IN THE cool, generous space of St Mary’s, Beaminster, in Dorset, Canon Jo Neary, Pioneer Priest in the benefice of Beaminster for more than ten years, is clearing away the boxes of plastic toys and other paraphernalia from the weekly toddler group. The spaces behind the pulpit and under the communion table provide a convenient place to conceal it all in readiness for a communion service later in the week.
It strikes me that the unseen presence of these items in the church while the inherited liturgy is performed once again is a pretty good metaphor for the uneasy relationship between all that Jo has been developing over the years and the ongoing life of the traditional parish church. As Canon David Baldwin, the Rector, puts it: “I think it’s an understanding that things can be done differently. So long as, and the trade-off is, you keep some of the traditional going as well.”
What David possesses with conviction is a vision for the renewal of the Christian faith in places like Beaminster and the surrounding villages which begins with doing something different. It begins elsewhere. It begins with the forging of new relationships and the offering of new ways of engaging with the Christian faith.
At the same time, however, David and Jo both seek to assure the regular members of the 15 churches in the benefice that they will do what they can to maintain the traditional ministry of the parish.
THESE questions reach into the heart the matter of how we imagine the future of the Church: not just the rural Church, but the whole Church. What is our vision, our theory (and theology) of change?
Margaret Wheatly and Deborah Frieze, in their book Walk Out Walk On (Berrett-Koehler, 2011) have described a process of change that sees the emergence of a new system of operation in a given field, separate from the old as the old declines. They point to a gap between the declining curve of one system and the emerging upcurve of the new. Into that gap the visionaries and creatives, the pioneers of the new journey, move and begin to experiment. They also talk to each other, network, form alliances and collaborations.
In such a way these small and scattered experiments, in the liminal space between the old and new, begin to scale up and form the kind of sustainable and resilient structures of a new system.
Wheatley and Frieze also describe some of the main agents within this theory of change. Firstly there are the pioneers, or “walk outs” as they call them, who have the courage and the vision to “walk out” of one system in order to forge the new. These are the entrepreneurs and the innovators, the inventors and creatives whose love for the old system and all it provided compels them into a journey of reimagination. Such people need space from the assumptions and scepticism of the old system.
Organisations and institutions are predisposed to maintain the stability of the status quo. That is what they are designed to do: to create a stable and reliable environment for the provision or delivery of what the system is there for. Most of the time that works fine. But when the environment around the system changes significantly, new answers to the same questions need to be found, and initially at least these will be challenged by the innate disposition of the system to preserve itself.
So, as the Catholic anthropologist and writer Gerald Arbuckle says in his book Refounding the Church (Orbis, 1993), “the new belongs elsewhere”. In order for new answers to old questions to be found in a new context, space must be given to those with the gift of finding them.
Arbuckle puts it like this: “A refounding project should not normally be placed in the midst of existing work/structures, where prophetic people would be under constant critical assessment by members of the community and required to waste valuable energy “apologizing” for that they are doing.”
Then there are those who champion the innovators. These agents of change are not pioneers themselves but champion the pioneers from within the old system, rooting for them, encouraging them and making space for them.
There are also those who act to “hospice” the old system, who recognise that there is an important work in allowing the old to die well, honouring its contribution and giving it the space, time and attention that recognises that the life it has had is coming to an end.
Hospicers do this with no illusion that the old system is suddenly going to spark into life again. They do not give any kind of false promises about a return to the halcyon days when the old system was full of life and at the heart of things. They carry out the gentle and compassionate work of allowing something the dignity of a good death, of helping a group or a community, or even a whole organisation, to let go and face the reality of the end of its life. . .
FOR David and Jo, it’s clearly been a challenge holding space for the new while being faithful to the old. The old is represented by the 15 churches in the town of Beaminster and its surrounding villages. These villages read like the lines of a Betjeman poem: Toller Pocorum, Drimpton, Salway Ash, Melplash, Mosterton. . .
Navigating that challenge has involved trusting in the theology of vocation and the abundance of God. They invited anyone to join in with the new developments that Jo was starting by encouraging people to explore the new as part of their vocation.
