THE Save the Parish movement — and the Church of England’s leadership — must become more “ecumenically alert and alive” if it is to understand the profound decline affecting the nation’s churches, a church historian has said.
While expressing support for the movement — which is currently seeking to elect candidates under its banner to the General Synod (News, 4 August) — Dr Andrew Chandler, Professor in Modern History at the University of Chichester, warned that it, and the Church at large, was missing “some kind of ecumenical recognition that what goes on in a parish has not for a long time been nearly or purely Anglican. . . What has been going on has affected all Churches. It is both immense and profound.”
Decline was a decades-long phenomenon, he observed, and was now “sharpening perspectives and deepening frustrations and fears. In the first half of the 20th century, there was a recognition that the parish was losing its status and experiencing a severe decline. The high-tide mark had perhaps fallen about 1900. . .
“The evocation of the wonderland of the parish today can overlook many of these complexities, and even tend to mythologise. This isn’t to say that isn’t a good myth. I’d vote for it myself. But a robust parish hasn’t actually been the general reality for a lot of people for a long time, and there are many reasons for this.
“The present debate is actually an old and age-worn debate, but it’s becoming more severe across a much wider landscape because public religion is running down to a point at which it can barely continue to exist, at least in what have become its conventional forms. We all know that. The trouble is that the Church these days is so full of what is, to my mind, largely nonsensical, self-promotional language and the jargon of mission . . . that it obscures the reality.”
Professor Chandler is the author of many books exploring the history of the Church of England, including a study of the Church Commissioners (Books, 1 June 2007). He is critical of what he sees as the leadership’s current problem-solving approach to decline (“This is the problem, so here’s the solution”), and fears that the Church is “actively writing its decline” through centralisation, managerialism, and a “narrow” focus on mission and evangelism which lacks an evidence base.
The Save the Parish movement was right to scrutinise the actions of “over-staffed” dioceses. He encouraged the challenge to diocesan spending, to the “brutal” quotas set for parishes, and the proliferation of suffragan bishops. Some amalgamation of dioceses was “absolutely inevitable” in the coming years, he said.
“In many ways, the Church of England historically has always been immensely privileged, and now it’s losing the privilege of money. . . So Anglicans should be looking at the URC, they should be looking at the Methodists, they should be looking at the Baptist churches and asking, well, can we begin to understand together what is going on in society itself and why denominational Christianity has seen such a severe decline, particularly over the last 30 years?
“But far too much in contemporary Anglicanism is ecumenically ignorant and indifferent.” He recalled a URC minister who had approached the priest of the parish in which they lived with a view to collaborating, only to be told that it was not the priest’s job to prop up a failing church.
It wasn’t just the culture of the Church that had changed since the middle of the 20th century, he said. Localism — which had “made Christianity strong, numerically and culturally, in this country” — had withered and even died in all sorts of places and forms, from the high street to schools.
The present leadership was not engaging with the reality of decline, he said, but taking refuge in “simplistic Evangelical rhetoric”. Since its creation, the Archbishops’ Council had focused on a concept of mission which was “not necessarily empirical”, but often “largely propaganda”. He feared that the current approach was creating a “debilitating culture of success and failure. Those who think they have succeeded will become still more ambitious, and those who appear to fail in the things that are plainly valued will feel more and more ignored.
“If public religion is to revive, I think that, somehow, something almost mysterious has to reconfigure the elements with which we presently live,” Professor Chandler concluded. “And it almost certainly won’t be a formula of our own devising.”
A campaign to elect members to the General Synod under a “Save the Parish” banner was launched last month (News, 6 August).
Letters, page 14