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. 

Trainscape

Train departing Scarborough. Wikimedia Commons

There is something liminal  about pulling out of a train station. It is a moment in which we have to let go of whatever has been left behind, not only the station, but specific life experiences, a holiday, or a failed love affair. Perhaps we are experiencing the frightening edginess of leaving home for a new country. We also have to let go of the bizarreness of the situation itself as the train gathers speed, of hurtling along in a tin box on rails. In such a context it is sometimes best not to think too much, or at least not to over analyse or dwell on the physical reality we find ourselves in.

Perhaps it is better to dwell, instead, on the unique perspective which train travel brings to our lives and to the world we currently inhabit. Leaving the station, as we become part of an accelerated transition from urban to rural environment , we are reminded of the difference and complementarity which exists between towns and the countryside and of how much we need each other. If we let go of habitual anxieties pertaining to train travel we can begin to look at the view from the window in a different way. We witness in a passing moment the interdependence which exists between all living things.

Letting go of the habits of anxiety which tend to surface, and then spoil such vacant travelling moments, allows us to become  part of a regenerative life, a life which connects us to itself and which is infinitely greater than the narrow confines of the one we inhabit most of the time. This wider, deeper space, or life, is what we might call reality. It is not the same as the reality we create for ourselves by the way we think, or the day to day life choices we make. These thoughts and decisions need to be substantiated and given purpose by a degree of mental effort often mistakenly thought of as ‘productive’.

As with the maintenance of a ‘life style’, the mental effort, or anxiety, needed to maintain a habitual thought world is in fact counter-productive because anxiety is usually caused by a skewed perception of what is real, and therefore of what matters. The real, as it is usually perceived, is what appears to sustain us in life. The real, perceived in this way, is also the logical. It is what ‘makes sense’. When the real, as we have always known it, becomes blurred or is interrupted, we experience various kinds of emotional and mental disturbance. In this frame of mind, anxiety claims everything, where before it could be limited to certain thought processes or to people on whom we depend, or who depend on us. In a sense, anxiety kept those areas real and the people about whom we were anxious, including ourselves, ‘safe’.

Anxiety gave us a sense of solid reality, a reality which could ultimately be managed and controlled in a logical way. Being anxious seems to hold things in place and so, paradoxically, gives a certain sense of security. We know where to find our worries when we need them. So letting go of anxiety is both irksome and exciting, but it is a  life skill which we all need to learn if we are to retain a hold on our sanity in a turbulent world and in our often turbulent lives.

The letting go, the departing from the station towards an uncertain future and the travelling which will take place before we get there, all amount to the vital work of prayer. The work of prayer goes on in two contexts, that which we might loosely call the self, and that of the world around us, the two being interconnected. Put more prosaically, it means engaging consciously with life as it really is for us as autonomous selves and with the real dirt of life on the ground in the harsh realities of war and injustice. In prayer, we can ‘free fall’ into the worst situation, including those which pertain to our own anxiety, and be part of the life which literally ‘rescues’ or drags us and the world we inhabit back up from what the bible calls ‘the abyss’.

Think, for a moment, of dirty politics. As I write, there is talk of Israel having spied subversively on the Iran peace talks. Nothing has yet been proved, but politics being what they are, it would not be surprising if it is true. This is a situation, among many, which requires that people of prayer ‘free fall’ into it. It does not matter what stage of your own spiritual journey you are on, or whether the particular situation has played itself out in a certain way. We do not yet know what results these talks will yield, anymore than we have seen the end of Isis. We do not yet know what the ultimate fate of Tikrit will be, but we know that the conflict is a dirty one.

The same kind of free falling applies to our own lives. We are called to free fall into the love of God and take the world with us. We fall into what the writer, Meister Eckhart, called the ‘ground of our being’. Then we allow our thoughts, whatever they are, to be taken down to that place. We do not need to have started on a spiritual journey, or to have been formed or trained through any particular method in order to do this, but we do need to be prepared to open up to that good grounded place and to travel deeply into it. There is no telling what we will discover once we get to our destination, if we can call it that, and there are no particular landmarks along the way. It is uncharted territory, the life of God’s spirit at work in us.

