One of the expressions that used to be around a lot in Christian circles and institutions was that of ‘inter-denominational’. By suggesting that an organisation sat lightly on the boundaries that existed between Christian denominations, it was trying to pretend that somehow it transcended these differences. Of course one soon learnt to realise that ‘inter-denominational’ was a code for a complete rejection for all the historical issues that exist in the Christian story in favour of what this blog would claim to be a flat, predictable evangelical form of Christianity. By claiming that evangelical Christianity was in a direct succession to the New Testament and the early church because it alone followed the letter of Scripture, the events and twists and turns of Church history could be ignored at will. In practice the conservative evangelical interpretation did hang on to some parts of Reformation history but this left the first 15 centuries to be ignored as though they had never existed. Thus the contributions of Orthodoxy, the medieval mystics and the Celtic church were airbrushed out of consideration by ‘bible-believing Christians’.

All Christian denominations exist because of the events of church history. Each denomination represented an important emphasis which stood as a witness to one part of the great panoply of Christian truth. Thus the few Anglicans who have taken the trouble to study the Methodists cannot fail to be impressed by what the Wesley brothers stood for, even if they do want to become Methodists in the 21st century.

Evangelicalism and ecumenism do not mix. The reason is that the former has very little sense of Christian history in claiming that it alone knows the ‘truth’ because it has God’s word. Ecumenism is rooted in a firm understanding that Christian history must be embraced and understood so that all that the different Christian bodies represent can be heard, understood and represented in finding an ever fuller vision of Christian truth.

Ecumenism is thus hard work and takes patience and intelligent study as well as imagination. The cliché-ridden slogans of popular evangelical rhetoric do not deliver the subtleties required for this kind of work. Here in the Anglican Diocese of Carlisle we have a conundrum which is preventing important ecumenical work proceeding because of the predominance of evangelical churchmanship in the area. Over the past 20 years this Diocese has encouraged many evangelical clergy to occupy hitherto ‘middle of the road’ parishes. Now the Diocese is finding it hard to move forward with a great plan for working more closely with the United Reformed Church and the Methodist to form mission areas. A predictable resistance is being found on both sides. It is hardly surprising to find that an evangelical clergyman rooted in the Bible finds it hard to understand the subtleties of difference with their Methodist brethren. The feeling is mutual. I do not know what is going on at the other end of the Diocese but things do not look good around here. And yet it was all so predictable …….

The government of Britain is at present in a bit of a dilemma how to respond to the stories of an Islamic ‘takeover’ in certain primary and secondary schools in Birmingham.

No doubt the details of what has been going on will eventually emerge, but there is revealed in this story some confusion as to what would constitute an ‘unsafe’ education. The government obviously want to protect children from coming under the influence of extremist teachers and speakers. I dare say that they would like them to understand that in every discussion there is normally another point of view that needs to be weighed up before the first opinion is accepted. The aim of education is to have an understanding of the way society works, the values of tolerance, empathy and compassion.  There is also the value of respecting the opnion of another person.   The trouble is that there are many  schools, Christian and Muslim which do not subscribe to these values. The so-called ‘Christian’ school which claims to teach ‘Christian’ values may also be a hot-bed of misogyny, homophobia and plain scare tactics. A typical Christian-aided primary school (of which there are many thousand in Britain) will normally have a decent head-teacher but they will be under constant pressure to allow in unsuitable speakers to come and rant at the children for assembly. I still remember hearing about a school where the Vicar spoke so strongly about the awfulness of hell, that many of the children were in tears. The problem is that one impressive but nutty speaker can have a powerful effect on a vulnerable child. My brother who is a parent-governor at a school in Canterbury when an outside speaker came to do a powerful fundamentalist presentation to the children, telling them that the ones not in church on Sunday would not go the heaven. This school is not even a church school.

The values of education on which everyone can agree are not easy to define. As regards the religious content, the agnostic opinions of the majority could be seen to interfere with the desire of parents, Muslim and Christian to have a religious education for their children. The Government has to tread extremely carefully. And yet they know that if there are no restrictions put on what is taught in schools we may have a generation of Muslim children who grow up, at best marginalised from the wider society but, at worst, encouraged to become alienated terrorists. Children educated in the extremist end of the Christian faith will not be terrorists since this is not part of the ultra-fundamentalist agenda. But many of them will grow up unhappy, lacking in self-esteem and terribly fearful. Many of them will also have suffered violence at the hands of their parents, because of the apparent injunctions of Proverbs. Others will have imbibed a terrible sense of guilt that hangs over them like a miasma for the whole of their lives. Their suffering will be handed on to their children because this kind of teaching goes down the generations.

