“THE scene is a big, gay holiday camp at Bognor, and no, your eyes are not deceiving you: four hundred clergymen from the diocese of Southwark are moving in.”
So begins perhaps the finest British Pathé newsreel in existence. It describes the diocese of Southwark’s clergy conference and retreat at Butlin’s Holiday camp at Bognor Regis in 1961. The clipped received pronunciation of the voiceover describes how the parsons are forced by their fellow holidaymakers into ever more absurd activities. In the end, most of the clerics eschew their collars, resulting in a new game: spot the clergyman. “Is this a parson?” the voiceover asks, “No! It’s a scrap-metal dealer from Burnley.”
The reel gets better and better, as the Bishop himself, Mervyn Stockwood — whose holidays were spent more often actually in Tangiers — takes up more camera time. He signs in to an activity day and then emerges from the pool with the then Bishop of Woolwich. The dénouement is Stockwood’s drinks event: “The Bishop himself set the ball rolling by giving a party at one of the camp pubs.” I bet he did, and I bet it was. It has been observed that the idea of many clergy in the diocese of Southwark at “a big, gay holiday camp” actually wouldn’t be that surprising at all.
I am sure there was a distinct, gleefully naughty self-knowledge in Stockwood’s choice of location. Yet, as ever with his showmanship, something of a deeper link to the history of the faith — and to the realities of the present — lurks beneath the decision. In fact, choosing a holiday camp for a clerical conference should appear to be the most natural decision in the world.
The very etymology of “holidays” goes back to a sense of sacred time, the holy days that punctuated the medieval calendar. A holy day meant a day of respite from the interminable labour that made up the life of the medieval peasant. There is something distinctly beautiful in the idea that rest from toil is tied to the lives of the saints: a double taste of the life of the Church Triumphant for the Church Militant here in earth. As the hymn reminds us, “the great Church victorious Shall be the Church at rest.”
YET, it isn’t only holidays as a sense of restful time where the link to the faith is obvious and longstanding. Perhaps the most famous holiday in English is not E. M. Forster’s description of interfering clergy in Florentine hotels, or even the recent escapades of The Inbetweeners in Malia, but a sort of mix between the two: Chaucer’s trip to Canterbury. Medieval pilgrimage invariably tied together, in the English mind at least, the concept of time away with the holy.
That might well be loosened in this day and age in an explicitly Christian sense, but the concept of time off as sacred is alive and well. For my part, at clerical awaydays, as patience begins to wear thin with proceedings, I always think of Margery Kempe, so irritatingly pious that her fellow pilgrims locked her in her own room as she threatened to ruin what was, to them, primarily a holiday.
Of course, many of our statutory periods of time off as a nation are linked still to the great feasts of the Church. Easter and Christmas remain the lodestars of our national time off, and are still generally referred to as such. But I, like a less poetic (and, I also hope, less randy) Philip Larkin, lament that Whitsun and its concomitant joys are a thing of the past. Tying our national holidays to the moments of the faith seems much healthier than linking them to acts of revolutionary violence, as the French and Americans do, or to meaningless and cynical progressivism, as our corporations seem determined to do.
Now, even that little link back to the world of Chaucer et al. is slipping away. Calling these breaks from the working round a “Bank Holiday” just seems a little grubbier, a tiny but depressing step away from the idea of sacred time, but, undoubtedly a more accurate representation of our national priorities. What your time off is called, there your heart shall be also, as Jesus almost said.
Despite this creeping secularisation of our holy days, it is natural then that many churches continue to run their own breaks, visits, pilgrimages, and camps. If church is a family, then carving time away to spend time with one another is a natural working out of that commitment. Today, these come in all shapes and sizes, and include all sorts of destinations.
THE variety of holidays that I encountered in researching this really did represent the full panoply of possible Church of England identities. Correspondents described every possible taste catered for, from parish weeks in Herefordshire involving deli lunches and the Three Choirs Festival to churches decamping (or rather, camping) en masse (but not at mass) to the Spring Harvest Conference, a pan-Evangelical festival of worship. Organisers of groups to attend the latter are given a prize for those who bring the most people.
The behemoth that is the HTB network is a huge player in the world of the church holiday, as it is in so many other areas of the national Church’s life. It runs Focus, an event at the Newark showground, where, it claims, “something extraordinary happens every year.” Invariably, there is a strong biblical emphasis on the theme of the event. One individual who attended from Holy Trinity, Clapham, described it as “fun, but yes, quite churchy”.