Now, and then

An EU report on children’s health has concluded that excessive technology is bad for

Desk (Author's photo)

growing minds and inhibits the development of healthy social relationships. In this week’s edition of The Tablet Laurence Freeman describes a plane journey in which he found himself seated next to two young boys. He understandably feared for his extended period of relative peace and quiet. He need not have done. The boys were wired up from the start, their attention riveted to the small screen on the back of the seat opposite them, to the point that the airline steward had to personally remove their headphones in order to alert them to the fact that there was a tray of food in front of them. It goes without saying that Laurence Freeman was left in peace for the duration of the 8 hour flight.

It is tempting to think that in the good old days, before the advent of mobile phones and the internet, people read good books and had more meaningful personal relationships, that childhood friendships were nurtured in fertile intellectual ground, their imaginations untrammeled by fast food entertainment and reactive electronic games which would lead, presumably, to a shallow reactive take on life in general. As a result, it is easy to lay claim to the idea that it was the youth of those old days who generated all that is good and worth listening to in music, the arts in general and literature in particular, and that society was consequently altogether healthier as a result.

From this viewpoint comes the propensity for socio-historical amnesia with potentially serious consequences for us and for our children and grandchildren. The issue of race is a case in point. There are those who think that things would be better if there were fewer people, a shibboleth which ignores the statistical realities of emigration, as well as of immigration. When it comes to immigration, partial remembering helps to blur the lines of objective analyses when it comes to who exactly are the people who ‘scrounge’ on the health and benefits system. Wealthy tax avoiders are just as likely as anyone else to find themselves, in an emergency, having a life saving operation courtesy of the NHS. Things are not always quite as they seem.

This kind of mind set also ignores the drabness and sadness of life in those good old days, days which for me were epitomized by spam – the meat variety. There were fewer cars perhaps, but far longer and more tiring journeys which, in any case, only the relatively well off could afford. The arrival of the first motorway service area on the M1 could almost be described as a cultural milestone. There were trains, of course, but with them came the fear of finding oneself alone with a male predator in a locked compartment with no outside corridor.

But to return to technology and its undoubted detrimental effects on the young. Being so closely hooked up to whatever is taking place on a screen changes perspectives. It makes those things which were once at a distance not only much closer, but intimately bound up with our inner life system. Everything, including the news, is on tap and available instantly, and when this is not so our impatience, and sometimes irrational fury at being so rudely interrupted by buffering broad band, knows no bounds. We are in fact ‘bound’ by its general chatter which also makes it hard to switch off in the way we used to. This gives pause for thought as we approach the season of Passiontide.

There is a passage in Isaiah (Is.11:1-5) which speaks of a shoot coming out of the stump of Jesse. Shoots usually appear on the branches or trunks of older trees. If we think of the Cross as the symbol of an old tree, and see the one who hangs on it as the life giving source of the shoot, we are reminded of the way all things, both then and now, are enlivened through this one source. The old and the young find their life source in and through that one tortured victim, as they have always done. Through this common life we also see the old tree, the Cross, as symbolic of human history in all its depravity. But the victim is ‘redeeming’ it by ‘binding’ himself to it, by giving it his own life so that it can become a new and young plant without being anything other than what it is.

Remaining connected, or bound, to the life source matters. The two boys on the plane who are connected to their headphones, or bound by them, are a symbol of the now – the way in which we are connected, but need to constantly re-evaluate the state of that connection; whether it either impedes or makes it possible for us to remain bound to that deeper source of life which flows through the old tree.

Staying with the symbolic shoot and tree allows us to make sense of the Isaiah passage in a new way. The suffering of the tortured God who hangs on the old tree (the Cross) is his ‘belt of righteousness and faithfulness’ (v.5). It is his supreme authority fully revealed. Until now his authority has been partially hidden behind clouds, pillars of fire and temple veils. Today, his authority often appears to have been superseded by other barriers to a right understanding of the purposes of God. These can be roughly translated as various kinds of power games, some of them brutal, with regard to religion in general, and the injustices, vainglory and materialist concerns of the Church in regard to Christianity in particular.

His suffering is also the ‘judgment’. In other words, it is the last word spoken to all of us in our own tortured confusion about who we are, the moral quandaries and potential health risks which rapidly advancing technology throws at us, where we are going as a society, the political complexities of any given conflict situation and the future of the planet. In all of these human predicaments, the tortured God we see in Jesus is the judge who knows us and in whom is life, as there has always been. It is up to us to lay hold of it now. 

