by Martyn Percy

Second in a series of four reflections

It is hard to imagine the Church of England hanging on to its powers and privileges in the next 50 years. Especially since the majority of citizens expect equality and accountability from their institutions as any prerequisite for trust. Moreover, as the numbers of paid-up members of the Church of England has already effectively fallen of the cliff-edge – and there is no sign that this decline is temporary or seasonal – serious questions have to be asked.  These relate to the fitness and role of an established church in one nation, yet within a devolved union of three nations, and Northern Ireland.

The present state of the Church of England would pose an enormous challenge for the very best estate agent to elicit serious interest. True, the CofE is not for sale. But it is constantly on the lookout for long-term and loyal tenants who will take care of the storefront as though they were the owners. Upkeep, appearance, productivity, regional-brand-compliance and purpose are devolved to the local occupiers, who mostly do an extremely good job on very tight budgets.

For all their labour, laity and clergy will receive little thanks from their somewhat distant landlords, who are only interested in the productivity and turnover. And compliance too, unless diversification delivers growth.  We now have a situation in which the Church of England’s senior leadership are re-mortgaging the church on a regular basis.

In this, they are banking on the past and borrowing from the future to try and resolve the present issues.  As many will know with their own homes, it is risky – and only makes sense if the value of your property goes up.  But as the social, moral, spiritual and intellectual capital of the Church of England is all in negative equity, there may be a default at any point.

A senior colleague and friend from a Diocese in the Church of England, and one that enjoys a very fine and lengthy coastline, was surprised to come back from a short sabbatical and be met by the recently appointed Leader of the Enabling Team, charged with delivering and rolling out the maps and charts for a new Mission Action Plan for the Diocese. 

Naturally, my friend had to be paid a visit by the Leader of the Enabling Team promoting the fizzy new Mission Action Plan, so everyone was “fully on board”. My friend studied the maps carefully, which showed where the new congregations were to be “planted”, and how the “old parishes” were to be “consolidated and merged” into new “Missional Minster Areas”. 

Somehow, all of this was meant to be met with breathless excitement.  Who could not be excited at such good news?  For example, the rural deaneries were to be replaced with “active-out-facing resource hubs geared for equipping disciples and enabling transformation”.  (Who in God’s name writes this stuff?). This would all be done and dusted by 2035.  There was a new catchy strapline for the Diocese too, and a specially written prayer for this bold endeavour. 

But my critical colleague asked if the authors had seen the BBC Weather App of late, and looked at the predicted 2035 climate change map for their region?  Of course this future-map had not figured in missional groupthink. 

“Well”, said my colleague, “that map shows half the diocese under water, so most of these new congregations will be submerged.  Worse still, our rural economy, tourism, fishing, shipping and port industries, and many of our current transport infrastructures will be decimated. Did the group think about what kind of world we might be living in by 2035?” Answer came there none.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has recently announced a Bond of £500 million, secured against the future Church of England.  Bonds are traditionally secured on assets, and the money has to be repaid – eventually.  Of course, £500 million in 50 years’ time won’t feel as much as it does now. And perhaps the gamble was worth it – money in the short-term, to see if the future in the long-term can be secured.  That will depend on clergy and laity pursuing the goals and vision set by Bishops and the Archbishops.

So far, there is no sign that these goals and visions are consensual, corporately owned, or collectively assented to.  Most vision-talk by the hierarchy is met with polite indifference, or just ignored. There is no leverage to compel followers of Jesus to pay obeisance to the latest episcopal strategy. Thank God for that.

Yet re-mortgaging the Church of England is going to be a risky business.  Local branches may want to start asking some quite basic questions.  Who really owns this business? Who does it serve, and for what purposes?  Who are these people in regional and national Headquarters, telling us how to run things locally, and cutting our support whilst increasing their own?

As the term zugwang denotes (in chess), every move the church makes is wrong and only makes your position worse.  Yet the player at the board cannot sit there and do nothing, as that will forfeit the actual match. The famous psychologist Jonathan Haidt once said that to understand the governing narratives of our time, we needed to:

“follow the sacredness… find out what people believe to be sacred, and when [you find that, and the people gathered], there you find rampant irrationality”.

Yet faced with difficult choices and competing convictions, most of our church leaders set aside law and wisdom, in order to accommodate all ardent opinions and belief claims.  The embrace what I call Rampant-Sacred-Irrationality, which defies reason and facts.  In the Bible there is a famous story about King Solomon (I Kings 3: 16-28), who ruled between two women both claiming to be the mother of a baby. The two mothers lived in the same house, where each mother cared for an infant son.

One of the babies died, and both women claimed the remaining baby as her own. Both were mothers. Both faced grief and loss.  Both represent a form of Rampant-Sacred-Irrationality.  Solomon’s ultimate justice was an archetypal example of an impartial judge displaying wisdom in a ruling.

Fast-forward to today’s Church of England, and imagine the same story.  But in our modern rendering, Bishop Solomon has left the temple, having finally entered into a co-parenting arrangement with the women, both fighting over the one child. Why? Because Bishop Solomon’s Rampant-Sacred-Irrationality is that you cannot upset either mother, and so both deserve something.  What was he supposed to do with a bereaved woman, and another one hysterical? Compromise was his solution. But not truth and justice.

In a telling article by Bailey Lemon (‘Why this Radical Leftist is Disillusioned by Leftist Culture’, Medium Magazine, 16 February 2020), she examines the inherent contradictions present in a culture that speaks about being progressive, when in fact it is aggressive, oppressive and repressive:

They talk about listening, being humble, questioning one’s preconceived notions about other people and hearing their lived experiences…and yet ignore the lived experiences of those who don’t speak or think properly in the view of university-educated social justice warriors, regardless of how much worse off they really are. That is not to say that we should accept bigotry in any form — far from it. But I would go as far as saying that the politically correct mafia on the left perpetuates a form of bigotry on its own because it alienates and “otherizes” those who do not share their ways of thinking and speaking about the world.

Bailey is talking about the Radical Left, but her analysis comfortably translates to the current culture of the Church of England in many Dioceses, and most certainly from the Archbishops. Bailey continues:

I’m tired of the cliques, the hierarchies, the policing of others, and the power imbalances that exist between people who claim to be friends and comrades. I am exhausted and saddened by the fact that any type of disagreement or difference of opinion in an activist circle will lead to a fight, which sometimes includes abandonment of certain people, deeming them “unsafe” as well as public shaming and slander. It is disgusting that we claim to be building a new world, a new society, a better way of dealing with social problems — but if a person makes a mistake, says and/or does something wrong, they are not even given a chance to explain their side of what happened because the process of conflict resolution is in itself driven by ideology rather than a willingness to understand facts. Actually, in today’s activist circles one is lucky to be given any sort of due process at all, while everyone is put under social pressure to believe everything they are told regardless of what actually occurred in a given situation. This is not freedom. This is not social justice. There is nothing “progressive” or “radical” about it, unless you are referring to fascism.

Again, the resonances with the current Church of England culture hardly need spelling out.  Yet a culture where there is no accountability, transparency or scrutiny of Bishops creates a seed-bed for inequality and injustice.  Bishops seem content to let this continue, and none call it out. 

Do they apologise for their mistakes in the here and now? No. But they will sincerely and sanctimoniously say sorry for sins committed centuries ago, but not by them. Do they acknowledge that the institution they want to see supported is broken, frail and far from perfect? No. They tell us instead that progress is being made, we are all on a journey, and that things are much better than they were ten years ago, or since they came into office. Do they provide convincing evidence for this? No. But you are still meant to trust them. Should you? Let us leave that question open.