Going down hill with no brakes

The latest statistical news on religion in this country continues a well established and depressing trend: Christianity is going down hill.

From the reliable British Religion in Numbers

Lord Ashcroft’s latest large-scale political poll, conducted online among 8,011 voters between 11 and 22 August 2016, included his customary question about professed ‘membership’ of religious groups.

.... the proportion identifying with no religion has increased steadily in similarly-sized Ashcroft surveys for the second half of each year since 2011, by almost five points over this quinquennium.

There has been a corresponding reduction in self-identifying Christians, who seem destined to lose their overall majority share within a matter of years. Indeed, religious nones are already in the ascendant among under-35s and supporters of green and nationalist political parties.

Henry VIII created the Church of
England by his demand that the clergy
submit to him.

(Lord Ashcroft Polls, BRIN links to pdfs of the survey results - see Table 65)

Hand-wringing and prophecy

I don't think I'm defeatist; I think we should face reality.

That reality is that religion is losing traction across the population. Inevitably this is uneven: some geographic areas, some age groups, some traditions will lose people quicker than others. Here and there affiliation to religion will grow. But the overall trend is decline.

This is not merely that people don't like religion, or see its faults and failings and decide it's not for them, or that they simply see the worst expressions of faith.

It's more fundamental:

• Fewer people think in religious ways
• Metaphor is no longer a legitimate or normal way to express or explore truth
• Conformity is not a positive value
• Always-on social media is not conducive to prayer and meditation
• It is hard to see religious experience as integral to the digital world
• Science has a mind-set which normally regards religion as irrelevant (at best). Furthermore: science delivers knowledge and tangible benefits that religion cannot match
• Religion is associated with (even identified with) fanaticism and violence, and at best social conservatism

But the majority of people simply don't care: religion is not so much meaningless as irrelevant.

Non-church-going: its reasons and remedies,
William Forbes Gray (ed), 1911

This isn't new, just inexorable. All sorts of responses have been tried (see the book pictured). Proposals have included: grow your church with hard work, dedication and faithfulness, seek greater holiness and devotion, return to traditional expressions of faith, adapt the faith to changing times, build big and they will come, don't adapt the faith but create fresh expressions of the church.

Each response has no doubt had some effect and been valuable for those involved - and without them things would probably have been worse - but still the trend is towards the marginalisation of Christianity. 

The Church of England 

The Church of England, in which I have a vested and pecuniary interest, seems to be losing affiliation more rapidly than some other groups (or, maybe, I just notice it more).

In fact all those things in which its identity is invested are just those things which make the CofE unable to adapt to changing circumstances,

The CofE remains hobbled and encumbered by its legal processes, its laws and legalism, its parochialism, its history, its hierarchical structure, its buildings, its entrenched divisions. Its structure militates against novelty.

Even the most ardent supporter could not call it 'nimble'. Long before he became Archbishop of York John Sentamu described the CofE as having 'the engine of a motor mower and the brakes of a juggernaut'.  It is an entirely reasonable for the leaders of the church themselves to create extra-mural ways of communication, mutual support and commitment (Companions of St Aidan, for example) as a way of getting around the constraints they work within.

Realism

I accept: one person's realism is another's defeatism. But I cannot see that tinkering at the edges of the CofE is going to save it. I think that if the Church of England is going to live it is going to have to die first.  We don't need a new reformation but a resurrection: a new body, a new identity.

Paul Bagshaw

Flying Fresh Expressions of Church: Holy Drones

The yet-to-be-announced St Hilda's Foundation for the Future of the Church of England (StuFFE, or HiFFE, we haven't yet decided) has been considering its future programme.

One central focus will be the impact of new technology on the delivery of Christian Ministry.

A preliminary scoping study identified drones as holding exciting possibilities. This is the executive summary of the initial report:

The potential for enhanced ministerial practice,
efficient delivery of pastoral care
and deepening spiritual life
by the deployment of
uncrewed aerial vehicles (drones)

Summary: it is highly probable that, as drone technology develops alongside a permissive regulatory regime, almost every area of church life can be enhanced by the use of drones. There may be downsides almost all of which can be dismissed as the misguided worries of antediluvians.

The care of individuals

Pastorally programmed drones (co-ordinate with phone and bracelet technology) might track every church member.

A drone can monitor, for example, the time members spend on their knees, or reading Scripture, or fasting or undertaking charitable or evangelistic tasks.

They can protect vulnerable members. They could, for instance, be programmed to ensure that members do not risk their faith by visiting locations of morally dubious activity.