AlamyThe putting green at Butlin’s holiday camp, Bognor, in the 1960s
This year, amid the soft play and the carousel, children will be encouraged to learn the story of Moses. In terms of accommodation, space is provided for caravans and tents and in something called “bunkabins”. The interiors are rather more Butlin’s than I was expecting from a church in the not-very-Lazarus adjacent Chelsea deanery. It is nice to know that Nicky Gumbel has something in common with Mervyn Stockwood after all.
Other larger churches of a different flavour are similarly active in their offers. I suspect that it is a very different churchmanship at the away weekend for St Martin-in-the-Fields, but many of the nuts and bolts seem to be similar. Members of the congregation are encouraged to give all the available activities a go — from art workshops to sport. The overarching theme is that of “improvisation” rather than a story from the Bible, although the Vicar, Canon Sam Wells, is keen to emphasise in his introduction to the trip that improvisation itself is a theme that bubbles up in biblical narratives.
There is even the ubiquitous promise of songs round a campfire, except in this case those songs are compline. Attendees are also promised “improvised drama with musical accompaniment in real time”, which, as one friend said, just sounds like a normal parish mass in some places.
SPEAKING of the m-word, for those of a more ritualist persuasion, there are the National Pilgrimage, the Youth Pilgrimage, or any one of the smaller pilgrimages that draw a steady stream of the faithful to Walsingham. While the Youth Pilgrimage takes place in a big top and involves campers from across the country, older pilgrims can be assured of a welcome at the purpose-built centre in the little Norfolk village. The retreat house there has played host to generations of Anglo-Catholics, and still does to thousands of visitors every year. I gather that the food is better than it was, and the hot water is more bountiful: Our Lady’s Shrine is now a source of comfort rather than chastisement.
For all these big events, with their slight whiff of partisan churchmanship, which, we are told by our bishops, is so much more wicked and destructive than managerialism, there are also lots of trips arranged simply by one or two congregations off their own bat. Most that occur in this country are less formal and simply part of the annual rhythm of the life of a particular church rather than part of a wider movement.
The Revd Claire Jones of Emmanuel Church, Woodley, in the diocese of Oxford, described a weekend of “lazing around in a field together, paddling in a stream and toasting marshmallows at campfires”, interspersed with morning devotions and a Sunday service, over the August Bank Holiday weekend.
Then, of course, there are the unofficial holidays, probably even greater in number, where people who have become that most Christian of things, real friends, actively choose to go away together, having met at church. I have happy memories of an impromptu trip to the Channel Islands along exactly such lines when an attempt by an Oxford church to organise a retreat in Normandy fell through. I suspect we grew closer to each other and to God than we might have done shuffling past one another in a Norman cloister.
THAT is not to do down retreats, of course, which are a staple of many churches’ spiritual diets, besides providing time away from the ordinary grind as a holiday ought to. Interestingly, a number of clergy I spoke to identified more formal retreats as easier events to which to invite new members or those just “exploring faith” than some of the more relaxed “Just be yourself” events that churches can put on.
For many, the thought of actual time away, sticking to the rigours of, say, a monastic timetable, represents the ideal of “getting away from it all” more than a period of time checking the same phone in a far-off field. Still, retreats do seem to be of a different genus than holidays proper, not least because, as any cleric knows, one counts as “time off”, whereas the other is expected to be part of the rhythm of a year to help keep the clergy half-sane.
iStockPilgrimage, in a stained-glass window in Canterbury Cathedral
Then there are pilgrimages, which remain — as they were in the days of Chaucer and Margery Kempe — in a sort of no man’s land between holiday and devotion. Perhaps the most joyously Anglican example of one that I heard about was the Prayer Book Society’s 11-day trip to the Holy Land last September. The penultimate day fell on the anniversary of the King’s accession, and so the archaeological site at Caesarea Philippi resounded with the Accession Service from the Prayer Book, led by the retired Bishop of Exeter.
There is something of the conquest of the pale Galilean when the stones that once re-echoed the praise of Caesar now do so with prayers of thanks for the idea of Christian kingship. The group trip had first been planned the previous year, before the death of our late Queen, and so it was coincidence that such an event occurred.
Not everything, however, could be left to chance: interestingly, the PBS, like many churches, relied on an existing pilgrimage organisation for their formal organisation. The company takes a number of groups to the Holy Land every year: though it is a sad reflection of the state of that part of the world that their website has quite a long section on risk assessment and “crisis strategy”.
