FWIW I'd like to see more lay involvement and grassroots initiatives within the CofE, and indeed within my own affiliation. However we cut it, I think some form of 'organic' development rather than top-down managerialism or more superstitious forms of 'priest-craft' have to be the way forward.
Professor Leslie Francis, in his book about rural churches, was saying this 30 years ago - but no-one was listening.
As an aside, if anything Nonconformist church decline is even steeper in the countryside than Anglican. That certainly appears to be the case in rural Wales, for instance.
So it can't all be blamed on episcopal inertia and inflexibility.
I could return to the previous argument, but I won't. FOr me the key part is that none of the previous approaches has worked, and the current situation is so fragile that a sustained breath in the wrong direction could cause total collapse. As it is, the weight of buildings, cultural and social obligations are crushing everything. Neither of the last two archbishops have managed to lead the church through embracing reality as it is, because elaborate schemes which deliberately sideline reality and create pretty and/or spectacular patterns in an attempt to distract are preferred. Reality will assert itself, is asserting itself, and the whole lot will eventually collapse.
As an aside, if anything Nonconformist church decline is even steeper in the countryside than Anglican. That certainly appears to be the case in rural Wales, for instance.
I could return to the previous argument, but I won't. FOr me the key part is that none of the previous approaches has worked, and the current situation is so fragile that a sustained breath in the wrong direction could cause total collapse. As it is, the weight of buildings, cultural and social obligations are crushing everything. Neither of the last two archbishops have managed to lead the church through embracing reality as it is, because elaborate schemes which deliberately sideline reality and create pretty and/or spectacular patterns in an attempt to distract are preferred. Reality will assert itself, is asserting itself, and the whole lot will eventually collapse.
I don't disagree that collapse isn't a very distinct possibility.
What I'm unclear about is how you think the last two Archbishops could have steered the CofE through 'embracing reality' without precipitating collapse?
I'm still unclear about what the simple and straightforward solution that @TheOrganist recommends would have involved and how it could have led to anything other than a polarised split.
@Gamma Gamaliel I think that's my point. We've spent a quarter of a century at least - probably longer - charging archbishops with the impossible. As we come to appointing another one, we need to have the courage, collectively, to declare that a failed and in any case foolish mission, and let them do something else. We also need to define that something else, and where they start. I think this is, in logical terms at least, where the collapse starts, because it involves acknowledging the fact that, fatally flawed accommodations which were borne of the impossible mission given to previous archbishops (to keep together and revive a structure that was basically dead) as ide, it already has collapsed. The next archbishop then has the job of sweeping away the dead bits, and seeing what remains, which is another fool's errand, but at least has the merit of having a chance of success in a generation or two.
We had an OLM priest when I lived in Calderdale but after I moved she left the CofE when the parish church was closed, preferring to stay in the village with the local Baptists.
I genuinely think lay readers and locally ordained are the future of a lot of DIY rural ministry. It’ll help keep places open.
The problem is that it tends to reward areas with lots of able-bodied middle-class retirees with time on their hands. Our OLM was unusual in being a disabled working class woman. Any pretence of being a church for the whole nation is long gone.
Presumably that is the case with non-stipendary and house for duty priests too.
House for duty priests at least aren't tied to a particular area. They do require another income, whether that is a pension or other employment, however.
Yes, the independent means aspect (and the class implications of that) was my point.
The parish where I play has been "lay led" for the past 4 years because of a failure by TPTB to find us a priest. ... The eucharistic service numbers are static, the non-eucharistic are growing.
So far, so good: but every single priest who comes to look at us, and the Archdeacon who is meant to be finding us an incumbent, place at the top of their list increasing the number of eucharistic services and doing away with Matins. Far from being "evangelical" the churchmanship is middle-of-the-candle, yet we get it with both barrels from evos and ACs. The evos say we are "too structured" and the ACs say we are "too low". We have the bums on pews - and more of them than before - but are being told this is wrong.
Good to hear - thanks. Sounds like a refreshing reversion to the days before the Parish Communion movement. Vacancies can be productive times for congregations.
Meanwhile, on the search for a priest: even if you are able to find an ordained minister happy to continue your pattern of services, I wouldn't be surprised if they were soon "encouraged" to increase the number of eucharists. There is a certain irony in the reaction from TPTB to your having found an approach that seems to look to the future.
The parish where I play has been "lay led" for the past 4 years because of a failure by TPTB to find us a priest. ... The eucharistic service numbers are static, the non-eucharistic are growing.
So far, so good: but every single priest who comes to look at us, and the Archdeacon who is meant to be finding us an incumbent, place at the top of their list increasing the number of eucharistic services and doing away with Matins. Far from being "evangelical" the churchmanship is middle-of-the-candle, yet we get it with both barrels from evos and ACs. The evos say we are "too structured" and the ACs say we are "too low". We have the bums on pews - and more of them than before - but are being told this is wrong.
Good to hear - thanks. Sounds like a refreshing reversion to the days before the Parish Communion movement. Vacancies can be productive times for congregations.
Meanwhile, on the search for a priest: even if you are able to find an ordained minister happy to continue your pattern of services, I wouldn't be surprised if they were soon "encouraged" to increase the number of eucharists. There is a certain irony in the reaction from TPTB to your having found an approach that seems to look to the future.
