THE former Vicar of the University Church in Oxford begins his story with his brief and disastrous first curacy at St Stephen’s, Rochester Row, in Westminster. Nostalgic recollection of a fascinating parish that now seems a vanished world (I was a later Vicar) soon gives way to a resentment that he needs to get off his chest, of the incumbent who would not recommend him for ordination as priest.
But the disappointed curate is soon redeemed by “the pulsating atmosphere” of ’60s Bayswater, “a complete contrast to stuffy Rochester Row”. He characterises his new Vicar as a maverick after his own heart, and exemplar of the “show-biz Christianity” that he took into his future ministry — “Iris Murdoch, Bernard Levin and Monica Furlong publicly debated their views on Christianity.”
More seriously, the parish established the vision that Mountford has consistently championed: “I was a theological liberal committed to making Christian ideas accessible not only to mainstream churchgoers but to those on the edge and beyond.”
Only after memories of the Cambridge chaplaincy that followed does Mountford go back to his training at Westcott House, in anecdotes that would be pleasing enough in conversation, but seem at times too inconsequential to stand up in cold print — though an older generation of Westcott men (sic) will enjoy a frisson of recognition.
Incumbency arrived at the thriving suburban north-London parish of Southgate, to which Mountford brought “something in common with a wide-boy approach to cutting corners and by-passing authority”. He includes an exemplary account of a death-bed discussion, taken, in fact, from a short story that he published after leaving the parish.
By this point, the reader may feel that the author is clearly a gifted priest, but a bit of a showman. The self-portrait is deepened and complicated by the accounts that follow first of his marriage — we learn of a couple without children who find themselves taking on his sister-in-law’s children after her tragic death — and finally of his childhood, in a chapter that he admits was painful to write. It is an evocative portrait of a post-war Essex boyhood — where the Routemaster bus had “the face of a strong and reliable uncle” — but also of a strict Congregationalist home, with a pacifist father and a violently angry mother. Only when misguidedly finding himself at Newcastle University did the young Brian begin to come to terms with “the maternal concentration camp”.
Childhood faced, the author turns to his 30 years in Newman’s old pulpit, where his confidence in his “up-to-date” approach suddenly had to contend with Oxford’s conservatism. He rejected “introspective churchiness”, held to his vision of St Mary’s as “a natural interface between the sacred and the secular”, and writes with notable generosity of his colleagues: “always try to appoint junior staff who are better than you.”
Mountford never envisaged such a long ministry in Oxford, and is scathing of the preferment system that never preferred him; he regrets being denied the opportunity “to implement my vision for the Church on a big stage”. Some might think he hasn’t done badly. Curiously, he makes no mention of his 30-year chaplaincy at St Hilda’s College.
Church Going Gone is Mountford’s own Apologia: compellingly readable, disjointed, amusing, wise, opinionated, radical, and occasionally annoying; convinced that Christianity “captures the seriousness, the joy and the meaning of things”, but with little time for the risk-averse, managerial Church of England which he sees today.
It will particularly be enjoyed by those who have shared the world that he writes about, including his regret that the ascendancy of progressive Christianity has not proved as inevitable as it once seemed. His book is an entertaining portrait of a highly coloured ministry. It is also an elegy for liberal Anglicanism.
The Revd Philip Welsh is a retired priest in the diocese of London.
Church Going Gone: A biography of religion, doubt and faith
Brian Mountford
Christian Alternative Books £14.99
(978-1-78904-812-4)
Church Times Bookshop £13.50