I HAVE just checked the online archive and looked at the Church Times of 10 February 1995, my first issue as editor.
It is salutary to note that its front page featured a dispute about gay priests. (In those days, the now all-encompassing gender acronym contained just two letters.) Conservative Evangelicals were threatening to withdraw from their dioceses, disobey their bishops, and stop paying the diocesan quota — threatening “the collapse of the Church of England as we know it”.
In contrast, the leader of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, the Revd Richard Kirker, thought that the “younger and more thoughtful bishops” were softening. “They don’t want to be remembered 20 years hence” [i.e. ten years ago] “as having been opposed to something which by then will be seen as an ordinary part of church life.”
One can choose to be pessimistic — the sexuality debate drags on — or optimistic — the Church of England as we know it hasn’t collapsed. I find myself caught between both reactions. Of course, it is depressing that such a topic has absorbed so much of the Church’s energy, causing such hurt and disaffection. Surprisingly few conversations over coffee after church mention sexuality, unless the churches that I’ve attended have been atypical.
But it is also encouraging that the Church continues to hold together as it wrestles with a contentious topic that has occupied it off and on for centuries. Or doesn’t wrestle (as in those coffee-time conversations, which, I’m sorry to admit, seems quite a healthy approach).
You can read what I think about this in the leader, of course, and the Church Times’s policy is not to allow anyone two bites of the cherry, even its editor. Suffice it to say that I concurred with the quotation from the late John Moses in the Times obituary last week: “What I do know is that I don’t find the truth by slamming the door on the debate.”
IT IS customary for old editors to indulge themselves with reminiscences. Readers will be grateful to be spared this, and not only because memory has never been my strongest asset. The nature of this work means that one is always looking forward: to next week’s issue, to that morning’s online stories. Fortunately, thanks to the Church Times online archive, all the public aspects of my work over the past 30 years are readily available to anyone who is interested.
But even I could not fail to notice the technological changes that have gone on in my time. Since I started here as a reporter in the late 1980s, I experienced life in the Church Times office in Portugal Street largely as it must have been not long after it was founded a few streets away in 1863: manual typewriters with ivory keys in smoke-filled newsrooms; copy sent upstairs to be subbed then retyped on the hot-metal Linotype machines on the top floor; column- and then page-pulls descending for a second sub; the sound of the lead ingots being hauled to the top floor (why the heavy machinery was up there I never fathomed); the sound of the printers trooping down the back stairs in the early afternoon (their union was better at bargaining than ours). . .
When the paper changed hands from its founding family to its new owners, Hymns Ancient & Modern, I assumed I was witnessing one of the greatest revolutions in newspaper history: the ancient machines were broken up, we left the old building, and we moved to computers and phototypesetting.
How little I knew. Our first website was launched in 2000, and the developments have continued since then at an astonishing pace: everything now prepared digitally, the use of social media, the advent of online subscriptions, a daily ebulletin. . .
So, although I have been custodian of the Church Times for less than one fifth of its 161-year life, and produced only 1450 of its 8428 issues to date, I have experienced far greater change than any of my predecessors. Neither they nor I could have imagined a world in which more people subscribe to a daily ebulletin than the weekly paper. In which people who buy the paper have it delivered through the post rather than from the local newsagent (and a world in which the competence of the Royal Mail would be such a concern). In which vast numbers of people worldwide would read our content online, sometimes 250,000 in a single month (without paying). And that, in many households, the Church Times would be the only newspaper they bought.
I could not have imagined that, instead of a weekly visit by Glenn from the PA with a brown envelope containing three or four black-and-white prints — our ration of news photos for that week — my colleagues and I would scroll through hundreds of images every day on our computer screens. Or that just a handful of those images would have overloaded the total memory of our 1990s computers. Or that readers would pay to come to Church Times organised events, and sometimes pay not to come (e.g. to webinars).
And I certainly could never have imagined that I and my colleagues would be able to do our jobs perfectly well — and sometimes better — from home, managing domestic life and young families while continuing to work just as hard, in a revolution brought about by a global pandemic.
People tend to change jobs to experience some novelty. Perhaps one reason I have stayed here so long is that, despite having the same job title, the job I’m giving up this week bears little resemblance to the one to which I was appointed.
THE most innocent artefact can evoke the oddest memories. When clearing my desk, I turned up a sheet of paper confirming that we had registered “Church Times” as a trade mark.
I first thought that this might have been in response to the founding a decade or so ago of the Church Times Nigeria (no relation). But then I remembered the real reason: a phone call late one evening in the early 2000s, asking me to check the Church Times website. It had an unusually patriotic look — I remember a lot of red, white, and blue among rather more pink. The site had been hacked, and the url now pointed to a British porn site.
Our IT consultant managed to take it all down the next day, but we discovered how vulnerable we were to misuse. The porn site was run by a swingers club in Surrey, which had also taken the Church Times name, and our lawyer at the time advised that, without a trade mark, we would have to convince a court that they were guilty of “passing off” i.e. pretending to customers that they were us — which they clearly weren’t (at least, I think so — I didn’t look too closely).
A small sum of money changed hands, and they went away. I’ll leave it to someone else’s browser history to discover whether they still exist anywhere online.
I HAVE joined in criticism of the dangers of social media, not because it encourages hate speech, but because it is difficult to archive it. One of the delights of sifting through old files is discovering letters from readers that were too priceless to throw away.
Could there be a more arresting opening sentence than “This letter is intended to be a scathing and blistering attack upon you personally as well as the rest of the staff at the Church Time” (sic).
I DO not want to offer any disrespect to the clerics who have had a hand in the Church Times’s editorial history, but over the years it has grown on me how important it is that this job is done by a member of the laity. I can say this openly now that my (lay) successor has been chosen.
It’s not that there aren’t clergy who are better than me in every possible aspect. But clergy are chosen, trained, and possibly bred to care for the people to whom they minister. They cannot display the irresponsibility, the carelessness, and the necessary disregard for consequences that journalism demands.
There is no faith test for those who work or write for the paper, but pretty much everyone on the editorial staff or among the close-knit group of contributors cares about the state of the Church and its mission. And, although the Church Times has always been independent, it none the less plays its part in the life of the Church. But that part is simply to give readers enough information to form their own view of what is good and what is bad; what could be emulated and what should be resisted.
Because we have no executive power in the Church, there is no temptation to suppress a story because it damages the Church’s reputation. If there’s a mess somewhere in the Church, our job stops at pointing it out. To overthink things and start offering solutions is to slide from news reporting to news management.
And this reporting is a fundamental act of faith. I don’t see how we could continue doing what we do if we didn’t believe that our readers were the sort of people to respond well to the news that we tell them, using their individual or collective abilities to put right the wrongs that we expose, or adopt the good practices that we reveal, or respond to the needs that we highlight.
We are often in awe of our readers, their quickness to respond generously and sacrificially — and not just to the Church Times Train-A-Priest Fund, which I have been pleased to nurture throughout my editorship, or to the various charity appeals that we carry. Two tiny examples that we have heard of in the past month: two organisations have had funding gaps filled after the briefest of mentions in these pages.
Such feedback reminds us, should we need reminding, that, for all its flaws, this is a Church made up of saints, and it is a privilege to serve it.