WHEN a whale dies in the ocean, the “mobile scavengers” are soon on the scene, feeding on its flesh, as the carcass slowly falls to the seabed. Next come the “enrichment opportunists”, who feed on the remaining blubber, and burrow into the bones.
And then, in a process that can last 100 years, bacteria break down what’s left of the whale’s skeleton to provide nourishment for mussels, clams, limpets, and sea snails. Over time, these deep-sea “whale fall” sites become hotspots for evolutionary diversity (“adaptive radiation”), enabling the generation of a multitude of new species and ecological communities in and around the carcass of the dead whale.
What if . . . the Church of England, as we know it, is in the process of decomposing? What if the institution we inhabit is akin to the carcass of a dead whale? Perhaps some of the biological terms in the description above might feel a little bit uncomfortably close to the bone (“enrichment opportunists”, anyone?). Perhaps the starkness of the analogy is horrifyingly bleak for those who are committed to digging their heels in and “saving the parish”. But might that starkness jar us into paying attention to something that we might otherwise be missing?
THE podcast The Great Humbling began in April 2020, when the “recovering-sustainability consultant” Ed Gillespie and the author Dougald Hine reflected together on some of the ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic might be experienced as an (unchosen) stripping of pride and self-importance, a “bringing down to earth” (humus in Latin) in ways that are both a kind of defeat and the beginnings of reconnection.
Via the works of the economist E. F. Schumacher and the Roman Catholic social philosopher Ivan Illich (both writing in the 1970s), Gillespie and Hine invite us to pay attention to the importance of “enoughness”, “proportionality”, and “a literacy of scales”. “What becomes possible and what ceases to be possible, as we move between different scales?” they wonder. What are the “hidden costs . . . when we pass a certain threshold of speed, of scale, of intensity?”
There are “qualitative side-effects”, they suggest, including a “stunning of the imagination: that we don’t even have words to describe what has been lost; or worse, that our attempts to do so may conjure up something poisonous, some travesty of the thing towards which we are trying to gesture”.
Jesus’ parables and actions, his life, death and resurrection, breathe life into the imagination of the significance of the small: the tiny seeds, the yeast hidden in the dough, the lost sheep, the little children, the five loaves and two fish, the widow’s coin, the small circle of disciple-friends, the near-deserted crucifixion, the nail-wound in a hand, a breath, a couple of strangers on the road, the breaking of bread. . . These are witnesses, to those of us who have received them as such, of divine smallness.
As the theologian Graham Adams develops brilliantly in his new book God the Child (SCM Press), in the midst of and beyond “the colonial matrix of adult power”, the biblical witness, centred on Jesus, invites us to discover a God whose power and agency are characterised by smallness, weakness, and curiosity, solidarity, playfulness, and imagination. So why does the Church seem obsessed with “big”?
Illich had some ideas about this. He repeatedly charted the way in which the institutions of Western modernity (including education, charity, and medicine) had become, in their over-reaching ambitions and their technocratic quests for efficiency of scale, counterproductive to their own best intentions and stated values, colonising, pathologising, and stoking dependence in the lives that they were created to support: corruptio optimi quae est pessima (the corruption of the best is the worst).
In Illich’s analysis, the Church has been utterly complicit in this corruption — since at least the late Roman Empire — in its attempts to “scale up”, institutionalise, and thus deform Jesus’s radically egalitarian, liberating gospel of neighbour-love. Illich would, I think, have taken a perverse delight in a C of E’s strategy for institutional survival, development, and growth which nevertheless held the words “Simpler, Humbler, Bolder” near its heart.
MUCH depends, of course, on what those words mean in practice. “Simpler”, in the strategy, focuses on centralising decision-making and emphasising “efficiency” and “effectiveness” in how resources are distributed and used; “Humbler” includes admitting safeguarding failures and acknowledging the need to work in partnership with other denominations, to be “effective” in mission; and “Bolder”, it seems, is insistent in its aspirations for numerical growth: doubling the number of children in church, starting 10,000 “new Christian communities”, and showing the world that “what we have is what the world needs” (I paraphrase, but only a little).
These kinds of strategic commitments strongly suggest an undergirding assumption that the whale that is the Church of England is largely alive and splashing, if ageing a little, and not quite as lively and independent as it used to be. But what if we were to relocate the attractive strapline “Simpler, Humbler, Bolder” within a more radical story? What if the whale is already beginning to decompose?
The Revd Dr Al Barrett is the Rector of Hodge Hill, in Birmingham diocese, and one of two newly appointed theological-development officers for the West Midlands Racial Justice Unit.
This is an edited extract from an article he wrote for the July 2024 edition of Crucible: The journal of Christian social ethics. Read the full article here.
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