Linked software can give ministers real-time searchable data on a range of customisable scales of devoutness. This might provide useful objective data by which to assess members being considered for such posts as door steward or coffee maker.

Drones could remove the need for home visits. Cameras and microphones could enable conversation at a distance (like a phone, but with greater spiritual punch). An extensible arm could deliver the sacraments. 

Any possible urgent action could be avoided by immediate, perhaps automatic, referral to the appropriate agency. Preliminary death-bed visits could be replaced by a static drone programmed to summon the just-in-time Priest when the last few minutes approach.

Downside: The possibility that bishops of other clergy overseers might also use the technology to monitor ministers.

The quality of worship 

Overhead drones during worship could be used to ensure that everyone was on the same page. They could assess degrees of distraction/concentration (by movement sensors or subtle changes in skin temperature) which can be fed back in real time to the minister. This would give the minister an unprecedented capacity to respond by, as occasion demands, announcing an unexpected hymn or doubling the length of a gripping sermon.

No downside identified.

Future prospects 

As drones develop we can anticipate greater carrying capacity and precision in flight programming. On this basis we anticipate significant widening of the scope for drones.

For example, holy drones could be given widely recognised visual insignia (a white bar on a black background, maybe). With this badge the authorities might allow the drone into difficult circumstances - a disaster, perhaps, or a riot, or other public trauma - and in this way the church might bring comfort and succour, safely and remotely.

Baptism

Baptisms could be conducted remotely, either in church or in people's homes and swimming pools. 

Specially adapted drones could, for example, lower an infant into a font. (One member of the group suggested that, if fonts were re-designed into a long oval shape, swinging the baby through would be a much more dramatic symbol of spiritual rebirth.)

Other symbolic aspects, making the sign of the cross in oil, for example could be undertaken by a carefully programmed extensible arm.

Downsides: none.

Weddings 

Weddings are already recorded by drone. It would be a small extension to have them conducted remotely. With a little planning several weddings, commencing at the same time in different venues, could be conducted simultaneously.  

The essence of marriage is the public commitment of each party to the other. Accordingly the drone, in recording the ceremony, could be sufficient for legal recognition of a valid wedding.

Downside: a minister may be less likely to be invited to the reception, with its free food and drink, if they are only remotely present.

Funerals  

There is significant potential for the use of drones at a funeral. Drones could, for example, carry the coffin to the burial and lower it into the grave with decorum and precision.  

Mourners may watch remotely (as already happens in crematoria). The minister could float above the grave sonorously intoning the service for the Burial of the Dead. 

Notes:

1. This proposal has an additional benefit: where land is expensive or scarce, of removing the need for paths or foot access and thus intensifying land use.
2. However the negative association of military drones with multiple and unaccountable deaths may make it difficult to engender sufficient public support.

Conclusion

As technology advances it is essential that churches embrace available developments. With such blessing, the results of God-given human ingenuity may be sacralized. Technology may, in return, open undreamed-of possibilities for ministry, evangelism and devotion. 

Some caution is always wise. This has at times been characterised as the church being behind the times (a logical impossibility). But this would be a mistaken interpretation. Instead faith and technology have long been in dialogue: writing and printing technology, for example, and architectural developments have shaped faith and been shaped by it.

StuFFE (or HiFFE) intends to be up to the job in the twenty-first century.

Cheques to support this vision may be sent to [text deleted for reasons of decorum].

Reforrm and Renewal - the South African way

From the website of the Archbishop of South Africa, Thabo Makgoba:

In just over six weeks' time, representatives from all 28 dioceses, including experts in strategic planning, will hold two meetings, back-to-back, in which the Province will seize a Kairos moment to review our Vision and Mission as a church, to strategise around ways to implement our priorities, and then to make practical decisions on how to implement them in a manner that is productive, holistic and transformative.

Five years ago, the Province adopted a Vision and Mission Statement. In it we declared that the Anglican community in Southern Africa seeks to be:

• Anchored – in the love of Christ
• Committed – to God’s mission
• Transformed – by the Holy Spirit

Archbishop visits victims of Duduza tornado
4 October 2011 (Hope Africa gallery)

We added that across the diverse countries and cultures of our region, we seek:

• To honour God in worship that feeds and empowers us for faithful witness and service
• To embody and proclaim the message of God’s redemptive hope and healing for people and creation
• To grow communities of faith that form, inform, and transform those who follow Christ.

