Wells Cathedral Sermon July 20th 2014 - Evensong
Rev Canon Dr Graham Dodds
A Changing Church
There was a tendency some 30-40 years ago to idolize the Early Church.
I remember attending conferences where comments would be made
about how the Church had lost its way and needed to regain a vision
from the Early Church. The Early Church, by which was meant the
Church we meet in the book of Acts, was caught up in the discovery of
the gifts of the Spirit, healing, evangelism, miracles, worship in the Spirit
and so on. This was what was lacking in the declining churches of the
West, and if we could only get back to the Early Church then all our
problems would be solved.
It is tempting to read Acts as if it were a church manual to create the
perfect church, yet when we read the rest of the New Testament we note
that behind the churches mentioned in Acts such as the one at Corinth,
the group of churches around Ephesus, Galatia, Thessalonica and so
on, we see, amongst some very good things, division, back biting,
fragmentation, heresy and the like. We need to read Acts alongside the
letters of Paul to gain a better understanding of how things were in those
early experiences of Christianity.
In our own time, the yearning after the early church experience gave rise
to the charismatic movement of the 1960s and 70s which in turn
heralded emerging churches such as housechurches, cell churches,
new monastic experiments and such like. John Wimber was instrumental
in beginning the Vineyard churches around Los Angeles in the late
1970s, which quickly spread world-wide and there are Vineyard
churches in this diocese today.
While all this was happening, mainstream churches, such as the
Anglican Church, have been declining in membership and leaders.
Some 40 years ago this diocese had approximately 400 stipendiary
clergy, which has virtually halved to date. However, it also had
approximately 100 lay readers then and today it has nearly 400. Perhaps
this shows something of what has been happening. As ordained
leadership has declined in numbers, lay leadership has increased. We
might welcome the increases, but the stark facts are that membership in
the Church of England has still not revived.
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I was at a lecture recently by the distinguished Scottish social historian,
Professor Callum Brown. Professor Brown wrote a controversial book in
2001 entitled The Death of Christian Britain. In it, he attempts to prove
from statistics and in depth interviews that this ‘death’ began in the
swinging 60s and has resulted in catastrophic decline of church
membership. Not only is this detrimental to the Church’s wellbeing, it is
also disruptive for the nation, as attitudes based on Christian values held
in the 19th and early 20th centuries, seen in, for example, tracts,
magazines, novels and obituaries, are now lost, and morality and our
social mores are like a ship without a rudder.
Brown’s critique was, and still is controversial and somewhat shocking.
However his work is, in my opinion, well researched and needs careful
examination. For example, in 1960 there were 190,000 confirmations, by
1997 just 37 years later this was reduced to 40,000 – the biggest drop
occurring between 1960 and 1970. The same is true of baptisms,
attendance at Sunday School, marriages solemnised in church and
communicants – all have dropped considerably in the period between
1954 and 2010.
The lecture I attended gave an opportunity to think further. Professor
Brown was followed by some responses to his lecture. One in particular
came from a Pentecostal minister who asked, ‘What is actually being
measured here?’
His argument was that true faith should not, perhaps even cannot, be
measured in church attendances. This was somewhat provoked by
Professor Brown’s use of interviews of people who spoke of seemingly
losing their faith. The professor played an interview of a soldier in the
Second World War who had seen horrendous death and had seemingly
given up on God. The Pentecostal minister asked about what faith he
had in the first place. It was similar in the other examples Callum Brown
offered and it made me wonder about how we define faith and the
faithful.
For example, when a person regularly attends church we tend to
assume they are part of the faithful. When we hear someone outside
church profess something of the tenets of Christianity we tend to
assume they are also part of the faithful. But would we also say that
someone who simply asks questions about Christianity is part of the
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faithful as well? They are certainly seekers. And what about all the
tourists who come to the Cathedral and simply look and wonder, and
muse and contemplate? Are they on the journey of faith? Statistics about
the Anglican Church show large-scale decline, but are we seeing real
decline or a change in the way people want to assimilate religion?
