What's the best way to entice young people to go to church? Credit: IMDB
Disrespectful and often deeply offensive, headlines in The Sun have long been a feature of our national conversation. There was the unforgettable “Gotcha!” after the sinking of the Belgrano with the loss of hundreds of lives (judgment: utterly disgraceful); or “Up Yours Delors!” as the President of the European Union was pressing for a single currency (judgment: well done my Sun); or even “Freddie Starr ate my Hamster” (judgment: actually, he didn’t). With such attention-grabbing openers, Rupert Murdoch won his ratings war with competing tabloids. Brash and unashamedly populist, The Sun targeted a younger less reverential, less establishment audience.
Sometimes, I can’t help but chuckle at their irreverence. And so it was last week with their “Taking the Michael” headline. St Michael’s Church in Bournemouth had renamed itself St Mike’s “in a trendy rebrand to entice young people”. Grumpy conservatives online — like me — pointed out that the “el” bit at the end of the word “Michael” is of one of the words for God in the Hebrew Bible. Michael — roughly translated — means something like, “One who is like God.” Given this, taking the “el” bit off the end seems rather unfortunate, especially for a church.
But like most headlines in The Sun, there is a streak of cruelty about it. St Mike’s is a huge barn of a Victorian church designed to seat 1,000 people, but now with a congregation of 20. Bournemouth has one of the highest rates of child poverty in the South West. The Vicar there, Sarah Yetman, has a tough gig and all power to her elbow for trying to turn things around. “We aren’t trying to alienate anyone by changing the name” she explains, “But I do feel that if we don’t take steps now to draw people in from those younger generations we will be lamenting what we have missed in the years to come.” “A bid to become more trendy” was the Daily Mail’s take.
So why did this tiny story attract such attention from the national press? Well, I suspect because it does say something rather important about the changing nature of the Church of England. “Taking the Michael” is just the latest in a broad transformation whereby formality of worship is being dropped because it is seen as a barrier to new younger worshippers. The big idea is that we should all get more chummy with the divine. The austere, intimidating God of fire and thunder, the God of the mountain top, the God whom we approach in awe and wonder, is being replaced with the friendly face of Jesus, more mate than majesty. St Michael was the angel of battle who defeated Satan in the ultimate celestial firefight of good vs evil. I don’t think he’s a Mike.
For the Daily Mail and The Sun, what is going on here is of a piece with the cheapening of our national life — which may seem a bit rich coming from them, but there you are. Trendy vicars are the new trendy teachers trying to relate to the kids with permanent (draining to watch) smiles, over the top, unrelenting enthusiasm, and awkward references to popular culture. Yes, I get it. I too want my children’s teachers to look more like Hector from the History Boys (without the fondling) than the Nineties era Tony Blair leaning casually against the photocopier in his stonewashed jeans. And the comparison is not just with trendy vicars. Our new Bishops want to be known as Ric or Pete or Rod. Names are all about relatability. And Christianity is about our relatability to God.
But here, of course, we stumble very quickly into some deep theological waters of the sort Christians have been arguing about since the first few centuries of its existence. It is a cliché — and indeed an antisemitic trope (See Richard Dawkins) — to compare the violent austere God of the Old Testament to the loving warm and cuddly God of the New Testament as captured in the person of Jesus. Old Testament bad, New Testament good — that’s not Christianity btw.
But nonetheless, the central dynamic of Christianity is to be found in the interplay between immanence and transcendence, between the God who draws near and the God who is far off. And far off isn’t a bad thing. This is the God who hovered over creation at the beginning of time. The is the God of the unknown, the one who rather put Job in his place by saying that there are some things that will always be beyond his understanding. This is the God of the God’s eye view, looking at things from the widest possible perspective. This also is the mystical God of silence, there in the still small voice of calm. For Jews, this God is not even to be named. He is known as “Hashem”, the name. This is the God who hides his face from Moses.