Within the context provided by that statement, we declared our Provincial priorities in the succeeding decade to be: 

• Renewal for transformative worship
• Theological education and formation
• Leadership development
• Health (HIV and AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis)
• The environment
• Women and gender
• Protection and nurture of children and young people
• public advocacy

==========

To me the tone and substance might have significant and constructive lessons for the CofE, if we could hear.

1. To begin with God-orientated vision. Not fear of collapse.
2. A history of Kairos (remember the Kairos document of 1985?): embracing the possibility of transformation (wiki). As opposed to cautious and arthritic legislative reform and tinkering.
3. To look equally inwards and out: to see that the church is only whole when it is engaged in a transformative - and reflexive - manner with the injustices of the society in which we live.
4. And, as a united church, to be prepared to address public issues which are neither easy nor one-sided but where there is the possibility that the church could make a substantive and positive difference to people's live.

And, frankly, a sense of excitement. 

I don't doubt that in the cities and the deep countryside there will also be significant anxiety about what all this will mean for them. The view through the Archbishop's eyes is most unlikely to be the same view as a worshipper in a village outside Olifantshoek, say, or in the centre of Bloemfontein.

But we are buried under too much sediment: not only our history but also the weight of being the State church.

An imaginative Church?

The CofE does a weekly podcast. I'd never bothered with it before, but thought I'd have a listen to one (dated 16 July).

Bishop Thornton: blue skies man

What caught my ear first was Tim Thornton, Bishop of Truro, desperately not saying "imagination's in short supply." (at about 5min 40secs)

Instead he got to: "... imagination is in, er, very great demand, is not around very much."

He was selling a notion that vicars (and congregations) could and should re-imagine roles and  relationships. He  cited leadership in churches in mixed lay/clerical teams.

You could say that sounds basically like a PCC working well, but that might be too simplistic.

However if we take seriously - and I think we should - the notion that imagination is in short supply then it might be helpful to look at some possible reasons.

I suggest, for starters:

• The episcopal system effectively leaves all initiative with the bishop. Tim Thorton can get people to work in different ways because he is bishop. When a new bishop arrives with different ideas they too will be followed by the clergy.  
• Thornton says people need permission to be imaginative. Presumably because the episcopacy has previously constrained them.
• In effect Thornton says: by the authority vested in me I desire and permit you to be imaginative but (implicit but taught and heard well down the generations) only within the boundaries that I set. Those boundaries also include Thornton's tenure in office. New bishop, new ideas, new fashions and practices come into favour. However no bishop (nor, therefore incumbent) can bind the hands of their successor. 

It's not that people lack imagination. It's that the structures and relationships of the CofE have taught both clergy and laity that, first, each member should stay in their allotted place, second, that imagination comes close to insubordination and, third, that any exercise of the imagination is acceptable only within certain prescribed boundaries (which may or may not be set out clearly and in advance).

I found this image when I searched for 'PCC'

There are also, I think, also deeper and religious reasons for unimaginative practice.

• Faith is not only held (object-like) but lived, embodied. Insofar as faith is part of one's identity (individual or shared) behavioural change also entails becoming a different person, a different church. Of course, change is normal - it is the nature of life. But persuading someone else to deliberately change their identity, their sense of who they are and their relationships with others, is a very tall and often scary order.
• And there is always an anxiety in faith faced with novelty: how do we know we're getting it right? To do what has been done before is safe. It may not be adequate but it is secure. Part of  embodied faith is the reassurance which comes from hallowed repetition.

It maybe that a disproportionate number of unimaginative people make their home in the  CofE. or that the CofE has consistently devalued imagination. Or, probably, both. Either way it'll take more than episcopal encouragement to make a thousand flowers bloom.

Destination Imagination

The last sustained and effective re-imagining of the CofE was by the Oxford Movement. It was, of course, initially opposed by bishops. It evoked opposition, some of it violent, sent some clergy to gaol, and took perhaps 100+ years to become the new normal. In part we need new imagination because we are only now shedding such victoriana.

Eight impossible things the C of E will never do

Disclaimer: I don't mean any of these literally - and, contrariwise - I know several of them are well underway in some churches. Some have been happening for years - just not necessarily round here. Others are almost inconceivable.

To be clear: this is just a personal tirade. Each of these suggestions is merely meant to point to some aspect of the challenge I think we face. I don't propose to put them into practice (not all of them, anyway). 

1. Walk out of church Sunday

This is especially for those with listed buildings but everyone can play.  Simply leave. (Having, of course, done a good dust and spring clean and checked all electrical appliances are unplugged).