Only connect

My current computer screen saver is Giovanni Bellini’s Christ Blessing, as shown on my post of February 10^th.  I am returning to this picture because it holds my attention in a particular way. With our slow internet connection, there is always time to contemplate it, even if contemplation is abruptly cut off by the arrival of emails and other distractions emanating from the ‘real’ world. By contemplating, I mean looking through the picture, rather than looking at it. To contemplate this picture is to look through it to the Christ who is inviting the viewer into relationship with him, and into a different way of seeing the world. Looking at the face of Christ makes me wonder sometimes which world is the most real – his or the one I seem to inhabit, as most of us do, via a computer.

 

Computers and social network sites, as well as blogs, leave us in a kind of limbo when we are not on them, which is why it is so difficult to turn them off. It is as if we inhabit two worlds at once, in which we deal with what feel like different realities. What kind of inhabiting is this? and what kind of reality am I contemplating as I look at the face of Christ while waiting for the computer to get going? It seems to be a liminal place. I am standing on a dividing line between two worlds, two realities which interface with one another. In contemplating the image of Christ blessing I sense it reaching in to the world being opened up not only to me, but to millions of others, through the computer. When the screen saver goes, an interruption occurs as the computer releases a different real world into the mind space of its user.

But the image of Christ blessing is not so quick to fade. My screen saver remains with me and serves as a reminder of that other real world. The memory of Christ’s hand raised in benediction now confronts the host of alienating images and stories which shape themselves around not only my own consciousness, but also around everything which the computer may have to offer, its potential for both good and evil. The computer is a re-incarnation of that allegorical tree of knowledge portrayed in the book of Genesis. We need to eat carefully of its fruit.

The computer takes us to dark places and, potentially, to a general darkness, although not  always one which is specifically ‘religious’. It is important to differentiate between general darkness, the darkness of ignorance and materialism, and that which seems to pertain solely to religion, as many people understand it. Those who distrust religion will often associate it with the kind of darkness which comes with the preaching of hatred and murder. This particular darkness is encapsulated in the image depicting the Arabic letter ‘nun’, for ‘Nazarene’, as it is used to single out Christian homes for the intimidation or destruction of those who live in them.

The task which faces all of us, if the world is to survive the current tide of religious violence, consists in bringing together these two images, the one of Christ blessing, and the Arabic letter, and allowing them to confront one another. It is challenging and, at times, frightening work. Firstly, because it requires that we come to terms with the idea that the light, as we see it in the Bellini painting, and as we sometimes sense it in the deeper reaches of our own consciousness, has not been overcome by the sinister darkness associated with the letter ‘nun’.

Secondly, it obliges us to also look at our own inner darkness, those feelings of doubt, fear and anger which surface from time to time and for which there is often no obvious or immediate explanation. This process of confrontation begins with our accepting and coming to terms with the light which we also carry within us. It is the light of God’s presence, the working of his grace in our lives, to the extent that we allow it. Allowing grace into our lives is a matter of making ourselves available to God. It is what the writer Simone Weil called disponibilité.

Being available to the work of light brings us to the outer limit of what we think of as our ‘selves’. In so doing, it faces us with a particular kind of emptiness, one where the ‘self’ that we understand we are, including all its dreams and desires, loves and hates, has to be literally ‘forgotten’.[1] This is what Christ meant when he talked about ‘dying’ to self. In the moment of forgetting, or dying, we are invited to drop down into darkness, the darkness of not having answers, of not knowing, and at the same time of trusting in the light which literally ‘lightens the world’. This whole process of forgetting, dying and trusting leads to a new kind of knowing and seeing.

There is a connection to be made in the process of  knowing and understanding on one level with that of not knowing or understanding on a deeper and more significant level. We are talking about the inhabiting of two worlds, or realities. At the deeper level, we don’t need to know things in the same way. We don’t need to have made sense of why the world is as it is, or to have come up with solutions. All that is required is that we maintain a connection between the light, as we see it in the holy face of Christ, and all that is chaotic, violent and dark in our world.

On the whole, this work of connecting is best done by individuals who are prepared to be open to it for most of the day. They will find, in any case, that once they have made themselves ‘available’, being open to the work of grace will become a way of life, although it will not prevent them from carrying on with life as they have always lived it, with regard to what they do for a living, their marriage or relationships and all those in between times when they are not doing or thinking anything in particular.

The vital work of engaging with darkness, while remaining in the light, is a matter of remaining connected at a deeper level with the light we see in the face of Christ, who confronts and overcomes the darkness in the world around us.