This - I’d love to have more than one holy communion a month but we are where we are. I can’t be doing with cafe church, but the reintroduction of mattins has meant we only have one Sunday a month with no service, and only one that involves the rector/a priest. It seems to be working.
We still have our weekly 8am said Communion, and the same retired priest comes to our "warm church" thing midweek and chats to people - maybe in the New Year that will be expanded to include a said communion but we'll see what the attendees want.
I could return to the previous argument, but I won't. FOr me the key part is that none of the previous approaches has worked, and the current situation is so fragile that a sustained breath in the wrong direction could cause total collapse. As it is, the weight of buildings, cultural and social obligations are crushing everything. Neither of the last two archbishops have managed to lead the church through embracing reality as it is, because elaborate schemes which deliberately sideline reality and create pretty and/or spectacular patterns in an attempt to distract are preferred. Reality will assert itself, is asserting itself, and the whole lot will eventually collapse.
I don't disagree that collapse isn't a very distinct possibility.
What I'm unclear about is how you think the last two Archbishops could have steered the CofE through 'embracing reality' without precipitating collapse?
I don't think the current situation is working, and it's actually storing up all sorts of issues (financial and balance of forces) that are going to make the eventual collapse a lot more acrimonious.
To me this is the point. There can't be a fully developed prospectus at this point, because very little in the current armoury works. As @TheOrganist says, in some circumstances, starting with the community works. In fact, that's all that ever does work. It's not always successful, especially when having beautiful, mostly empty buildings open is one of the things the community wants. That can be the most expensive thing of all.
As an aside, if anything Nonconformist church decline is even steeper in the countryside than Anglican. That certainly appears to be the case in rural Wales, for instance.
Indeed so.
I think what is different about nonconformist congregations is that there is less reluctance to travel. Some folks are happy with large congregations (e.g. Soul Church. Mostly those will be folks who are comfortable with charismatic worship. Others, particularly the more conservative nonconformists, tend not to be so keen on large congregations.
The advantage of large churches is that they often have vibrant children’s and youth work, and are attractive to families with growing children. So people migrate to them for that reason. Smaller congregations are more resource bound. But either way there is significantly less preference for a church in one’s immediate locality.
I am sure that many small nonconformist congregations are in trouble and many will disappear over the next 20 years. Small, ageing, church populations are finding it increasingly difficult to survive.
I'm not so sure that it's simply a case of more conservative Nonconformists not being keen on larger congregations, rather that they find it more difficult now to develop the kind of 'preaching centres' - Metropolitan Tabernacle under Spurgeon for instance - than they did back in Victorian times.
I'm old enough to remember significantly-sized Nonconformist chapels such as 'The Heath' in Cardiff which were associated with the ministry of particularly admired preachers.
Time was, I would suggest, when most cities or South Walian Valley or Yorkshire or Lancashire textile town had a large and dominant Nonconformist chapel that attracted more worshippers than the others by virtue of having a 'name' in the pulpit.
I'm not sure you are right on the distance thing these days either. I know of people who travel a fair distance to attend a 'lively' or 'family-friendly' Anglican Church and of Anglo-Catholics who travel to parishes which appeal to them.
There's a renewed 'parish movement' within the CofE but by and large parish boundaries have become pretty meaningless.
Ostensibly, there's not a great deal of difference these days between a charismatic-lite Anglican congregation (note I said 'congregation' rather than 'parish') and its equivalent among the Baptists, say.
I'm not so sure that it's simply a case of more conservative Nonconformists not being keen on larger congregations, rather that they find it more difficult now to develop the kind of 'preaching centres' - Metropolitan Tabernacle under Spurgeon for instance - than they did back in Victorian times.
Institutional reproduction being the core issue rather than develop - as you say, at one point those cities did have a exemplar church.
And to return to the previous thread this is the reason why the current situation isn't working. If you think through through how each faction reproduces itself, and how it ensures some kind of theological and institutional coherence long term and you quickly start to spot problems. In many cases they end up having a financial component, but that's the only factor at work.
What's your model of leadership, where do they come from, how are they trained, how do the institutions doing the training reproduce themselves. How do you ensure a level of fidelity to the core part of the tradition. How do your institutions renew themselves, etc etc.
Back in the day the UK 'restorationist' or 'new church' movement thought it was declaring 'Year Zero' - "the axe is laid to the root of the tree ...' as if it were possible to telescope 2000 years of development back to the supposedly pristine days of the New Testament. Yeah, right.
I don't know how we can disentangle or unknot the accumulated intertwining of history in any church context - be it among the historic churches or the 'Free Churches'. Where do we start?
I don't know how we can disentangle or unknot the accumulated intertwining of history in any church context - be it among the historic churches or the 'Free Churches'. Where do we start?
I'm not suggesting that people start here, but merely use that framework as a means of identifying problems and shortfalls, I think some of the factions rather over-estimate their room to manoeuvre if and when the final denouement comes.
@Gamma Gamaliel Parish boundaries "pretty meaningless"? Not in rural areas, especially where civil parish boundaries mirror church parish boundaries.
I presume that @Gamma Gamaliel is speaking in terms of choice of regular church.