The PCC can resign en mass (leaving a couple of people as residual trustees of any money) and ask the Archdeacon to take over responsibility for the church (copy to the Bishop).

Send a polite letter to the Second Church Estates Commissioner suggesting that the State should take responsibility for the building and telling her which flowerpot the keys are hidden under.

Don't forget, tell the neighbours you'll be away for a while.  And remember to tell the congregation a minimum of one week before it happens. Otherwise people won't know whether they're still supposed to be on the stewarding rota.

2. No congregation should ever own a church

Then hire a meeting place. Find somewhere with decent parking, comfortable seats and above all a cosy feel. Check that coffee and cake are available and that the toilets are clean and comfortable.

If your numbers dwindle move somewhere smaller. When they grow, move somewhere bigger.

In this way you can always be the right size group. You can move to where people are. Leaders can give almost all their attention to the people, the worship and deepening faith - and not to the building. God can be worshipped with minimal distraction. Members can decide what's important and not be overwhelmed by the demands of drains and guttering.

3. Listen to people

I think God listens to each of us. I think the church should too.

At the moment the Church of England pays almost no regard to almost all the laity. The words people use in worship are all scripted. Individuals' experience, priorities, delights and anxieties have no place in such prescribed services.

This relationship is symbolised and realised in the sermon: one person speaks and the rest remain passive. There is no mutuality.

It's not just that the audience have no voice - I would guess it's very rare for a sermoniser even to check what people have heard. The odd hints I occasionally get suggest there can be a considerable and sometimes entertaining gap between what I think I said and what someone else thinks they heard.

And f the church doesn't listen to its members how on earth can it expect to listen to people outside it?

4. Give lay people a full part in the government of the Church

At a larger scale the structure of church government deliberately marginalises the laity. Lay members vote for Deanery Synod Representatives. Deanery Synod Representatives vote for Diocesan and General Synod Representatives. Consequently no-one is accountable to members.

I think it's high time that all members had a vote and a voice. I think representatives should then account to their electorate. It should be easier as there are fewer and fewer of us.

5. and no more processions

Processions embody hierarchy, status and power. They literally set each person in their rank and degree, They mark who's in and who's not. Those who do not process do not count.

I can see some justifications for processions - but not a Christian one (Aquinas notwithstanding).

More significantly, processions are archaic: relics of a social ordering increasingly destroyed by digitisation.

6. Throw out the clutter

Church vestries are renowned for the clutter they accumulate. No-one's quite sure who put the stone gargoyle in the corner, or whether the books belong to the vicar, or whether you need a faculty to throw away unused and mildewed cassocks, or who promised to repair the torn linen. So it all just silts up.

Throw it away (having, of course, first found out about the faculty bit). Throw out the remaining pews, redundant hymn books, nineteenth century robes and ideas. Make space in the vestry and in prayer, give God a bit of room and, when Jesus comes round for a coffee, make sure the place is bright, warm and comfortable.

And, while we're about it, don't be half hearted with legislative reform. Piecemeal tinkering will only end up with pieces all over the floor. Decide the key principles that church governance must and should enact. Throw away everything else.

7. Account for the right things

I know we need to count numbers and money. They are important in themselves (though always, of course, with lots of caveats).

But I think we also need to count what a church gives away. Faith is not something we have but something to be given away. God does not bless us so that we can hoard it, but so that we can be a blessing to others. Jesus did not tell his disciples to guard his teachings carefully - he sent them out to share with all and sundry.

I think counting what a church gives - money, time, energy, facilities - may also be a measure of its compassion and faithfulness.

8. and no more talking heads videos

This is not the way to reform or renew anything:

 Let's have a bit of life, imagination, passion, dynamism, colour, indignation, vision, vitality. This is just dull.

Are we all doomed?

In the words of private Frazer:



Several people have looked at the decline in attendance in the Church of England and projected forward to the date of extinction:

Church Growth Modelling gives around 2040 for the death of The Church in Wales, The Scottish Episcopal Church and The Episcopal Church in the US. The Church of England, starting at a higher numerical base, dies beyond the edge of the graph, sometime around 2100 perhaps.

The Spectator is more pessimistic (which may not surprise anyone). Damian Thompson projects that 2067 will be the date on the Church's tombstone.  He says:

That is the year in which the Christians who have inherited the faith of their British ancestors will become statistically invisible. Parish churches everywhere will have been adapted for secular use, demolished or abandoned. 

... Christianity is dying out among the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic inhabitants of Great Britain. The Gospel that Augustine and his 30 monks brought to England when they landed at Ebbsfleet in ad 597 is now being decisively rejected.