Let us watch the newspapers in the next few weeks to see how our politicians cope with this dilemma. The best thing that can happen is there to be a real debate about religious education. All of us want religion to be taught in a way that opens up this whole dimension of life so that something of its wonder and mystery can be glimpsed. The schools can do this as long as the fanatics of whatever religion or faith are firmly kept out of our schools.

One of the problems of studying the issue of conservative evangelical churches is that the situations on each side of the Atlantic are quite different. On the other side of the Atlantic, the word ‘fundamentalist’ has an exact historical meaning and is sometime worn as a badge of pride. It can be traced back to the period of the First World War when a group of conservative theologians wrote pamphlets which stood up for the ‘fundamentals’ of the faith against modernist ideas. In Britain the word is generally resisted by evangelicals, and they maintain that the word describes people with ideas which are pretty extreme and for the most part are not found in this country. These ideas would include an insistence of six day creation, a total denial of theories of evolution and a belief that women have no part in ministry. A more moderate evangelical position would tolerate women in ministry, find some way of accommodating evolution and certainly not endorse the ‘young earth’ theories. That such ideas are found at all in this country seems to be the result of ‘Christian’ schools importing wholesale educational material which contain some truly ultra-conservative opinions. If you want to see these kinds of ideas on offer, you need to get hold of the text-books used for independent Christian schools (including home schooling) where the American fundamentalist bias is clearly seen. One answer to the question as whether evangelicals in this country are fundamentalist is to say: ‘It depends on how far certain styles of American literature, American institutions and ideas have been welcomed into British churches and homes.’ The dire material that is churned out on the so-called ‘God Channel’ also has all the hall-marks of the worst kind of American fundamentalism.

In the past twelve months a new book entitled Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism edited by David Bebbington has been published. It is particularly valuable because it is a scholarly study of the situation in the UK.  It talks for example about the influence of Billy Graham in this country and the way that fundamentalist/evangelical movements in Ireland and Wales had their own characteristic emphases which were quite distinct from those of America. There is a scholarly attempt to separate to separate the words evangelicalism from the ‘f’ word by noting how fundamentalism in America normally had a militancy and a strong separatist tendency which only rarely found in this country. I have dipped into the book and I expect that I will be sharing segments of it over the coming months.

This blog is meant to be a short blog and I wanted to suggest that a study needs to be made at some point to examine the question as to how far the church in Britain and individual Christian have been corrupted by the influence and excesses of a rampant American fundamentalism. It reaches us, as I have already suggested, through literature, broadcasting and the effect on leaders who want to be up to date with the show-biz style and music that belongs to some American churches. The sobriety of a John Stott at All Souls Langham Place, seems to be a mile away from these excesses. I may not like the theology of John Stott but at least we are on the same planet culturally . In my study Ungodly Fear, I recorded how an American church was transplanted complete with leaders in a West country town. Perhaps there was an attractive glamour about its style but there was also something un-English about the way people were trapped into styles of church life that did them much harm.

The David Bebbington book, which I welcome and value, throws into relief the need for churches in this country to work out which strands of culture and theology are indigenous to our land, and which come as brash imports. The brash imports may have glamour but they lack the reflective sobriety of the British approach to church and theology. Perhaps my conclusion is that fundamentalism is everything that comes to conservative Christians from across the Atlantic in the packaging style of ultra-right-wing evangelicalism. What evangelicalism belongs to this country, however strange it in its ideas to my way of thinking, can be dignified by the more sober description of ‘conservative evangelicalism’. It is for the conservative evangelicals themselves to purge themselves of the crazinesses that flow across the Atlantic.  To all of them, I would say: ‘Be very, very careful before you welcome the money, glamour and influence of imports from a land that sometimes appears to revel in weird and somewhat crazy Christian ideas.

In the previous post I mentioned the Wasdell research in the 60s which was filled out by further work done by the Alban Institute in later decades in the States.   Although we might think that American churches are generally full, with hundreds of members in each of them, the average congregation is not dissimilar to our own, with some 50 – 80 souls in each. It would however be true to say that in the States there are far more congregations at the top end in numbers than in this country.   But for the most part, they also have small congregations which struggle with the same problems of viability (financial and otherwise) and the need to provide helpful ministry. One point that Wasdell made in his research, which was not particularly picked up by the Alban Institute, was that a 150 worshipping congregation is seldom exceeded in the UK because people who come feel a sense of estrangement when any congregation becomes too big. Anonymity is fine if you are young, unattached or in a situation of transition, like that of being a student. Having no one to recognise you is not OK if you are an older person or someone struggling with mental health issues. Being noticed is also important to anyone who lives in a place and wants to be a part of the community and make their contribution to it.