In one sense Professor Brown presents a rather depressing picture,
however, in another sense he may be pointing us towards a change in
how people believe in the 21st century. Regular attendance in church,
has declined, however, what may be emerging is a different form of
religious adherence. This different form is not centred on weekly or even
monthly attendance at a service. In fact it is difficult to measure at all for
it is often quite itinerant. Choices are made about what kind of religious
experiences are helpful – sometimes these are individually helpful – a
quiet space in a sacred building where a weary soul can find some rest,
an opportunity to explore a challenge or a problem or a regret, or
perhaps the experience of walking a labyrinth of prayer. Sometimes they
are corporate experiences - learning through seminars, social media and
web experiences, annual gatherings such as New Wine, Spring Harvest,
Taize, or indeed pilgrimages to a local Cathedral.
So when Archbishop Rowan Williams pointed out in the 2004 reportMission Shaped Church that these new forms of church should be
scrutinised to assess whether we can really call them church, it’s not
very easy because these sorts of experience often happen quietly,
behind the scenes, and are not easily described. And that forms an
interesting question as to what constitutes God’s church as opposed to
any other form of organisation.
One of the encouraging things that has begun to happen is that while all
sorts of experiments have been started over the last 10 years, over
recent months some data about what is happening has been published.
From Anecdote to Evidence was published earlier this year, Spiritual
Capital, the Cathedral’s report was published in 2012, the Church of
England has produced statistics about each parish, available on
diocesan websites called Parish Spotlights, and our own market
research has been conducted in the Cathedral – and indeed Chapter will
be looking at some of this data tomorrow.
One way of looking at this data, and indeed the Church, is through the
metaphors it adopts and a major metaphor for emerging churches is
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journey – thinking of faith and indeed life as a journey or pilgrimage from
birth to death and beyond.
The use of pilgrimage in the Church is as old as the hills. The Psalms of
Assent bear witness to its use in the OT, and historical documents show
how important it was to the Early Church. A pilgrimage is traditionally a
group of people, in fact of any faith, who travel together to a place. In
terms of Christian pilgrimage and according to a Stockholm University
study in 2011, and I quote:
Pilgrims visit the Holy Land to touch and see physical
manifestations of their faith, confirm their beliefs in the holy context
with collective excitation and connect personally.
The number of pilgrimages has risen in the 21st century so that the top
39 places of pilgrimage including Rome, the Holy Land and Compostella
in Spain receive some 200 million pilgrims each year.
What I find interesting in the phenomenon of pilgrimage is that it
suggests that people want faith to be tangible and dynamic. The faithful
want to go places, see, hear and touch things, chat to people on the way,
get excited, connect personally and so on - and this raises a question of
how the Church can be a movement not just an institution. There’s much
discussion about the movement vs institution debate and the increased
interest in pilgrimage takes us to the heart of it. Can the institutional
Church find a way through its institutionalism to allow the journey of faith
to prevail?
Brown was measuring institutional Church, and clearly it is in decline.
However, we may now be glimpsing a different picture of emerging
churches. People reconstructing faith, less like a group we belong to,
and more like a journey we might join - hence the rise in numbers at
occasional and weekday oases of peace, like traditional Anglican
evensong and candlelight services, Easter vigils, a requiem on
Remembrance day afternoons - people choosing what will help them
spiritually as they walk the way.
Evidence seems to suggest that people like the notion of going on a
journey, possibly especially if they don’t know quite where the end is. On
the way they want to see, hear, touch, smell and taste things. They want
to find out about the history and the significance of things and interpret
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these experiences for themselves - not have meanings imposed from
some institutional hierarchy. If we are canny, if we want to help these
pilgrims, if we want to share the glorious gospel of a loving, wise and
generous God who has riches to share with us, then, as parish churches
and cathedrals, we need to understand much more about what it means
to be a movement.
At its best, institution brings order, organisation, identity and security. At
its best, movement brings dynamism, innovation, trust and risk. The
Church needs both, and God’s challenge to us here in the second
decade of the 21st century is to employ the Wisdom of Solomon and the
boldness, courage and tenacity of the early disciples to continue the
building of God’s Church and God’s Kingdom.
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