They trusted that, as people began to help with new things like toddler groups and Messy Church, God would provide. God has provided.
At the same time there has also been a reduction in the sheer volume of traditional services. There has been a rebalancing. There has been some dying.
I drive to Drimpton through the deep summer lanes of this remote part of Dorset. Amazingly, a village of only 400 people continues to support a pub, a village hall, a recreation ground, a Methodist chapel, and the small church of St Mary’s, Drimpton. However, the deeper changes impacting rural villages like this are at work here too.
The church is starting to admit that it is coming to the end of its present journey. David tells me: “Five years ago [we] had the Bishop here to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the new building being consecrated, and five years on, it’s gone downhill to the point where there are lots of people worshipping, regularly 12, 13, 14, 15 people, but nobody will take on any roles.”
We laugh that a congregation of maximum 15 people is considered “lots of people worshipping”, but when that works out as nearly four per cent of the population of the village it compares favourably with proportions of people attending church nationally.
The challenge once more is the age and energy needed to resource the requirements of the upkeep and maintenance of the building. “Two men, one churchwarden, one licensed lay minister, who have kept it going said, ‘We can’t do this on our own any more.’ I mean, they’re getting older and older.”
At another parish in the Beaminster team, David describes how the worshipping community have shifted their posture towards the village community, changing the nature of their worship but also taking the bold decision to begin to make use of their land in new ways.
Not long before David arrived, an extension to the graveyard was consecrated with room for 300 graves. David has since buried six people there in 13 years.
It’s unlikely that all that space for graves is needed. So the community has taken a risk against the grain of traditional assumptions and planted a community apple orchard. The hope is that the apples can be a free resource for the whole community and the orchard a venue for cider-pressing days.
DAVID and Jo describe the conversation between the traditional and the new life that is emerging.
The cultural gulf is great. Jo wonders if it’s possible to bridge it at all. “I feel the gulf between [the new] and what happens on a Sunday seems to get wider and wider in lots of ways. In 30 years’ time, will my toddler mums be running the church? I don’t think they will.”
Jo reflects whether more work might have been done to bridge the gap from both ends. She cites recent academic research by the Revd Professor Leslie Francis into rural ministry and the fragility of so many rural churches (Taking Learning Discipleship Seriously), which concludes that intentional discipleship is the only viable response to the uncertain future of these many churches.
It leaves Jo reflecting whether things might have turned out differently if innovation had gone hand in hand with discipleship of the existing church communities. “I just think if we had done this experiment differently, and if we had just focused on discipling the current congregations when I got here, before we started doing anything new, would we have had a different outcome? And the answer is, I don’t know.”
Either way it’s clear there is no quick fix, no magic formula to the dilemmas and challenges of the church looking to find a renewal of life in the context of a secular age.
Planting an orchard at the edge of a graveyard seems like an apt metaphor for the sort of attitude that the Church might take: a kind of investment of faith in a shared future that is a conversation between the living tradition of faith and the communities around it; a long-term project of vulnerable, shared construction that doesn’t retreat from the reality and very possibility of death for much of what has been held so precious for so many for so long.
You cannot rush discipleship. And from both sides of the gulf, it’s clear that discipleship is the heart of the matter, journeying with those engaging with the Church in new ways toward a maturity of faith, and journeying with those who have held these traditions for their whole lives to enable them to embrace the potential for the Spirit’s reimagining.
That this is a death, a loss, is true. Death and loss are within the trajectory of the gospel. Time is not only linear but circular. The Kingdom is a paradoxical economy, a circular economy. So the inevitable march of decline may yet herald a resurrection beyond death, held in the seeds of an apple in a newly planted garden.
This is an edited extract from In the Fullness of Time: A story from the past and future of church by Paul Bradbury (Canterbury Press, £14.99 (Church Times Bookshop £11.99); 978-1-78622-607-5). The Revd Paul Bradbury is leader of Poole Missional Communities in Salisbury diocese.