Wasdell was saying, to summarise, that most congregations find a natural ceiling of around 150 people. Obviously there may well be more people associated with a particular church but the ASA (average Sunday attendance) at the main service will only rarely exceed this number. As I said in the previous post, the larger churches have to make changes of organisation in order to manage a higher number successfully. But, if it is true that most churches in fact do stop growing when their regular main congregation reaches this 150 mark, then this will affect our understanding of mission and outreach. What are the implication of this research finding on the church’s desire to evangelise and reach out to save souls among the mass of people who do not as yet come to our churches?

When I was a Vicar or Rector I remember posing the question. ‘How many people could our church absorb at one time.? People pondered this question and the answer was generally agreed to be around 20% over the course of a year. In a congregation of 90 this represented 18 new people, or one or two a month. Were the congregation to be faced with an influx of 50 people at once, then there was a recognition that the carefully nurtured dynamics and inner relationships of the congregation would be affected dramatically. It would represent a challenging task to absorb so many new people and not lose whatever character and style the congregation already possessed. Perhaps it is a challenge that some leaders would relish, but I suspect that in practice it would also be highly stressful. In practice the last two congregations that I oversaw attracted on average of one new person a month. The integration of such numbers of people was manageable. The existing dynamics were preserved and the congregation were helped not to remain too inward looking by a steady drip of new faces arriving.

The Church talks a lot about church growth and mission but I suspect that there are not many who have really though the practicalities of managing large numbers of new converts. The structures of the Anglican church that I know could certainly not cope with a large influx all at once and I wonder whether any church could manage the enormous practical issues of large numbers of converts beyond 20-25% in the course of a year. Thus I raise the question as to whether most churches are equipped for the kind of evangelism that they say they want to provide.

The 150 ceiling which seems to describe so many of the congregations of Britain does suggest to me that mass evangelism will never in fact happen while the Church is organised in the way it is. If there is to be a partial conversion of large numbers of people in society (as many say they want) then the Church would have to change shape in ways that are impossible to conceive at present. There is however another way of understanding the meaning of ‘mission’. The church could explore more deeply how to ‘be’ a church within a community, how to do the things it does but with a far greater awareness of how these impact on the community around. The weekly tasks of worship, prayer and service would continue but there would a real effort to nurture and retain the goodwill of those around. The churches that in fact cause harm to individuals, which we explore in this blog, are also, as Chris tells us, precisely the ones that care not a jot for their reputation in the surrounding communities. They believe, wrongly, that what goes on in their congregations is what is important and that their reputation outside counts for nothing. The smugness of ‘being saved’, so they think, is far more vital to their well-being that what the community outside sees and hears. But in their indifference to the community they fail in the command of Jesus to be salt, yeast and light to the world and the world starts with the neighbouring community. When the people who do not come to our churches are nevertheless grateful that we exist, then we are beginning to succeed in being what the church is meant to be. The church would be saying ‘come and join us’ but also it would be saying something else.   Our purpose is to do things on behalf the community. It exists to represent you before God. We trust that our faithful witness will in some way spill out into the community in ways seen and unseen. There may be visible acts of service but the holding up before God of the entire community in prayer is an unseen but powerful contribution to the well-being of this place. Perhaps we are called to be like the Suffering Servant, the representative human being who is faithful so that the many can be kept safe.

Such a representative function for the church would not accord well with traditional evangelical ideas of individual repentance and conversion. But as I get older and find the conundrum of the 95% of society who play no part in our churches more difficult, I wonder if we have got church growth ideas all wrong. Perhaps the model of the yeast, light and the salt is a more realistic task for us to contemplate than trying to convert the whole of society. Anyway I offer this thought to be shared and I would welcome the comments of others.

During my undergraduate years, someone asked me to read an article on the subject of congregational size. The article was based on some research that suggested that a normal congregation seldom grows beyond a ceiling of 150 individuals. The number of 150 seems to be the maximum number of people that a single individual can relate to. Beyond that number, whether it be in a firm, a school or any institution, the sense of being lost in a crowd becomes extremely strong. The author of the paper, David Wasdell, put forward the idea that if a congregation has any chance of growing larger, then the church leaders must ensure that each member must be allowed to be part of a small group. The title of the paper was something like ‘Divide and Grow’ to fit in with this idea. If the small group is the main focus of membership, then the church congregation can in theory break through the 150 barrier.