Certainly I have tried several times to make our local shack my regular but it's always gone tits up in the end. Now it's gone full Girls Have Cooties See of Oswestry that has become even more unlikely. I don't know if we'd qualify as rural to you but we're surrounded on three sides by woods and fields and on the fourth by a golf course. I never quite know what counts.
...Reality will assert itself, is asserting itself, and the whole lot will eventually collapse.
I'm not concerned on my own account, but I know a lot of people whose lives would be crushed if it happened. And, considering that second part cynically, I wonder to what extent it's the story that The Powers That Be tell themselves to justify their heroic (self-sacrificing, etc) efforts to keep things as they are.
...The next archbishop then has the job of sweeping away the dead bits, and seeing what remains, which is another fool's errand, but at least has the merit of having a chance of success in a generation or two.
I doubt that timescale is still viable. But calls for a significant change of direction are likely - however, no-one (that I've been able to find) seems to have articulated an alternative direction that stands a snowball's chance in global warming of turning things around.
@Gamma Gamaliel Parish boundaries "pretty meaningless"? Not in rural areas, especially where civil parish boundaries mirror church parish boundaries.
I presume that @Gamma Gamaliel is speaking in terms of choice of regular church.
If you're thinking about church in terms of "choice", then you're not thinking the same way as many rural congregations. They go to their parish church because it's their parish church - it's part of their identity. The rural CofE comprises many benefices where the majority of congregants do not attend each other's churches.
Financially, things are getting interesting now that, in some dioceses, the congregations in a benefice are being asked to be collectively responsible for paying the total of the parish shares that have been calculated for the individual parishes in their benefice.
And many dioceses expect the proportion of parishes not paying the full share to significantly increase over the next few years. The direction of travel is that those who have - whether parish or diocese (or any body in-between) - will be asked to share with those who have not. In practice, not unsurprisingly, it turns out that some parishes are not willing to share.
Certainly I have tried several times to make our local shack my regular but it's always gone tits up in the end. Now it's gone full Girls Have Cooties See of Oswestry that has become even more unlikely. I don't know if we'd qualify as rural to you but we're surrounded on three sides by woods and fields and on the fourth by a golf course. I never quite know what counts.
It's not unusual in rural parishes for people (not just the parish council) to know where the parish boundaries lie.
Back in the day the UK 'restorationist' or 'new church' movement thought it was declaring 'Year Zero' - "the axe is laid to the root of the tree ...' as if it were possible to telescope 2000 years of development back to the supposedly pristine days of the New Testament. Yeah, right.
I agree with @pease that people will suffer. The point is that many already have and are. Many who have left the church have felt bereft and betrayed by its focus on collective, institutional self-preservation over the courage to face and deal with reality. Their suffering has never counted for much, but it does exist. I'm not blaming anyone here, just saying that the institutional care about those whom it crushes in its relentless fight for self-preservation is already set at nil.
Speaking as one who worships in a fifteenth century building, I think the buildings should be treated as a different problem. There are thousands of people out there who would never set foot in a church to attend a service but will happily tour churches and cathedrals for fun because they're part of our heritage. Set up a body like the National Trust for managing churches and cathedrals, open it to membership (like the National Trust) and anyone with Anglicard gets unlimited free entry to cathedrals and churches. Then congregations get the use of 'their' buildings for their worship. Less picturesque/historic buildings get subsidised by the popular ones.
We're halfway there anyway: our local parish church often has appeals to residents of the parish for funding.
@Gamma Gamaliel Parish boundaries "pretty meaningless"? Not in rural areas, especially where civil parish boundaries mirror church parish boundaries.
I presume that @Gamma Gamaliel is speaking in terms of choice of regular church.
Certainly I have tried several times to make our local shack my regular but it's always gone tits up in the end. Now it's gone full Girls Have Cooties See of Oswestry that has become even more unlikely. I don't know if we'd qualify as rural to you but we're surrounded on three sides by woods and fields and on the fourth by a golf course. I never quite know what counts.
Yes, and at the risk of treading on @The Organist's toes, this is another area, I'm afraid, where things are not at all straightforward.
I could take you to several rural churches where a significant proportion of what regulars remain are refugees from parishes in nearby towns. They've fled to a rural Zoar when their town parish did away with surpliced choirs or introduced guitars.
Obviously, the deeper into the countryside you get, the less this scenario applies. I fully accept that there are people in rural parishes who know exactly which hedge the boundary runs along and who never set foot in another parish church but their own.
But even in rural Wales you've got people from outside the parish turning up to services, and they can very well be Nonconformists whose chapel has closed.
I was referring to choice of where to worship. Like @KarlLB I tried my best to stick to my local parish church when we moved here. It meant putting up with balloons and action-songs and one of those demonic digital screen things. 😉 Heck, I even tried to go along with that when it was my turn to do the intercessions. I'd put the prayers (with a few sneaky icons or other images) on a memory-stick and take it with me to church. Eventually the vicar stopped me doing the intercessions at the 11am service because I did them in too traditional a way. So we migrated to the 9am service instead where my wife played the organ. When they started having video clips and 'discussion' in the 9am service as well, things became untenable. I did hang on until my wife died though.