Christianity doesn’t resile from any of this. But adds something shockingly different. God is manifest in a particular person, with a name and a face. Jesus is the image of the invisible God. He is down-to-earth (quite literally) and makes God relatable in a whole new way. Jesus is God, and Jesus is my friend.
For the first 400 years of the church’s history, it struggled to express how both of these perspectives could be true at once, how God could be both near and far, immanent and transcendent. And what it came up with was the doctrine of the Trinity, not so much an answer to how these different perspectives co-exist, but rather a firm commitment to the idea that neither could be given up without giving up the heart of what it was to be a Christian. The Trinity is not any sort of philosophical answer but a kind of regulative guide to what orthodox Christianity looks like. “But play you must a tune beyond us, yet ourselves,” wrote Wallace Stephens. It’s a bit like that.
I am not convinced that the whole Jesus-is-my-best-friend approach best carries all that young people want from the Almighty. There is nothing like spending an hour or so on your knees, somewhere vast and empty, to put your life into some kind of larger perspective and make you feel suitably humble in the great scheme of things. There is nothing quite like the order and majesty of catholic worship to summon a sense of holiness. This is the place where you can come with all your baggage, failures, stupidities, and hold them up to the altar without the distracting need for chat or explanations. This is the place where the sinner hears the convincing reply of silence. Even the deeply irreligious poet Philip Larkin could see what this kind of church offered: “Since someone will always be surprising/ A hunger in himself to be more serious.”
St Mike’s has spent some of the considerable money it received from the central church funds on a smart new website. It has the look of a Benetton advert with ridiculously good-looking 20-somethings in fashionable clothes set in interesting locations. Some of the clergy I know call this sort of thing “imaginary church”. On the website, there are no images of the church itself or the real congregation. So I looked for some. I found one of ladies in their 70s with tight platinum rinses and big coats keeping out the chill.
Being a vicar is extremely hard. And it looks like the Vicar of St Mike’s has a job that is harder than most. I wish her well. But even so, the new St Mike’s scares me for the future of the church. As numbers collapse, it is the small pools of musty holy silence that are being cut out first, ordinary churchgoers being sidelined, as central church finance is being pumped into smiley relatable imaginary church. People can find relatable anywhere these days, in every walk of life. Our culture is sick with the sugary taste of emoting professionals. Because, like diabetes, it eats us away from within.
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SubscribeThe Church needs to ‘hate’ more. Not people, but actions and ideas that are stupid, vile and degrading. Modern-day Christians are so fixated on the ‘love’ part that they feel that everything, no matter how wretched, must be tolerated. This has turned Christianity into a milquetoast religion. It’s ok to hate, because it highlights what it is we truly love and cherish. There are many things listed in the Bible that G— hates, not because they harmed Him personally, but because they are detrimental to human reasoning and healthy functioning.
Many young people are sick and tired of adults pampering and kowtowing to them. In our eagerness to be ‘nice’ we have allowed social media, lawnmower parenting, and corrupt education systems to raise our children up to be vindictive totalitarians where the slightest feeling of discomfort is experienced as a form of oppression.
The good news is that there are still young people who reject the mass media messaging and the ideologies being taught to them in schools and colleges. If the Church wants to become relevant again, it needs to stop patronizing young people and learn to talk to them at an adult level. Simply put, it needs to take an oppositional stance against the cruel insanities running rampant through our institutions. Once it is brave enough to stand for something again people will begin to take note.
Yes, love the sinner and hate the sin.
I came of age in the early 1980s, when Brideshead Revisited was on the telly. As a young fogey I was drawn to its depiction of the beauty, mysteries and ritual of pre-Vatican II Catholicism. And as an old fogey I continue to be drawn, despite a growing default position of scepticism. Many young people are also drawn to solemnity and mystery, and hate (or perhaps deride, it’s not necessarily malicious) the cringe worthiness of the ‘trendy vicar’; it’s a bit like laughing at dad dancing.