There are of course churches in Britain which appear to break this limitation of 150 members but they are usually special city centre establishments, catering to groups of people who are in transit. If you attend All Souls, Langham Place in London you will find larger numbers, but the dynamic is quite different from a neighbourhood congregation. There will be students, visitors and overseas residents who come for the preaching. People who sit in large congregations accept the fact that they are one of a large number and they tolerate the fact that they will probably be unnoticed for weeks if not months. They maybe even welcome this anonymity, as the price to pay for good preaching and/or music. In the local parish church you would object if, in a congregation of around 50, no one spoke to you after you had visited the church for four Sundays in a row. It does happen but most congregations have some mechanisms for welcome. The sub-150 congregation can, after all, normally cope with a few new people without any trouble.

Research in the States has looked at this issue of congregational size. It divides the sizes of congregation into four categories. The largest, 350+, is seldom relevant in a British context so we will mention the first three. The smallest group is a congregation which has up to 50 members. This is called a family congregation. Frequently such a congregation is strongly controlled by one or two leading families and such congregations will ‘see off’ any minister who attempts to change the status quo. Some young conservative clergy here in rural Cumbria have become unhappy at the way that their small rural congregations have resisted the changes which the minister wanted to bring in after learning about them during their training. Based on the remarks in the previous post, these ideas will normally be to do with ‘mission’ and outreach. These will not fit easily in with a church firmly rooted in a ministry style of functioning. The change of focus required is frankly too great for such a congregation to take on board, particularly in deeply rural situations. One should not quickly ascribe blame in these situations as it can be found on all sides. But the basic fact remains that, as the American research shows clearly, the dynamic of a small congregation is quite different from that of the large gathering. Not to respect these differences is to court unhappiness and dissonance on all concerned.

If the ‘family’ congregation is resistant to change, the research suggests that there is greater potential for change in a congregation which numbers between 50 and 150 members. This is referred to as a ‘pastoral congregation’. Within such a congregation, there is the expectation that after a period each member will know something about every other member. Equally important, the individual members will expect to be known fairly well by their priest or minister. The priest/minister in such a congregation will have ways of keeping ‘tabs’ on every member of a ‘pastoral’ congregation so that if, for example, sickness occurs, there will be a mechanism for letting him/her know. It does not always work like this but, administratively, it should be possible to know what is going on with a sub-150 member parish. I have worked with two congregations of this ‘pastoral’ size and also I can attest it is possible to know everyone well and make small but steady changes in the ethos and style of the congregation over a period.

The larger congregations of 150+ need to be treated differently. The minister can no longer know well each individual and so, as the Wasdell paper suggested, the congregation needs to have a different structure. In the researchers’ terminology, the larger congregation has to be a ‘programme’ church in order to function. There needs to be extra attention to different sub-groups in the congregation, young parents, the elderly etc. Each group will have leaders who will communicate with the minister. He will support the leaders and make sure that they have the resources needed. The management of ‘programme’ churches does require special skills because internal lines of support and structure can easily go toxic when someone within the group decides to do things their own way. As any Vicar will tell you, there are always problems overseeing volunteers.

Having set out this theory about congregational size, I realise that there is no space left to speak about the place of evangelism and church growth in this particular post. So I shall keep that discussion for my next posting. But the information I have set out, cheerfully lifted from studies made by the Alban Institute in America, was revolutionary for me when I first encountered it some ten years ago. Perhaps the reader will be able to apply this analysis to their own situation and experience of church life. The main point that has been made so far is that congregations of different sizes have quite different dynamics. The priest/minister who ignores this fact does so at the cost of his/her happiness and ability to serve the people in his charge.

An unresolved conundrum in the Church

I have noticed that when clergy of my generation meet together, there is often a nostalgic sigh and the cry along the lines of ‘things in the church were not like that in our day!’ We reminisce about the strict training given to young clergy (many of us did start young in those days!) and the way that we all did two periods of training under an incumbent. Much has changed and it could be said that the priorities of clergy today are often very different. The 60 -70 hour weeks have (thankfully) vanished and visiting parishioners in their own homes seems to have become a forgotten activity. The working day began at 7.30 or 8 and apart from a meal times and snatched breaks, went on till 10 pm, after the evening meetings had finished. As a curate I did have a fixed day-off, but the evening of that day was moveable at short notice so that I could never enrol for a choir or an evening class.