I'm sorry to have to keep coming back to my 'it's not that simple' mantra but it really isn't simple.
Facing reality is one thing but what happens then? If the next Archbishop of Canterbury says, 'Let's face it folks, we're stuffed ...' that might be a refreshing breath of fresh air but where do they go from there?
To apply a painful personal analogy. I well remember, of course, my wife and I being ushered from a cold, clinical room into one with curtains, cushions and a sofa to be told that her cancer had spread. The prognosis was terminal.
The consultant said that we were welcome to respond in any way we wished. We could swear at her if we liked. We both asked for a cup of tea.
Then we had to go home and get on with it.
The CofE is going to have to do the same. Tea will help.
I could take you to several rural churches where a significant proportion of what regulars remain are refugees from parishes in nearby towns. They've fled to a rural Zoar when their town parish did away with surpliced choirs or introduced guitars.
I know a rural URC church (not in Wales) which is like that.
The trouble with splits is that they carry on fragmenting. Thats been the story since the Reformation. And the smaller they get the less viable they become.
@Gamma Gamaliel Spot on. We have "refugees" who travel a significant distance because of unhappiness with what goes on at their local church.
But I think the thing that marks out successful rural parishes is that they have a mindset of St X has been here far longer than the Revd Y and will continue long after he/she has moved on so we'll grit our teeth and put up with the madness and refuse to be pushed out. Once the irritant has gone elsewhere - and the inevitably long interregnum is a reality - normality resumes.
I think the thing that marks out successful rural parishes is that they have a mindset of St X has been here far longer than the Revd Y and will continue long after he/she has moved on so we'll grit our teeth and put up with the madness and refuse to be pushed out.
True, but that makes it very difficult for Revd Y to instigate change even when it is sorely needed.
I think the church will survive the death of some longstanding institutional expressions of it. Gatherings of Christians will have some hard choices to make. But the start will be, as Thunderbunk has intimated, the painful recognition that a priority of institutional survival is inextricably wedded to a decline of social relevance.
It will take more than a cup to tea to cope with the inevitable grief this will produce. But I remain hopeful.
It is Friday, indeed. Given my mother's situation, I understand what @Gamma Gamaliel is saying. I would like to pursue the analogy further, but rather fear treading on his toes. The assisted dying debate has many themes which are relevant here, and a similar range of alternatives.
I could take you to several rural churches where a significant proportion of what regulars remain are refugees from parishes in nearby towns. They've fled to a rural Zoar when their town parish did away with surpliced choirs or introduced guitars.
I know a rural URC church (not in Wales) which is like that.
The examples I'm thinking of aren't in Wales either.
The reference to rural Wales was in connection with another issue. Not people seeking refuge from guitars and digital screens but changing address because their local expression has closed down.
@Barnabas62 - yes, things will continue despite institutional collapse. I remember reading an article by a Methodist minister which suggested that Methodist spirituality would continue even if the Methodist church closed.
It is Friday, indeed. Given my mother's situation, I understand what @Gamma Gamaliel is saying. I would like to pursue the analogy further, but rather fear treading on his toes. The assisted dying debate has many themes which are relevant here, and a similar range of alternatives.
I have broad shoulders. But can understand your reticence of course. Probably best to move the analogy away from particular individuals though, whether your Mum or my late wife.
What I was thinking is that there are several ways in which the process of dying goes wrong, for the people around the person dying. Not all of these happens in all cases, but I can see most of them in the current situation of the Church of England, which will confront Welby's successor.
One is that the dying person is treated as an inconvenience, and seek to sweep them away as rapidly and neatly as decent. I see this in a lot of the revivals attempted by giving huge amounts of money to HTB-aligned "resource churches". The proportion of these which has succeeded is small and in most cases, the patient has ended up with about the same symptoms as they started with, though sometimes with more pretty, empty spaces.
One is the "if only you do this, you will survive" approach, usually seen as quackery in medical circles. With apologies to @theorganist and others, I see a lot of the conservative movements such as The Society as being like this. The problem with them is two-fold. First, they rely on an element of denialism - that the problem isn't as defined - for their solution to work, meaning that it can't. They also misattribute the problem, and fiercely attack elements which are not causing the symptoms. Thus, a huge amount of effort is wasted, people are hurt, and the patient dies anyway.
The other is with miserablism, which is definitely talking against myself. The problem with this is that it can tend to foreshorten the process of dying, and prevent the patient from living before they die. Since, in this case, some kind of life beyond the current process of death is the aim, more so even that for the human subject (where the post-death life is entirely out of our hands, of course), this can crush life out of the organism which could otherwise be the source of something after the death process has been completed, and the dead parts acknowledged and released.
There is an overall problem with "extraordinary measures". The patient eventually dies anyway, the extraordinary measures have exhausted those around the patient to the point where their lives have become burdensome, and life after the patient's death is made significantly harder by futile activities. Of course, this relies to a fair degree on 20/20 hindsight, and has some of the difficulties I just described as miserablist, but it still has its own element of truth.
