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]
[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 16th,
2017
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