This preamble brings in the discussion of two words that are in the title.   Anglican clergy of my day were concerned that their work tasks could be subsumed in the word ‘ministry’. Ministry covered the pastoral care of young and old, the leading of worship and the teaching that went with it. Somehow the church carried on through this kind of faithful attention to people’s needs, in and out of their homes. The Vicar or the curate might take one or two funerals every week and the so-called ‘occasional offices’ would take up a lot of time. But over a period, even in quite large parishes, you found that the networks of contacts that you had built up, through the funerals of people you had buried and the babies you had baptised, was quite extensive. I myself, in the days when my parishes were only 1200 homes, would attempt at Christmas to knock on every door with a card. This was quite an investment of time but it paid pastoral dividends. The greatest of these was that no one in those parishes ever was totally unknown when it came to taking a funeral. It is surprising how much information you pick up on the doorstep in a five or ten minute conversation. Bereaved people were always appreciative of the fact that I had known something of their relative while he/she was still alive.

The word ‘mission’ sums quite a different emphasis in the task of the clergy. It suggests that the main priority of the clergy’s work is to evangelise and ‘save’ the ‘lost’ and bring them into the worshiping congregation. My memory of working full-time was that mission and ministry in fact worked seamlessly together. In my last English parish, there always seemed to be a cluster of adult confirmation candidates alongside the far more challenging group of teenagers, whose parents wanted them to be ‘done.’ The new arrivals seemed to balance the number who died and the congregation maintained a equilibrium of around 90 worshipping souls at the main service on Sundays. The point is that clergy of my background believed that you did ministry, the mission side of things took care of itself.

What seems to be happening today is that an emphasis on mission seems to be undermining some of the old pastoral priorities. I had a shock when a single mother reported to me that her local clergyman had said to her, when seeking support, ‘I don’t do pastoral.’ I interpreted that to mean that the only thing he was interested in as a clergyman was evangelising. By not doing ‘pastoral’ he was saying that the bread and butter of parochial ministry, the comforting the sick, the support of the lonely, the helping the confused and bereaved was no longer part of his job. I would not suggest for a moment that these things are not going on in churches up and down the land, but something has nevertheless changed in the way that the church is perceived by the people of the communities where it is placed. There no longer seems to be the sense that the church plays a full part in the community.   There is a sense that the church is far more concerned about its own inner affairs than serving this community. I was recently asked to help support an urban parish for nine months while the Vicar went on maternity leave. In the first week I was asked to do a funeral. After that there was silence in that direction. It may be that the local undertakers had a cosy relationship with a retired clergyman to cover all the funerals or maybe the funerals were being performed by lay (secular) celebrants. These people do a good job but it is sad if such large numbers of people are opting out of Christian burial because the message has gone out that the only times that the church cares for you is when you are a soul to be saved.

This question of finding a balance between mission and ministry is of relevance to our topic because the absence of pastoral care towards people inside and outside the church who need it is a serious matter. In some parishes locally there is a sense that the clergy no longer care for the elderly, the poor and the ‘shut-ins’ . All the energy goes into trying to attract the young with a range of activities which include ‘seeker-sensitive’ services. In one particular church I know, two thirds of the traditional congregation left after a mission-focused Vicar arrived, to be replaced in part by a new group of individuals whose loyalty appears to be fickle at best. The stories of individual betrayal, as the things that gave comfort and solace over decades are abandoned, are hard to catalogue. I do occasional work in our local hospital as bank chaplain and I know how much some people appreciate simple acts of ministry like a prayer or a bible reading when facing the possibility of death ahead of them. If they cannot find these things from the priest or even from lay visitors because the emphasis has gone to mission at all costs, then that is, in a way, a form of desertion by the church. Ignoring the real needs of people by Christian leaders is, to my mind, a form of abuse.

As I write this I am reminded of the passage at the end of Matthew’s gospel when Jesus talks about the disciples who will be recognised in the coming age. They are the ones who fed the hungry, gave water to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger and visited the sick and the imprisoned. Surely these are the signs that we are required to give of our Christian witness. Such behaviour, the gentle reaching out to people in their need, will give glory to God and to his church.

This poster recently appeared on a church notice board in Norfolk.  It has been taken down after a complaint that it was ‘hate incident’.  What cannot be seen on my copy are the flames that are at the bottom of the poster.  This poster perhaps sums up the mentality among certain Christians that is at the heart of this blog’s concern.