Incidentally I’m not sure that the photo accompanying this article is of a ‘trendy vicar’. Maybe he’s a Catholic priest. Anyway, his surplice and chasuble look perfectly OK, and we shouldn’t condemn him just because he’s young, and smiling.
The photo is a still from Fleabag, season 2. The vicar in that is an interesting character. Not quite the archetypal trendy.
Ah, should have known that he was fictional – too young and handsome to be a real priest!
Some of my colleagues are young and handsome, and real priests. I am not I am a retired Prison Chaplain.
I was uncharitable with the handsome comment. I’m sure there are lots of handsome (and pretty) older priests. But you can’t deny that few priests are young. Policemen of course look young these days, but even at the ripe old age of 62 I seldom meet a priest who looks younger than me!
His chasuble is on the wrong way round,
Nothing wrong with the chasuble, it’s him who’s back to front – should be ad orientam…
He’s got his chasuble on the wrong way round – back to front! That might be telling us something – what?
The church hates conservatives, although that’s because they’re Labour supporters, Marxists and ecofascists, not because they’re actually taking a doctrinal position.
It is clear that the toe curling attempts of much of the Church to be trendy has proved a reliable repellant rather than a magnet for greater numbers hearing the gospel of Christ and yet they persist.
Great comment.
I enjoyed this article. The push for trendy vicars does, indeed, sound cringeworthy.
I wonder what the answer is, though, to attracting more young people to the church? Western society is in the process of rejecting its roots and tearing itself apart. It’s now hard to imagine young people coalescing around a shared set of spiritual values embodied in a particular branch of Christianity.
One reason I started reading Unherd was to help answer the question of whether Western society can be saved or is its decline inevitable. I’m leaning toward the conclusion we’re in the end stages of the West, at least as we’ve known it for the past couple of hundred years.
I strongly suspect the global economy will collapse, or at least suffer an economic depression, in the next couple of years and because central banks are already propping it up with ultra low interest rates they will have few tools to reinflate the economy. If we think the divisions in society are bad now, in a time of relative plenty, they’ll be much worse when resources are scarce.
Maybe that’s when we’ll rediscover our common roots including, for many, our Christian roots. The church always flourishes in times of adversity. People will need help making sense of the frightening new world in which they live. I’d like to think it won’t take a crisis for a renewal of our society and Christian heritage but I fear it will.
The CofE has been trying for years, decades even, to appeal to the ‘yoof’ by being ‘relevant’. It’s never worked.
Unless someone is brought up going to church, those who turn to it are usually looking for definitive answers, certainty. They’re not after wishy-washy youth-club platitudes.
Personally, I think there’d be more interest in the church if they were more ‘fire and brimstone’ and offered the chance for a righteous crusade.
I seem flippant, but I’ve met a number of people who’ve started going to the Orthodox Church ‘because they mean it’.
The children’s author Katherine Langrish became a regular communicant as an adult after becoming inspired by C S Lewis’ Narnia stories when she was a child.
As she explains in her recent book on Lewis’s stories, she eventually gave up a belief in God with a mixture of regret and relief.
It would be unkind to describe the nine year-old Katherine as a crusader. However, she now seems to have found other causes and other ways to campaign. Parish life of flower arranging and pew-polishing is by comparison mundane, even tedious, for an adventurous spirit.
As a nine year-old she wanted the crusading adventures of Narnia to go on forever. Had she paid a little more attention to what Narnia usually is (as described to Jill by the Unicorn in The Last Battle) she would have realised that the unadventurous is the normal condition. And what does one do after finding the answers?
This has set off a train of thought in my mind. Bear with me, it’s not a defence of Islam. I recently saw an episode of Vikings where the northmen raided a town in Al Andalus. One of them wandered into a mosque and was mesmerised by two things: 1) an utterly transcendent god without images, and 2) the sight of worshippers so totally absorbed in prayer they ignored him. This Viking, the most devoted pagan in the story, was obviously drawn to them and commented to a friend about how ‘passionate’ they were.
