe and predictable career paths mainly intended for men. We need more surprises. But, paradoxically, hope may be on the way, through the unlikely source of management. Driven as we are by internal politics, the professionalization of the work of priests, and by management-style mission agendas, the human beings caught up in these processes may yet rise up and protest. Hopefully, Bishop Libby will be one such human being. Meanwhile, we in the Church in Wales, which voted for women bishops but has so far failed to deliver, hope that new life will appear through a new management initiative, the creation of ministry areas.

Management thinking, and the creation of ministry areas, justifies itself on the basis of cost effectiveness and vague talk of mission and the empowerment of the laity, by which it means the people who come to church. All of this is alright as far as it goes but it does not go far enough. It is the people who do not go to church, because they are put off by misogyny, homophobia and clericalism, who need to be empowered. Many are understandably cynical but there is also good will out there, as I find when I happen to be wearing a clerical collar while shopping or paying the toll fare in order to cross the Severn Bridge. I get an encouraging smile where others perhaps do not. 

The smile and friendly word is not about recognition of status. It is about recognition of God’s unconditional love, made flesh in his Son, operating within the contexts of day to day life and made visible in the Church’s ministry. The Church, and people wearing clerical collars, irrespective of the colour of their shirts, exist to make that love known and, more importantly, experienced, by all whom they meet, including those who may not go to church or who do not think of themselves as religious. The essence of mission is therefore not what we say or do, but what we are. The task of managers in the Church consists therefore in making it possible for those they manage to be recognisably what they are called to be which is Christ in the world.

This is also what empowerment is about. To empower is to liberate. Good management is a liberating process. In the Church, it ought to enable those who minister in God’s name to recognise and fully ‘comprehend’ the pains and joys of others. This comprehension, or ‘holding’, is part of God’s ongoing work of creation and salvation. The two words are rooted in the Greek words for ‘life’.

For Christians, the work being done in all of us through the Holy Spirit, whether or not we go to church,oHo is about real life and practical action, so it is not enough for those who minister, whether lay or ordained, to be nice people with a sense of humour. They need to be people whose humour comes from an understanding, a connectedness with a God who laughs with us. The parables of Jesus were not told as grim morality tales. They were often jokes, and jokes only work when they are told from a place of empathy, rather than one of cynicism and judgement. Humour is central to salvation. Gloomy religion and solemn clergy do not speak of the salvation offered in the person of Jesus.

All of this brings me back to the kind of hope which Bishop Libby’s consecration offers both the Church and the world. There was a spark of real affection and humour which passed between her and those around her in the moments which followed her consecration, and a sigh of relief when the lone protestor failed to ruin it. We hope, and we pray, that this affection will prevail against all that is barren in our Church. We hope that the laughter will overwhelm the cynicism, that it will bring life and hope out of a death situation which has lasted for far too long.