Questions that arise.

Who commissioned this poster?

Do the people who approve of it really believe that the people who disagree with it and them will eternally burn in hell?

Do they take pleasure in this terrible example of discrimination against their fellow human beings?

If they do, are they not guilty of murderous sentiments laced with a thick dose of cruelty and bitterness?

Is there really anything distinctively Christian about this poster at all?

This post is not a full description of theories about child rearing on the part of conservative parents, but starts with a vignette from one particular family with a fiercely evangelical background in the 20s and 30s. This comes from a description of the family of Broughton Knox (b.1916), the formidably influential Australian evangelical teacher whose ideas have such a strong influence in the Anglican Diocese of Sydney even today.

Broughton’s mother, Doris, was well groomed in the Scriptures and the children were brought up to believe that the stories of the Bible applied to them. Both father David and Doris had been much buffeted by numerous family tragedies, including the death of several of their children. David, although a successful evangelical Anglican rector, and well respected for his preaching, seems to have shut down emotionally and was thus unavailable to his youngest daughters. They looked to their mother for emotional sustenance but again there was little available. In their memories of their upbringing, these younger daughters recall the Bible stories on which they were reared. The one thing the parents could not handle were whining and outbursts of childish emotion. So the particular stories told and remembered were ones lifted from the account of the wanderings in the desert by the Children of Israel. The narrative records how Moses had to cope with what the Bible calls ‘murmuring’ The people murmured and complained and so, the Bible tells us, the snakes came and killed them. The constant telling of this particular tale by Doris was able to suppress childhood emotion and complaining all too easily. It succeeded by introducing a state of constant fear in these younger Knox children. These younger sisters were never psychologically able to leave the desert for the joys of the promised land.

It does not take a childhood psychologist to see the way that Scripture was being used in a very cruel way to try and repress the process of growing up . Of course children will have tantrums from time to time. These will be allowed to blow over and be quickly forgotten. The idea that whining and outbursts of emotion are to be likened to ‘murmurings’ in the desert is a terrifying take on a scriptural passage, one that has certainly never occurred to me. One wonders whether this interpretation is to be found in a long-forgotten book on child rearing, or whether the mother made it up for her own purposes.

The classic text that is brought forward from Scripture on the subject of child-rearing is one lifted from the Book of Proverbs. It is a verse that single-handedly has probably caused more suffering to children than any other. The verse, referring to a father and his sons, reads thus: ‘If you take the stick to him yourself, you will preserve him from the jaws of death’ (Proverbs 23.14). There are other passages in similar vein and in 1 Samuel, God is likened to a father chastising a son with a rod for his iniquity. The common saying, ‘Spare the rod, spoil the child’ is not actually a quote from Scripture but the sentiments of this saying can be extracted from the Bible if one has the mind to do so. No doubt physical beating was felt to be inappropriate with regard to young girls but the effect of a constant referring to the punishments of the Israelites who ‘murmured’ was equally cruel.

The issue of Protestant nurture of children is not simply a matter of the way some evangelicals choose to understand a number of biblical texts. There is a fundamental theological reason for bringing these texts to the fore. Calvinist theology taught as one of its key themes the utter depravity of humankind. In order to emphasise the glories of salvation, John Calvin made sure in his teaching that this idea of the utter powerlessness and depravity of human beings was well and truly emphasised. Thus in traditional Protestant thinking, the selfishness and self-centered behaviour of children is an outward example of their innate wickedness. Even babies of a few months old were beaten in some Evangelical households in centuries past to drive the devil out. I would not accuse anyone today of these excesses of corrupted child rearing, but the norm of 18th and 19th century ‘respectable’ homes is terrifying to read about. The point needs to be repeated that it was a theological idea that gave justification for this terrible cruelty. Even if no one, outside certain cults, behaves like this now, this tendency to behave barbarically towards children in the name of God is something that the present generation should acknowledge and repent of.

The younger Knox sisters who grew up with the legacy of emotionally damaged parents and a atmosphere of fear are just one small example of the way that Christianity has been bad news to many people over the years. Hopefully society mores, the law and a general recognition of the emotional needs of the young has meant that this particular example of gross cruelty would not be found today.   But the potential of people in every age to corrupt the good for evil ends is something we must ever be alert for.