At the moment, we (the Church of England) are stumbling through the situation like a drunk in a room of empty chairs with an aisle down the middle of it (think empty conference room). Sometimes we stumble down the aisle, sometimes we can do nothing without falling over and/or knocking over a whole load of chairs. Objectively, the difference between the two can be tiny, but the effects are so different that the differences are exaggerated and the disturbers of chairs condemned. Sometimes they, or their solution, deserves the condemnation, but they are still very relevant to consideration of what happens next, since as the adage has it, those who are ignorant of history, including recent history, are condemned to repeat it.
One thing we know is that we can't go round in the same circles indefinitely. The whole structure will die under the weight of its obligations and the insufficiency of its existence to sustain actual life.
In Wales we've moved away from parishes to Ministry Areas and it looks as though something similar may be starting in England but I could be wrong here,These Ministry Areas are pretty lar.ge and have a Ministry Area Council. I'm not sure if full implications have filtered through as the MAC has now the executive power so to speak, rather than the PCC. Individual churches will have their own councils - and people will probably refer to them as PCC but the real power is in the MA so far as I can see. This could have implications further down the line such as in decisions to close a church for instance and I have heard of churches 'at risk' so to speak. /my own church seems to be luck-iesh as although being a fairly white city we do have at the Sunday Eucharist a fair number of ethnics,some of whom have become quite involved with the church.
I mjust admit though I have my wonders. Pace The Organist I'm inclined to think the parish system perhaps isn;t the thing in towns and cities but I'm sure things are quite different in rural areas especially as Wales has got a bit of a reputation for tribalism!! -D
Quite unjustified and some people deserve it anyway!!
In Wales we've moved away from parishes to Ministry Areas and it looks as though something similar may be starting in England but I could be wrong here,
Bear in mind that "from the date of disestablishment [1920], the ecclesiastical law of the Church of England ceased to exist as law in Wales." Which means that making these changes was rather more straightforward than it would be in England.
These Ministry Areas are pretty lar.ge and have a Ministry Area Council. I'm not sure if full implications have filtered through as the MAC has now the executive power so to speak, rather than the PCC. Individual churches will have their own councils - and people will probably refer to them as PCC but the real power is in the MA so far as I can see. This could have implications further down the line such as in decisions to close a church for instance...
The current Benefice / Parish boundaries within a Ministry Area will be removed. The Ministry Area will have a single Parochial Church Council. Each Ministry Area will also, in time, become an unincorporated charity...
The Ministry Area Council will set the strategic direction of the Ministry Area. It will have the powers of both the former Parochial Church Council and Deanery Conference and will promote the mission and ministry of the Church. It will identify and review the needs of the Ministry Area in respect to people, finance, buildings and property...
Each Ministry Area will have its own accounts, forward ministry share to the diocese, and hold financial responsibility for the Ministry Area. Each local church, or group of churches, should retain its own local accounts and deal with local financial arrangements. Legacies may be retained locally. Ministry Share will be allocated by the diocese to the Ministry Area. The Ministry Area Council will agree allocation between local churches or groups of churches.
I'm sure I'm not the only one to see potential problems (and maybe legal challenges) with the individual but shared financial arrangements.
@Baptist Trainfan IME The (new) Revd Y doesn't wait to get to know the parish and how it operates before trying to institute change.
At our place we have experienced it from both ends of the candle. First was an incumbent who announced on their third Sunday in-post that they would dispense with both Matins and Evensong, change the musical setting for eucharists, and dispensed with 5 out of 6 of our lay ministers of communion, all female. They lasted for 5 years with falling numbers until the only service with attendees in double figures (other than the choir) was the said 8am BCP communion.
After an interregnum of over 2 years we then got a far lower incumbent who decided the church was "too old" and decided if we went along the worship song sandwich "praise with cake" route that we would instantly be full of young families - ignoring the fact that most young families had been priced out of the area by rising property prices and soaring demand for holiday homes. Again, the 8am (which they farmed out to a retired priest with PTO) kept the parish going, while the choir and I gritted out teeth and churned out the required pap as best we could. This chap went on sabbatical 3 years in and sent in his letter of resignation the minute his plane touched down in North Carolina.
After another lengthy break, during which the church had more or less got itself back onto an even keel, we got a House-for-Duty part timer. In failing health when they arrived but with aspirations to move us far higher up the candle, their medical issues prevented them from carrying through most of their plans. They were with us for 7 years. But a parish that has only 1 PCC meeting a year (straight after the APM) gives the laity a clear message that they're on their own. And so that's what we've been doing ever since.
What has kept the parish in good heart? Two successive heads of Sunday School with an ability to get children attending from non-church families, and turn some of those families into new regulars. Churchwardens prepared to devote an enormous amount of time to running a parish, and with the drive, flair and commitment to do it properly. And a congregation and choir who see beyond the latest person in the pulpit spouting whatever version of Christianity they think fit to the real job of a rural church, which is to be the focus for the whole of the parish, and especially those who don't darken our doors very often.
Yes, listening to what is there is always vital. I'm sorry you've been through such utter shit, @TheOrganist. I suppose clergy are supposed to come with visions of their ideal parish, but it seems very unkind (to put it very mildly) to individual parishes to expect them to turn into that ideal as soon as a new incumbent arrives.
An encouraging story @TheOrganist - it shows what can be done IF there are people prepared to do some hard work, and to think about the whole parish.
