BOTH the Church’s funding bodies and the Government should ramp up investment in cathedrals, where financial pressures are resulting in commercial bookings that risk “crowding out the sense of stillness and calm”, a new report has concluded.
Living Stones: English cathedrals as sacred spaces in changing times celebrated the contribution made by the country’s cathedrals, but warned that they are in “serious difficulty”, with 80 per cent in structural deficit.
“The pressures of financial survival can consume so much energy and attention that there is little left for the deeper questions of purpose and mission,” it said.
Produced by Theos, the report was funded by the Church Commissioners’ Cathedral Sustainability Fund and the Association of English Cathedrals (AEC). It will be presented to the National Cathedrals Conference in Bristol this week.
In addition to fieldwork at six cathedrals, where a visitor survey gathered 1375 responses, Theos commissioned a YouGov poll of 1802 members of the public. Although 77 per cent of the poll’s respondents had visited a cathedral in the past three years, the report cautioned that “we are at risk of overestimating how emotionally, culturally or financially invested English people are in their cathedrals”.
The report diagnosed in the public at large a “warm but passive dominant posture”. It continued: “While the non-religious population unfamiliar with church can present an opportunity for cathedrals, this group’s relative lack of spiritual formation also means it tends towards a default indifference, which requires deliberate effort to overcome.”
The report said that many respondents were “pleased that cathedrals exist, glad to benefit from them and even emotionally attached to them, but they do not automatically infer from this that they bear any responsibility for sustaining them”.
More than half (57 per cent) of the YouGov respondents said that they were unlikely to donate to their nearest cathedral if it was in financial difficulty. Overcoming such public ambivalence required work in schools, community life, and the wider public conversation, the report said.
Recurrent themes across the fieldwork included “the idea that the building itself does much of the missionary work”. Cathedrals “remain spaces where stillness, beauty and wonder can gently draw the spiritually open toward an experience of the sacred”, the report suggested.
It said, however, that “the building — and even the liturgy — cannot communicate the Christian faith alone. Its potential for Christian mission will be realised only with the provision of clear interpretation and gentle handholding for the spiritually curious.”
Many visitors told the researchers “that they could not fully understand the beauty and meaning of the cathedral they were visiting”; and some senior clergy admitted to this as a failing.
”Collar off, I walked into the building trying to imagine I was a first-time visitor who didn’t know anything about anything,” one told Theos. “I learned a lot about Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII — I didn’t learn much about Jesus of Nazareth.”
It is 16 years since Theos published its first report on cathedrals. In the interim, the landscape has changed “markedly” with both commercialisation and professionalisation being two significant shifts, the report said. The latter has been “largely a positive story”, it suggested. But one staff member, who “spoke for many”, commented: “At the moment, cathedrals have become governing bodies with safeguarding responsibilities and fund-raising activities, and, if we have any time left, we can then run a church on the side.”
In recent years, commercial events at cathedrals have seen them drawn into the wider culture wars. The report revealed a degree of regret among cathedral staff, some of whom felt that “their cathedral got some things wrong in the early years, whether it be spirits tasting events, inappropriate comedy acts, or horror film screenings, and suggested they are now more deliberate about what events they host”.
The report itself said that a new, younger audience coming to a cathedral for a tribute concert “may come to feel comfortable entering the cathedral primarily as a concert venue”. It continued: “Cathedrals should remember that they have only one chance to make a lasting first impression and should not underestimate its power, lest they create a new set of lasting misconceptions.”
The “lotteryification” of the funding landscape was also explored. At several cathedrals, staff described how lottery-funded projects had “influenced, and in some cases largely erased, the religious meaning of spaces and objects in favour of heritage interpretation”.
The report was overwhelmingly sympathetic towards the financial “perma-crisis” in which cathedrals find themselves, noting “statutory responsibilities for buildings of immense national significance, whose costs outstrip their resources by orders of magnitude”.
It warned: “If cathedrals are to continue delivering the social goods that government commends them for, they will need sustained public investment.”
In addition to this, the Church’s national institutions should “consider going beyond” the support currently offered, such as the Cathedral Sustainability Fund, and “recognise cathedrals as central to its holistic witness and a singular means of discharging the responsibilities that come with establishment”.
The report continued: “This will involve calibrating expectations to the slow-burn nature of cathedral ministry. The return on investment in a cathedral should not be measured narrowly in new members or even visitor numbers (which have been, in fact, growing over the years), but in the provision of spiritual capital and social infrastructure for the nation, over generations.”