Of course, projections are not predictions. No-one knows what will happen between now and then. Will the effect of Reform and Renewal lift the leading edge of the graph and send it upwards? Will the impact of discussion about deep change lead to depression and hasten decline? Or will none of it make any difference?

Maybe the decline won't be steady at all. Implicit in the larger scale statistics is a picture of support ebbing away like a receding tide (it's gone a long way out from Dover Beach by now). 

But actually, for the most part, we belong to and worship in small semi-discrete units: parish churches. Here I suspect the pattern of decline is more or less steady until there comes a tipping point - where members' time, money and energy is no longer sufficient to sustain the building, services and clergy. One congregation I knew gave up when there were four people left, another had eight.

In other words, the long downhill slope ends suddenly as we fall over the cliff, like this (entirely imaginary) graph.

On this scenario projections from earlier data could even look somewhat optimistic.

Death (and resurrection?)

We do not have to accept less of the same, and may not be able to.

Perhaps 1: in the face of apparently inevitable obliteration, those who remain refuse to accept it. Maybe this will force a radical revision of the Church - it's shape, structure, role and mission. This in turn may tear the church apart if its current divisions are stronger that what holds it together.

Or 2: (I think more probably) minorities may be torn away, leaving a smaller continuing core.

However it happens, and whoever claims legitimate succession, in effect a new church (or churches) will be born from the ashes of the old.

Or 3: even more pessimistically, perhaps at some point in this century the Church of England will simply implode. Perhaps its internal divisions will prevent adequate revision. It might collapse like a burst balloon, as one too many parish church closures triggers an unstoppable cascade of others. At which point those who remain may say to themselves 'that's it. God has abandoned us.'

Or 4: they may say: 'time for a new start'.

Heading downhill

Statistics can be very depressing.

The blog Church Growth Modelling is written by John Hayward, a mathematician committed to the revival of the Church. It has lots of downward curves.

I find this one particularly interesting: 

In essence, roughly since the end of the First World War (or the Second, in Wales) Anglican Church affiliation in the West has headed south.

Second, the percentage of the population was not that great in the twentieth century, even at peak membership -  just over 10% for the CofE in the 1910s. And membership of the CofE was never the same as regular attendance. As Haywood says: "Churches in the West have never been as popular as they have perceived themselves to be."

And, third, through this century the population has grown significantly. This itself has helped buoy up absolute numbers while disguising the rate of decline.

Statistics are always retrospective. The question is whether, given the background rate of decline in affiliation Christianity, any one Church - or even all of them acting together - can do anything effective to counter a cultural shift.

Reform and Renewal

Reform and Renewal
These are the latest buzz words of the Church of England. They summarise what  might be an heroic attempt to rebuild and re-orientate the Church: to create a stronger and more missionary church.

The words might signify the beginning of a new Augustinian proclamation of the gospel in a pagan land - the church responding at last to secularization.

Or they might mean merely 'reduce and retrench'.

In broad terms I am very much in favour of the shake up which I think is entailed by 'Reform and Renewal'. I think the Church of England has come to the tail end of the reforms which shook it up in the nineteenth century. That did a lot of good and re-orientated the Church towards the new urban and industrial Britain. But the church created then is wholly unequipped for today's world, let alone tomorrow's. It's a Spy cartoon compared to Wired.

On the other hand, it's very hard to see that this current, top down, reform programme will be sufficient to re-orientate the Church towards the new, digitised, fluid, transnational, anxious and capitalist world.

And it is also very hard to see that any of the streams will be sufficient to the underlying challenge: that fewer and fewer people in the UK are bothered about religion.

(When I googled 'church of england reform and renewal' looking for illustrative images I was given a page dominated by middle-aged white men's heads, most in funny clothes. This does reflect the church, and the leadership of many other English institutions, but it is scarcely inspiring. I went for seeds and seedlings instead.)

Reform and Renewal strands:

Developing Discipleship
Blog / Video / Full Report / Comment Forum

Simplification Report
Blog / Video / Full Report / Comment Forum / Simplification Consultation document

Resourcing Ministerial EducationBlog / Video / Full Report / Comment Forum

Resourcing the Future
Blog / Video / Full Report / Comment Forum

Church Commissioners' and the Task Groups
Blog / Video / Full Report / Comment Forum

Leadership DevelopmentDean of Liverpool blog / Archbishop of Canterbury blog / Note from Bishop of Ely / Full Report