The fictional incident touched on something I’ve thought about for several years: with Christianity shedding its holiness, its buildings and rites pointing to transcendence, only Islam is left. Religious seekers aren’t looking for relatability. They’re looking for the numinous. St Mike’s doesn’t point to the numinous, it simply points to the guy next door. And if seekers can’t find transcendence in church, they may find it in the mosque.
Maybe, but on the other hand there’s this:
Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious. Islam does not allow swimming in the sea and is opposed to radio and television serials.
I can’t see many millennials jacking in their Netflix because the Ayatollah Khomeini told them to.
I think you miss July’s point. Christianity has seemingly abandoned one of its key values; that the universe cannot be understood and that we are in the hands of fate, God or whatever.
Islam seems to have, whatever its flaws, held to this.
None of it means we need to go to the Mosque or a church buy we do need that humility that religion can bring.
I don’t much see the point in a CoE that simply accepts modern values; there needs to be resistance, even if they are wrong.
Thank you Jonathan. Jon did miss the point.
So when you said “if seekers can’t find transcendence in church, they may find it in the mosque” you didn’t mean people would be inclined to convert to Islam?
No, I meant that. But I also made clear that it wasn’t a defence of Islam. I was hoping to avoid exactly this sort of discussion where a poster quotes something from Khomeini or the Koran at me. It’s not about what you or I think about Islam, it’s about the impression a seeker may get from it. Like the Viking, he or she might note the passion, the submission to transcendence missing from St Mike’s.
Islam is very worried about the risk of converts figuring out from the likes of Khomeini what it is actually like; this is why it advocates violent conversion of infidels and the murder of apostates.
I have more faith than you in the western convert’s likeliness to spot this before it’s too late. Tell your average millennial they can’t watch TV, have fun or swim in the sea and they’ll rapidly work out how numinous Islam is. It has always been spread by force for a reason.
“if seekers can’t find transcendence in church, they may find it in the mosque.”
Not if the seeker is female.
Women are allowed into mosques, of course they are. That is a fundamental part of that faith. They are separated from males, which is a different matter for debate, but that at least avoids distraction during worship, for those who might be distracted by females
Or indeed vice versa, I should add!
And historically the sexes were separated in churches as well as mosques (still are in some denominations) – as recommended by St Paul
And in many synagogues of Judaism, of course; and in some Orthodox churches
I agree with you. Quite often, thinkers and philosophers rubbish the ideas of religions without realising that most people are desperate to believe something, anything which makes a purpose in their lives. People may believe in science, literature, running, and these things are perhaps enough. Others are flailing about looking for something.
Mainly for hope, which nothing secular can provide.
Yes, exactly. So we must ask ourselves what they will find in a church: a sense of holiness drawing them to something beyond and ‘above’ them, or a community centre?
Wouldn’t it have been just as likely that a Viking would have visited the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople as a trader? Why not depict that in a drama?
Would a Viking raider have been interested in religious passion? Isn’t passion a modern concern? In not finding any loot in the mosque, wouldn’t the raider have enslaved the congregation, as they did with the inhabitants of the monasteries? If the Vikings weren’t impressed with the passion of the Christian monks, why would they be by that displayed by any other worshipper?
You see the point of this drama? The Viking is supposed to be a god-fearer of the sort who were attracted to synagogue worship in the Roman world and who are mentioned in the gospels. Except today, it cannot be Christianity to which such a person is attracted. God forbid.
The Edwardian Bishop of Durham, Handley Moule, wrote that in Islam submission was, in theory at least, a mere submission. For Christians, submission is accompanied by the indwelling of the Spirit. And our Viking wasn’t aware of the difference?