I have already indicated on this blog how difficult it is to define exactly who or what is fundamentalist. Part of the problem, as I have mentioned, is that individuals are very good at shifting their position to accommodate who they are talking to. Thus a preacher might come up with some classic conservative rhetoric to please a particular congregation.   In private on the other hand, talking to a liberal friend, his position on, say, the details of the Exodus, might be very flexible. One particular ‘trick’ that fundamentalist students and scholars use to impress their followers, is to utilise all the resources of biblical scholarship but then to arrive at a very conservative conclusion. Thus they might examine the language, contemporary literature of the ancient Near East and conclude that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible or that the events of the book of Jonah took place exactly as described. Because 99% of the readers of this literature are in no position to challenge (or understand!) the weighty arguments being put forward, they are left with the feeling that conservative scholars are every bit as good as the liberal scholars. The only difference is that these liberals come to conclusions which seem to challenge the idea that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. Thus they have to be disregarded in favour of the work of conservative scholars. These scholars are part of the correct evangelical tribe and they allow a sense of safety that they have arrived with a series of ‘safe’ and ‘correct’ conclusions about the Bible.

I have recently re-acquired a key book for fundamentalism studies, Fundamentalism and Evangelicals by Harriet Harris. I say ‘re-acquired’ because I let my first copy go in a purge of books some years ago. The book is a reworking of a doctoral study of the detail of the differences and overlaps between the two, the fundamentalists and the non-fundamentalist evangelicals.   In this blog post I want to share one particular debate that took place during the early 90s on this issue of the boundary between evangelical and fundamentalism. On the liberal side is an Oxford writer called James Barr who wrote a controversial attack of the fundamentalist position over the Bible. It infuriated many people in the evangelical camp, among them an evangelical scholar called R.T.France. France claimed that among evangelical scholars there were many that followed the canons of academic study which are pursued at university level. These include detailed textual analysis and the other tools of critical scholarship. The fact that their findings and conclusions agreed with their pre-existing dogmatic certainties about the Bible did not stop their work being genuine academic scholarship. Barr’s response to this was that although the tools they used were scholarly tools, the fact that they came up with conservative conclusions meant that they could not be using them properly. Although France claimed that his position was one of openness to both conservative and scholarly approaches, a kind of ‘mid-way’ position, Barr pointed out that this was nonsense. The moment that a conservative scholar refuses to endorse a particular stance about a detail of scripture because it is ‘inconsistent with evangelical theology’, then that scholar is implicitly endorsing fundamentalism. Barr points to the fact that this cadre of conservative scholars have an internal boundary which tells them the line between acceptable and inacceptable findings. Conclusions have to conform to their pre-existing ideas of inspiration. John Robinson, the radical New Testament commentator, received approval from conservative scholars when he wrote a book suggesting a very early date for John’s gospel in accordance with conservative views. Everything else was quietly ignored because the conclusions were too ‘liberal’ and radical for conservative consumption.

The strong point that Barr is making is that if you research something with the proviso that your findings have to fit into a pre-existing pattern of truth, then you fail the test of proper scholarship. Any academic research worth the name does not fix the result but allows openness and creativity. Both these words imply newness and even change from what has gone before. Barr rejects completely the idea that a true scholar can have a prior commitment to evangelical or conservative interpretations of scripture before setting out to do detailed study. No amount of learning and knowledge can overcome this stumbling block. It reminds one of the nonsense that would be created if a ship-load of members of the Flat Earth Society set off to explore the world. Everything they saw and measured would be interpreted to accord with their beliefs. That is, according to Barr, exactly what conservative Biblical scholars are doing, however impressive and apparently learned their scholarship appears to be.

I have managed to write a shorter post than usual and my readers will again be able to accompany me as I dip into the considerable wisdom of Harris’ book in the future. Because it is a detailed study of much of the available literature, it will help us to have objective view of what people have actually written and said. The shifting sands of what people say they believe about Scripture is, as I mentioned at the start, frustratingly mobile. It is to the written literature that we have to return and Harris’ book will make that possible.

One of the things I have learnt from Chris in our conversations is the incredible importance given to contemporary popular music by many conservative churches across the world. As an individual reared in the music of Tallis, Bach and Stanford, it would not occur to me to attend a church where I was regaled every week by music with a mesmerising beat. And yet, I have to recognise that the popular style of Christian music, influenced by contemporary pop music, is far more the norm than the pale imitations of cathedral music that I have encouraged in my churches over the years. Rick Warren, the influential writer of The Purpose Driven Church was asked if he would do things differently if he were to start all over again. His answer is striking. He said ‘I’d put more energy and money into a first class music ministry .. I made the mistake of underestimating the power of music so I minimised the use of music in our services. I regret that now.’ In talking about music, Warren was not referring to hymns or Taize choruses but to the loud beat driven music of the contemporary music scene, albeit with Christian words.   The extensive influence of Warren’s words on this subject mean that Christian leaders all over the world are following him in providing a plentiful supply of popular music dressed up as Christian worship.

