Author: Simon Jenkins
Publication: The Statesman, Kolkatta.
Date: December 28, 2000
Introduction: Fair-weather church-goers
pray for a day. The average weekly attendance at parish churches in England
is under 40 people, says Simon Jenkins. Churches receive public money and
enjoy public protection. So they have an obligation to be more intensively
used by all Christian (and non-Christian?) denominations.
An early sketch by English comedian
Row- an Atkinson depicted a vicar damning his congregation from the pulpit.
Why were they present in such numbers, he demanded.
Where were they last week, and the
week before? Where was Mr Tomkins in his best suit and Mr. Tomkins in his
best suit and Mrs Snodgrass in that colourful hat? They were not here to
listen to the Word of God. They had just heard that the Beeb was in town
and the service was on Songs of Praise.
The same goes for Christmas. The
weekly dribble turns to flood as fairweather church-goers "pray-for-a-day".
The family scurries out of the door. Each member seeks to avoid the parson's
eye and the accusatorial: "We shall he seeing you next Sunday?"
The Church of England has reportedly
had a difficult year. Communicants have fallen below one million for the
first time. A report of the National Society spoke of a collapse of Anglicanism
among the young. "Spirituality is on the agenda of many," it said, "church
is not". Only 65 per cent of the population now consider themselves Christian
and the number attending church has fallen by a quarter in 20 years.
Anglicans have failed to follow
1999's lead of the Lutherans in Germany, and "healed the breach" with Rome.
Small wonder that the new Bishop of Ely declared a "frontier ministry"
in some parts of the country. I regard this as the Church's problem. But
if the Church of England has had a bad year, the churches of England have
had a worse one. Their predicament should concern everyone. Without enthusiastic
custodians, England's most prominent landmarks are in trouble.
Of one thing I am convinced. If
there were just three practising Christians left on these islands, they
would be an Anglican, a Roman Catholic and a Nonconformist, each in a separate
church. They may adhere to the same faith. But not God in His Heaven will
get them to share the same building.
Liverpudlians used to make much
of the closeness of their two long-serving bishops, the Anglican David
Sheppard and the Catholic Derek Worlock. They struggled for years to bridge
the schism between their respective communities and achieved much in this
respect. But there was no meeting of religions. They were leaders of ancient
tribes, smoking pipes of peace but never intermarrying. Their communities
remained separate, secure in their cathedral fortresses.
They reminded me of the Welsh-American
millionaire who offered to restore just one chapel in each village in his
part of Wales, provided all the others closed. The offer was refused. Chapel-going
Wales would rather rot than share.
At this time of year, the letters
page of The Times is filled with lamentation over the future of the Church
in an ungodly society. Writers wail of a hierarchy mired in bureaucracy,
with ever more clergy sitting in offices and fewer in parishes. Like the
Royal Navy with ever more admirals per ship, the Church of England has
ever more bishops per worshipper. This year, it even discussed appointing
a third archbishop. As with all big organisations, bureaucracy grows in
inverse proportion to output.
We need not worry about the bishops
and deans. Their cathedrals are the success stories of modern Anglicanism,
with two-thirds even reporting rising congregations. They profit from fund-raising
events, concerts, civic functions and admission charges. Cathedrals are
public attractions in their own right. They may claim to be 'at the heart
of the community", but they abuse the term. They are at the heart of the
region. It is the parish church that lies at the community's true heart.
But that heart beats ever fainter.
These churches remain the glories
of provincial England. Their steeples soar over the roofs, high streets
and estates of each neighbourhood. They were built to serve every aspect
of communal life, political, social and religious.
If cathedrals are the palaces of
English Christianity, parish churches are its stately homes. Yet like such
homes before the war, they languish in the hands of ancestral families,
underoccupied, overtaxed, vulnerable to disuse and decay, and a perpetual
strain on their custodians.
In one recent letter to The Times,
Gavin Ashenden of Sussex University sounded the alarm over the fate of
these buildings. Church-goers were getting steadily older, he wrote, and
soon "the pensioned generosity as well as widow's mites on which the Church
depends will have passed to another generation, who share little or no
commitment to the national Church". Dr Ashenden's prescription was clear
: the Church should "realise its property assets and make the hard decision
to sell land and buildings".
The Church should, in other words,
sell the family silver and spend the money on evangelism. Most non-Anglicans
might say amen to that. They might call time on what many now see as gaunt
buildings, surviving without apparent purpose amid ill-tended gardens on
prime sites. I disagree. These churches were built long ago by local people
for a religious purpose.
They are temples to their history
and their faith. They may lack the day-to-day vitality of a Hindu or Buddhist
temple but that is in large part due to their sectarianism and unimaginative
custodianship. They are historic buildings and thus of limited commercial
value. Normal planning demands that every effort be made to use them for
their original purpose. No church should be demolished until the entire
Christian community has been invited to share it. In most towns and villages,
the Roman Catholics are still expelled to grim chapels or tiny huts on
the outskirts, as if Good Queen Bess had just assumed the throne.
And why should Methodists and Baptists
not be invited to sell their buildings and take up residence in the parish
church? Why not welcome the fastest growing denomination, the Pentacostalists?
Parish churches are Christian buildings. It is a desperate comment on Anglican
diplomacy that it cannot replicate the community churches of modern America,
or even the ecumenism of German Lutherans. Is Wesley still anathema?
By my calculation, the average attendance
at parish churches is under 40 people a week, an average that conceals
thousands of buildings that are virtually redundant. These churches may
survive on the efforts of a few valiant souls scratching together the money
to repair the roof and keep out the mice.
But the sheer emptiness of these
buildings in the booming suburbanisation of England is an anachronism.
It cannot be sustainable.
Churches receive public money and
enjoy public protection. They have an obligation to be more intensively
used by all Christian (and non-Christian?) denominations, and by the community
at large. In return, those denominations and that community must accept
responsibility for them.
No church should receive a grant
for its upkeep, bells, alterations or floodlighting without a formal plan
for its "opening" to the public. This means opening in every sense, including
for rival religious ceremonies and services.
There is no reason the nave should
not he available, as it was in the Middle Ages, to accommodate the civic,
cultural and even commercial parish activities. Clubs and societies used
to meet in the church and help to pay for its upkeep. Children were taught
in transepts or galleries.
The poor were sheltered in the porch.
Lunatics and prisoners were lodged in the vestry. These places were built
for all to use. It is little short of outrageous that, rather than admit
a rival creed or revive an original purpose, the Church should consider
sale and demolition.
There may or may not be al, crisis
of "Establishment" in the Church of England. This is a matter for constitutionalist.
There is certainly a challenge to its "Establishment" locally. Perhaps,
the last act of Establishment should be the opposite of privatisation.
Recent White Papers on the future
of urban and rural England spoke of reviving parish councils as a way of
reviving the spirit of neighbourhood.
That is a fine goal. But a first
charge I on such neighbourhoods should be safeguarding the future of their
most prominent institution, one never mentioned in any White Paper.
The parish church is the true cathedral
of locality. It will never go away. If the Church cannot resolve its future
then, this once, the State should intervene.
(Originally from The Times, London.)