Of course, things may be otherwise in an urban setting, where there is a wide variety of churches within easy reach, so a different approach might need to be taken in those circumstances. The people prepared to do the hard graft - and hard thinking! - are still needed, even though there seem to be fewer and fewer of them each year.
Yes, listening to what is there is always vital. I'm sorry you've been through such utter shit, @TheOrganist. I suppose clergy are supposed to come with visions of their ideal parish, but it seems very unkind (to put it very mildly) to individual parishes to expect them to turn into that ideal as soon as a new incumbent arrives.
The advice I've traditionally heard given to new incumbents is "don't change anything for a year" i.e. see the full range of liturgical seasons and discover how things currently work before you decide what would make them better.
Our Place (urban Anglo-Catholic) has not seen many changes since I first attended some 18 years ago, although the present incumbent tends to use RCC liturgical resources, rather than C of E, whenever he can!
It's the only *High Church* parish in the town, and therefore attracts a few people for whom the unrelenting evangelicalism of most of the other C of E parishes has proved too much.
As far as the very deprived local community is concerned (we're one of the poorest parishes in England), a good deal of effort is made, with not much in the way of visible results, but the desire to serve is certainly present. The problem is finding enough willing hands to do anything...
I thought it was only our lot who had clergy who could change things at their whim. We had a new'un who on his second Sunday handed me a pile of music and told me that from now on we would be doing that. I resigned on the spot and only returned when he was moved.
Aren't PCCs supposed to act as a brake against tyrannical clerics in Anglican parishes.
Anglican clerical Shipmates will be able to quote chapter and verse, but yes - PCCs are supposed to counter the excesses of the clergy, but don't always do so...
Comments
That's not just a CofE problem. But yes ...
So it can't all be blamed on episcopal inertia and inflexibility.
That doesn't help of course.
I don't disagree that collapse isn't a very distinct possibility.
What I'm unclear about is how you think the last two Archbishops could have steered the CofE through 'embracing reality' without precipitating collapse?
I'm still unclear about what the simple and straightforward solution that @TheOrganist recommends would have involved and how it could have led to anything other than a polarised split.
Yes, the independent means aspect (and the class implications of that) was my point.
Meanwhile, on the search for a priest: even if you are able to find an ordained minister happy to continue your pattern of services, I wouldn't be surprised if they were soon "encouraged" to increase the number of eucharists. There is a certain irony in the reaction from TPTB to your having found an approach that seems to look to the future.
This - I’d love to have more than one holy communion a month but we are where we are. I can’t be doing with cafe church, but the reintroduction of mattins has meant we only have one Sunday a month with no service, and only one that involves the rector/a priest. It seems to be working.
I don't think the current situation is working, and it's actually storing up all sorts of issues (financial and balance of forces) that are going to make the eventual collapse a lot more acrimonious.
Meanwhile, @ThunderBunk, what does 'success' look like?
I think what is different about nonconformist congregations is that there is less reluctance to travel. Some folks are happy with large congregations (e.g. Soul Church. Mostly those will be folks who are comfortable with charismatic worship. Others, particularly the more conservative nonconformists, tend not to be so keen on large congregations.
The advantage of large churches is that they often have vibrant children’s and youth work, and are attractive to families with growing children. So people migrate to them for that reason. Smaller congregations are more resource bound. But either way there is significantly less preference for a church in one’s immediate locality.
I am sure that many small nonconformist congregations are in trouble and many will disappear over the next 20 years. Small, ageing, church populations are finding it increasingly difficult to survive.
I'm old enough to remember significantly-sized Nonconformist chapels such as 'The Heath' in Cardiff which were associated with the ministry of particularly admired preachers.
Time was, I would suggest, when most cities or South Walian Valley or Yorkshire or Lancashire textile town had a large and dominant Nonconformist chapel that attracted more worshippers than the others by virtue of having a 'name' in the pulpit.
I'm not sure you are right on the distance thing these days either. I know of people who travel a fair distance to attend a 'lively' or 'family-friendly' Anglican Church and of Anglo-Catholics who travel to parishes which appeal to them.
There's a renewed 'parish movement' within the CofE but by and large parish boundaries have become pretty meaningless.
Ostensibly, there's not a great deal of difference these days between a charismatic-lite Anglican congregation (note I said 'congregation' rather than 'parish') and its equivalent among the Baptists, say.
Institutional reproduction being the core issue rather than develop - as you say, at one point those cities did have a exemplar church.
And to return to the previous thread this is the reason why the current situation isn't working. If you think through through how each faction reproduces itself, and how it ensures some kind of theological and institutional coherence long term and you quickly start to spot problems. In many cases they end up having a financial component, but that's the only factor at work.
What's your model of leadership, where do they come from, how are they trained, how do the institutions doing the training reproduce themselves. How do you ensure a level of fidelity to the core part of the tradition. How do your institutions renew themselves, etc etc.
Back in the day the UK 'restorationist' or 'new church' movement thought it was declaring 'Year Zero' - "the axe is laid to the root of the tree ...' as if it were possible to telescope 2000 years of development back to the supposedly pristine days of the New Testament. Yeah, right.
I don't know how we can disentangle or unknot the accumulated intertwining of history in any church context - be it among the historic churches or the 'Free Churches'. Where do we start?