To write this post, I am allowing myself to be in part guided by a book sitting on my shelves called Why I left the Contemporary Christian Music movement by Dan Lucarini. His is a story of first involvement and then gradual disillusionment with the Christian music scene in the States. His theological perspective is a fairly conservative one but I can respect some of the biblical issues he raises in his questioning. He first asks the question ‘What is worship?’   In answering this question, he draws attention to the fact that the Greek word for worship, proskuneo, means to kiss like a dog licking his master’s hand. I have to confess that this is for me a completely new insight but the important idea is that of obeisance or reverence before someone of power. Implicit in this word is the idea that we come to God with nothing of our own. Lucarini contrasts this idea of human abasement with the fashion for feeling good about oneself that seems to pervade much modern worship. He says ‘worship is not looking up and feeling good, it is bowing down and feeling lowly.’ The word ‘fear’ needs to be reinstated in its proper meaning of awe and holy veneration rather a sense of dread of eternal punishment. These two words, holiness and awe might well provide a summary of the direction we wish to aim at when we seek to introduce people to the heart of worship, with or without the aid of music.

The problem for Lucarini is that churches the world over have been seduced by the mantra that the only way of bringing people into church is to offer them a musical culture that they are already familiar with. The common denominator is popular music which will always have a good rhythm and probably a repetitive melody. Pop music, otherwise called ‘rock and roll’ is, for Lucarini, a dangerous container for Christian teaching. The very expression ‘rock and roll’ is slang for sexual activity and the music itself is designed to arouse a variety of emotions, not all of which can be said to be wholesome or edifying. As someone who will not enter a shop or supermarket which tolerates ‘piped’ music, I am not the best person to judge whether Lucarini is right or not over the corrupting influence of certain forms of music. I find his arguments interesting and worthy of an airing. Because of my tastes in music, I have always been afraid that my indifference or dislike of pop music was based on my some form of musical snobbery. It is therefore interesting to read of the case against such music in church being made, not on aesthetic but on moral grounds.

One issue that Lucarini raises, which is familiar to every church goer, is that of splits when new musical traditions are brought into churches. The modernisers all too easily characterise the traditionalists as ignoring a movement of the Spirit. Many Christian leaders will make the decision that a new musical style makes the loss of traditional members a sacrifice worth making. A parallel mini revolution is going on in Anglican congregations across the country and this concerns the replacement of ‘ministry’ with ‘mission’. What this means in practice is that the pastoral needs of the old and the sick are sidelined in favour of new and often untried methods of attracting new potential members into the church building. This may include a revolution in styles of music.   Clergymen of my generation do not understand the changing priorities of a new generation of ministers who, in many places, seem to have retreated from many of the mainstays of parochial ministry. These included faithful pastoral care, teaching and the support of individuals from birth to death. The introduction of new music is perhaps one way that an untidy shift towards ‘mission’ is taking place. Sadly this has left casualties, and hurt, abandoned faithful Christian people are pushed to the sidelines and sometimes feel it necessary to leave their churches after many decades of faithful membership.

For me, an older clergyman with conservative musical tastes, it is good to read that there are younger people who express what we secretly feel but do not articulate, namely that some styles of music are spiritually harmful. My own objections to ‘pop’ styles of music are probably nothing to do with the issue of causing sexual arousal, as Lucarini would claim. The objections have far more to do with an intolerance for loud noise and the inappropriateness of such sound for the business of worship. Lucarini touches a very good point when he talks about the modern tendency to project God as being like a mate, rather than the object of awe and wonder which is as he presented by the Bible and Christian tradition. Both the lyrics of songs and the sometimes seductive lilt of the melodies do suggest a relationship that is some way from reminding us of the majesty and awe of God. The idea that music contributes to a generally looser style of morals and relationships in a congregation is not an idea I have heard before but it certainly requires some pondering.

I have included these notes about the experience of one Christian writer on the worship music scene as it resonates with some deeply felt concerns that Chris has expressed. I hope that my readers will add their own thoughts. If some Christian music is even slightly harmful, as Lucarini claims, then that is a matter of enormous concern to our attempt to understand and interpret the face of Christianity today, especially in its conservative manifestations.