---

[1] I am grateful to Maggie Ross for many of the ideas which inform this post, especially that of  ‘forgetting’. See her recent book Silence: A User’s Guide, (DLT)

If I don't believe Jesus is divine am I a Christian?

http://www.atlantametropolisphiloptochos.org/

 “Who do you say that I am?” Perhaps this question, which Jesus puts to his disciples, is one which we ask about ourselves in the minute we are born. ‘Who am I?’ If we were to time-travel back to that moment, which some claim to have done, our first cry must surely be a shaping of this fundamental question, asked of those who first lay their hands on us. We will go on asking it for the whole of  our lives.

The newly born is giving voice to the acute loneliness of the human condition. In what capacity then does Jesus ask it of his disciples? It seems that its significance lies in the asking as much as in the expectation of an answer. The question seems to come with a particular authority, the authority of one capable of reconciling the God-forsakenness, the loneliness of the human condition, with the love of God. Jesus asks the question so that he can supply those who love him with the answer, the answer which will tell them who they are.

Just as the newborn child reaches out and rejects those around her in a single trembling gesture, so the human race continues to reach out and simultaneously reject the things which make for life and peace. This rejection and reaching out manifests itself simultaneously in greed, cruelty and the lust for power over others, combined with love for one’s children, the desire for a better life and a deep, mostly inarticulate, longing for meaning. This suggests that we should listen to the question on more than one level.

There are a number of theological areas to explore when it comes to understanding the paradox of human nature. Most of them have to do with the nature of sin and salvation, understood on the one hand as alienation from God and alienation from one another and, on the other, as the reconciling of all things in Christ. But they also return us to the question asked by the infant into the absence or nothingness which he experiences at birth just as he becomes, biologically at least, autonomous, no longer part of his mother’s life sustaining system, of her body, mind and, yes, spirit.

There is a time dimension to the question as well. Jesus asks it from within a particular historical context, at a particular time, but it is also the fulcrum on which the whole of human history turns and on which this present moment (as you are reading this blog) rests. If it spans time, if it moves with the dynamic of history itself and yet confronts us in this moment, it obliges us to hear and respond to still more questions.

Was Jesus more than human? Was he, and is he, God consenting to and embracing our humanity? Working on the basis of a unified sphere of history, a ‘then’ present in the ‘now’, a future which is also already being realised in the present, is it possible that he is embracing us even in this moment and will continue to do so ‘unto the end of the age’, as he himself put it?

Here we start to drop down to that level of understanding which invites us to sit loosely to the kind of a posteriori claims about God based on a certain way of reading history, science or philosophy, or of any intellectual pursuit which allows itself to be contained within a limited conceptual framework, and thus licenses assumptions which need to be re-questioned. Or which simply invite silence. Christ’s question is not an invitation to concur with a theory arrived at over time, although history, and what a particular history was leading to, was a significant defining element for his disciples.

The question was not a test, and it is not a test now.  Neither was it addressed exclusively to future Christians, or to the Jews of his time, or to the followers of any one religion at any one time in history. Jesus was outside time, and outside humanly organised religion, while allowing himself to be held within both. As Messiah, he did not fit in with the assumptions of his day or concur with its expectations, anymore than he does now. But then, why should he? The love of God revealed in the person of Jesus was, and is, infinitely more exacting of us than our limited expectations of him could possibly allow for. This is perhaps why many people who met Jesus rejected him – and why others worshipped him.

Incidents of spontaneous worship recorded in the gospels help us to see the significance of the question which Jesus asks of his disciples and of us. They offer a new intellectual dimension which is that of deep knowledge, better known as faith.  Christ’s divinity takes us straight to the kind of life with which we identify salvation. Indeed, the words ‘life’ and ‘salvation’ are etymologically linked.

So this is a universal, cosmic and at the same time uniquely personal question which invites more than mere opinion. It obliges response. It is an ‘I’ to ‘thou’ question, as the philosopher Martin Buber might have put it, requiring a willingness to respond and commit to the moment, and to the person we encounter in Jesus Christ.

An encounter with Christ involves hearing the question “Who do you say that I am”, from that place within us where we seek meaning, even if we do not know that is what we are seeking. So, for Christians, it matters how we answer the question, just as it did for the disciples. Theirs was not a qualified opinion. It was a declaration of his divinity embodied in response, that he was the Son of the living God. They had not worked it out. It had been ‘revealed’ to them. In other words, they understood, or knew, in the moment of his asking that they too had been understood and known by God. To be a Christian is to know that we have been understood, known and accepted by God in Jesus.