I'm not suggesting that people start here, but merely use that framework as a means of identifying problems and shortfalls, I think some of the factions rather over-estimate their room to manoeuvre if and when the final denouement comes.
I presume that @Gamma Gamaliel is speaking in terms of choice of regular church.
Certainly I have tried several times to make our local shack my regular but it's always gone tits up in the end. Now it's gone full Girls Have Cooties See of Oswestry that has become even more unlikely. I don't know if we'd qualify as rural to you but we're surrounded on three sides by woods and fields and on the fourth by a golf course. I never quite know what counts.
I doubt that timescale is still viable. But calls for a significant change of direction are likely - however, no-one (that I've been able to find) seems to have articulated an alternative direction that stands a snowball's chance in global warming of turning things around.
If you're thinking about church in terms of "choice", then you're not thinking the same way as many rural congregations. They go to their parish church because it's their parish church - it's part of their identity. The rural CofE comprises many benefices where the majority of congregants do not attend each other's churches.
Financially, things are getting interesting now that, in some dioceses, the congregations in a benefice are being asked to be collectively responsible for paying the total of the parish shares that have been calculated for the individual parishes in their benefice.
And many dioceses expect the proportion of parishes not paying the full share to significantly increase over the next few years. The direction of travel is that those who have - whether parish or diocese (or any body in-between) - will be asked to share with those who have not. In practice, not unsurprisingly, it turns out that some parishes are not willing to share.
It's not unusual in rural parishes for people (not just the parish council) to know where the parish boundaries lie.
We're halfway there anyway: our local parish church often has appeals to residents of the parish for funding.
Yes, and at the risk of treading on @The Organist's toes, this is another area, I'm afraid, where things are not at all straightforward.
I could take you to several rural churches where a significant proportion of what regulars remain are refugees from parishes in nearby towns. They've fled to a rural Zoar when their town parish did away with surpliced choirs or introduced guitars.
Obviously, the deeper into the countryside you get, the less this scenario applies. I fully accept that there are people in rural parishes who know exactly which hedge the boundary runs along and who never set foot in another parish church but their own.
But even in rural Wales you've got people from outside the parish turning up to services, and they can very well be Nonconformists whose chapel has closed.
I was referring to choice of where to worship. Like @KarlLB I tried my best to stick to my local parish church when we moved here. It meant putting up with balloons and action-songs and one of those demonic digital screen things. 😉 Heck, I even tried to go along with that when it was my turn to do the intercessions. I'd put the prayers (with a few sneaky icons or other images) on a memory-stick and take it with me to church. Eventually the vicar stopped me doing the intercessions at the 11am service because I did them in too traditional a way. So we migrated to the 9am service instead where my wife played the organ. When they started having video clips and 'discussion' in the 9am service as well, things became untenable. I did hang on until my wife died though.
I'm sorry to have to keep coming back to my 'it's not that simple' mantra but it really isn't simple.
Facing reality is one thing but what happens then? If the next Archbishop of Canterbury says, 'Let's face it folks, we're stuffed ...' that might be a refreshing breath of fresh air but where do they go from there?
To apply a painful personal analogy. I well remember, of course, my wife and I being ushered from a cold, clinical room into one with curtains, cushions and a sofa to be told that her cancer had spread. The prognosis was terminal.
The consultant said that we were welcome to respond in any way we wished. We could swear at her if we liked. We both asked for a cup of tea.
Then we had to go home and get on with it.
The CofE is going to have to do the same. Tea will help.
But I think the thing that marks out successful rural parishes is that they have a mindset of St X has been here far longer than the Revd Y and will continue long after he/she has moved on so we'll grit our teeth and put up with the madness and refuse to be pushed out. Once the irritant has gone elsewhere - and the inevitably long interregnum is a reality - normality resumes.
It will take more than a cup to tea to cope with the inevitable grief this will produce. But I remain hopeful.
It’s Friday. But Sunday’s coming.
The examples I'm thinking of aren't in Wales either.
The reference to rural Wales was in connection with another issue. Not people seeking refuge from guitars and digital screens but changing address because their local expression has closed down.
@TheOrganist, yes, I agree with that.
@Alan29 tell me about it!
@Baptist Trainfan change?! Change?!
@Barnabas62 - yes, things will continue despite institutional collapse. I remember reading an article by a Methodist minister which suggested that Methodist spirituality would continue even if the Methodist church closed.
Still difficult though.
I have broad shoulders. But can understand your reticence of course. Probably best to move the analogy away from particular individuals though, whether your Mum or my late wife.
What I was thinking is that there are several ways in which the process of dying goes wrong, for the people around the person dying. Not all of these happens in all cases, but I can see most of them in the current situation of the Church of England, which will confront Welby's successor.
One is that the dying person is treated as an inconvenience, and seek to sweep them away as rapidly and neatly as decent. I see this in a lot of the revivals attempted by giving huge amounts of money to HTB-aligned "resource churches". The proportion of these which has succeeded is small and in most cases, the patient has ended up with about the same symptoms as they started with, though sometimes with more pretty, empty spaces.