EVEN with such care taken over organisation by seasoned professionals, it is worth noting that not every church holiday goes to plan. They are, after all, Coach Trip for sinners rather than A Place in the Sun for the righteous. More recent trips have just as many potential pratfalls as those of the past, be they the brainchild of Stockwood or Chaucer.
I was assistant curate of Liverpool Parish Church until late 2020, and can think of several trips that, I suspect, will live on long in the place’s collective memory. One of my very recent predecessors still remembered, with a thousand-yard stare, the parish coach trip to visit the dressed wells of Derbyshire, which was thrown into disarray when one of the more forthright ladies said to another that she thought that her blouse was “a little revealing for a church outing”, i.e. she was not dressed well.
Nothing, however, beat the infamous cruise billed as a three-day round trip to Dublin and Cork, ending with a return to Liverpool in time for Sunday’s holy communion.
AlamyWhen things go wrong: scrap-metal heaps at the Liverpool Docks, not quite a sea view
Storms in the Irish Sea meant that the entire period was spent in Liverpool docks. Spirits were raised by a steady stream of complementary alcohol, which was offered by way of an apology for the fact that, while the winds and waves might obey Christ, they had no intention of doing so for the P&O Stena Line.
Indeed, the only truly disgruntled holidaymaker was the Rector himself, who had secured a room with a balcony to enjoy the view, only to have a three-day vista of the scrap-metal yard at Bootle.
SUCCESSFUL or otherwise, part of a wider network, or entirely the work of one enthusiastic congregation member, at home or abroad, all these examples, I think, say something about what and who the Church is. In almost every trip, conference, or worship event, from HTB to the Prayer Book Society, specific accommodations were made for those for whom time away might normally be an almost impossible luxury. Those who had more were happy to pay more so that these trips might be shared with people who had less. Acts 2 might not have been about all-inclusive breaks, but its spirit does still shape the thinking of all those I spoke to today.
More profoundly perhaps, regardless of budget, for very many people a church holiday might not be their first choice of time or place as a “break”. It is unlikely that their fellow congregation members would be their first choice of fellow holidaymakers either, but, if anything, this makes an even more profound statement about the Christian calling as a sacrificial one, of one that involves dying to self and living to Christ.
That said, they are not events without their issues. I think the future Mrs Butler Gallie would probably tell me where to go in no uncertain terms if I asked her to use her very limited holiday allocation on one of the events above. More serious even than the imposition on clergy spouses, “mixed” families are much more common in our churches than they have been at any time since the days of 1 Corinthians 7: the difficulties of the Church’s imposing on that precious time that families have together when not every member is totally on board was brought up by a number of those to whom I spoke. Even among the clergy, families where there are different levels of faith and commitment are much more common than they were. Sometimes, it isn’t even related to faith: for a spouse to give up limited holiday to attend what is, essentially, a work obligation for their other half is quite the ask.
And what is it about Christians and camping? I know that the Living God dwelt in a tabernacle in the desert, but surely we might provide some sense of having left the Wilderness, as well as options for those of us who favour indoor lavatories?
All that said, I also think that perhaps the most important thing about church holidays is not about the practicalities at all, but, rather, that they make a particular statement about metaphysics. At the heart of this is that they, in their unlikely and very human way, tell us a truth about time itself. They tell us about our allocation of it and about whom it belongs to.
Very often, we forget that the God whom we worship is the Potentate of Time. Consequently, when we assign that title to ourselves, or, more probably, to our Google calendars or iPhone alarms, we commit a sort of indirect idolatry. As diverse as all the holidays that I encountered were, they had in common an attempt to redress that balance: to carve out time and to give that time back to God.
By doing this, and by doing it together as the People of God, when we take part in church holidays we subvert the modern corruption that we have made of time. The fact that they allocate the most precious time of all — time that we would normally consider to be “free” — to the one who grants a truer freedom altogether is a powerful statement about the ordering of our being and God’s time.
In that sense, whether in a field in Newark, or a ruin in Caesarea Philippi, with thousands of others or just 20 or 30 from one congregation — or, even, if it involves a big, gay holiday camp at Bognor — such hallowings of time itself are holy days indeed.
The Revd Fergus Butler Gallie is the Vicar of Charlbury with Shorthampton, in the diocese of Oxford.