One is the "if only you do this, you will survive" approach, usually seen as quackery in medical circles. With apologies to @theorganist and others, I see a lot of the conservative movements such as The Society as being like this. The problem with them is two-fold. First, they rely on an element of denialism - that the problem isn't as defined - for their solution to work, meaning that it can't. They also misattribute the problem, and fiercely attack elements which are not causing the symptoms. Thus, a huge amount of effort is wasted, people are hurt, and the patient dies anyway.
The other is with miserablism, which is definitely talking against myself. The problem with this is that it can tend to foreshorten the process of dying, and prevent the patient from living before they die. Since, in this case, some kind of life beyond the current process of death is the aim, more so even that for the human subject (where the post-death life is entirely out of our hands, of course), this can crush life out of the organism which could otherwise be the source of something after the death process has been completed, and the dead parts acknowledged and released.
There is an overall problem with "extraordinary measures". The patient eventually dies anyway, the extraordinary measures have exhausted those around the patient to the point where their lives have become burdensome, and life after the patient's death is made significantly harder by futile activities. Of course, this relies to a fair degree on 20/20 hindsight, and has some of the difficulties I just described as miserablist, but it still has its own element of truth.
At the moment, we (the Church of England) are stumbling through the situation like a drunk in a room of empty chairs with an aisle down the middle of it (think empty conference room). Sometimes we stumble down the aisle, sometimes we can do nothing without falling over and/or knocking over a whole load of chairs. Objectively, the difference between the two can be tiny, but the effects are so different that the differences are exaggerated and the disturbers of chairs condemned. Sometimes they, or their solution, deserves the condemnation, but they are still very relevant to consideration of what happens next, since as the adage has it, those who are ignorant of history, including recent history, are condemned to repeat it.
One thing we know is that we can't go round in the same circles indefinitely. The whole structure will die under the weight of its obligations and the insufficiency of its existence to sustain actual life.
I mjust admit though I have my wonders. Pace The Organist I'm inclined to think the parish system perhaps isn;t the thing in towns and cities but I'm sure things are quite different in rural areas especially as Wales has got a bit of a reputation for tribalism!! -D
Quite unjustified and some people deserve it anyway!!
Come on, mun. We en like ah at all.
It's them Gogs* yew wannoo watch, mind. As for the crachach** in Cardiff ...
* Gogs - Gogledd - people from North Wales.
* * Crachach - Welsh-speaking media, higher education and institutional elite.
'w' pronounced like a 'oo'
Not sure what they'd call people from South East Wales. They tend to recognise my accent as a Valleys one.
But we are getting away from Welby and the CofE.
I think @ThunderBunk raises some serious issues but I'm at a loss as to what to say as I really have no idea how anyone can address them.
At our place we have experienced it from both ends of the candle. First was an incumbent who announced on their third Sunday in-post that they would dispense with both Matins and Evensong, change the musical setting for eucharists, and dispensed with 5 out of 6 of our lay ministers of communion, all female. They lasted for 5 years with falling numbers until the only service with attendees in double figures (other than the choir) was the said 8am BCP communion.
After an interregnum of over 2 years we then got a far lower incumbent who decided the church was "too old" and decided if we went along the worship song sandwich "praise with cake" route that we would instantly be full of young families - ignoring the fact that most young families had been priced out of the area by rising property prices and soaring demand for holiday homes. Again, the 8am (which they farmed out to a retired priest with PTO) kept the parish going, while the choir and I gritted out teeth and churned out the required pap as best we could. This chap went on sabbatical 3 years in and sent in his letter of resignation the minute his plane touched down in North Carolina.
After another lengthy break, during which the church had more or less got itself back onto an even keel, we got a House-for-Duty part timer. In failing health when they arrived but with aspirations to move us far higher up the candle, their medical issues prevented them from carrying through most of their plans. They were with us for 7 years. But a parish that has only 1 PCC meeting a year (straight after the APM) gives the laity a clear message that they're on their own. And so that's what we've been doing ever since.
What has kept the parish in good heart? Two successive heads of Sunday School with an ability to get children attending from non-church families, and turn some of those families into new regulars. Churchwardens prepared to devote an enormous amount of time to running a parish, and with the drive, flair and commitment to do it properly. And a congregation and choir who see beyond the latest person in the pulpit spouting whatever version of Christianity they think fit to the real job of a rural church, which is to be the focus for the whole of the parish, and especially those who don't darken our doors very often.
Of course, things may be otherwise in an urban setting, where there is a wide variety of churches within easy reach, so a different approach might need to be taken in those circumstances. The people prepared to do the hard graft - and hard thinking! - are still needed, even though there seem to be fewer and fewer of them each year.
The advice I've traditionally heard given to new incumbents is "don't change anything for a year" i.e. see the full range of liturgical seasons and discover how things currently work before you decide what would make them better.
It's the only *High Church* parish in the town, and therefore attracts a few people for whom the unrelenting evangelicalism of most of the other C of E parishes has proved too much.
As far as the very deprived local community is concerned (we're one of the poorest parishes in England), a good deal of effort is made, with not much in the way of visible results, but the desire to serve is certainly present. The problem is finding enough willing hands to do anything...
Aren't PCCs supposed to act as a brake against tyrannical clerics in Anglican parishes.