Good piece. One of the (many) problems with the CoE is that, generally, the evangelical and the orthodox have tragically rejected the liturgy and embraced guitars and Jesus rock (ugh), while the majority of those churches that maintain the liturgy often seem less than orthodox…
If evangelicals etc… dropped the cringe-worthy Jesus is my boyfriend power ballads, banned guitars, stopped trying to be inoffensive and ‘relevant’ (as if playing Hillsong bilge could be cool in any universe) and went back to both the Book of Common Prayer and some solid preaching, I think they’d find a few more people (young people included) in the pews (which should also make a comeback).
Another point: “For the first 400 years of the church’s history, it struggled to express how both of these perspectives could be true at once, how God could be both near and far, immanent and transcendent. And what it came up with was the doctrine of the Trinity…”
Bit of a trendy vicar thing to say. I don’t think the church fathers ‘came up with’ the doctrine of the Trinity, as if it was some wheeze or a solution to a problem. In the few hundred years after the resurrection of Christ, the church were still getting to grips with the world-altering facts of the incarnation. The ‘doctrine of the Trinity’ came from the church more fully understanding what had happened.
Of course I would say that, being a Christian and all. But that’s kind of the point…
But all gods and religions were invented by humans. Early human societies got past a few hundred individuals by inventing gods who’d punish in the afterlife those who misbehaved. Your familial alliances might allow you to murder rivals with impunity in a small tribe, but if you feared an almighty in the afterlife you’d think twice.
To this day, small primitive tribes in the Amazon and the Nicobars have equally primitive and intellectually flimsy animism in place of religion, if they have any at all. And they have stayed small as a result. The two are connected.
So religion has to evolve like every other civic institution. We don’t nail people to crosses any more, we don’t burn witches, we don’t consider Bible study or alchemy to be important elements of a complete education. In the ast religion has evolved into another religion, but it now needs to evolve into something else, and in the west it’s evolving into environmentalism. It maps completely onto Judaeo-Christian principles including Eden, a Fall, a heavenly afterlife if we behave, and it has dogma, a clergy, demons, and the sale of indulgences.
It’s not all bad. Some churches might make reasonable blocks of flats.
No Jon, churches do not lend themselves to conversion to blocks of flats, or at least churches of architectural quality don’t. Multiple conversion inevitably destroys their internal spatial qualities, before you even think about what to do with the furnishings. Some churches and chapels have fairly successfully been converted to single houses, although I’ve often wondered who would want to live in a graveyard surrounded by stiffs. And even if every C of E church in the country was converted to residential use, you would make only the merest dent in the purported need for additional housing, while at the same time wrecking a unique and wonderful architectural heritage.
But perhaps you were being naughtily provocative.
I think commenters are confused between Christianity and “The Church”. Christianity leads people to all kinds of charitable works in local communities – it is a sort of back-up for the social services.
The Church, however, is a huge business with a lot of assets and a hierarchy full of little boys who haven’t grown up. I sure you don’t really believe that many churches are suitable for living accommodation but your argument holds if you say ‘the assets of The Church including the land”.
You can’t have Christianity without a Church, which is to Christianity what the Ark was to Noah and his clan.
And you can’t have a Church that merely floats about in mid-air like thistledown.
It must have structure as well as being an ideal.
Like Jon Redman, you’re working for and towards a Muslim Britain.
I used to live in a church conversion. It was pretty good. Not all are suitable of course, but I didn’t say they were. And not just because of the furnishings (which you’d just sell to Drew Pritchard off Salvage Hunters).
Re “the merest dent”, well, this is arguing against Edmund Burke’s shrewd point that “Nobody made a worse mistake than to do nothing because he could only do a little”. There are 16,000 churches in the UK; if they’re all at 2% utilisation, they need to be consolidated into 400 or so, like petrol stations and cottage hospitals have had to do. The other 15,600 could make perhaps 156,000 dwellings.
It may be that the Church just needs to be privatised along the lines of gas and electricity. The central Church establishment is analogous the CEGB and is arguably not needed. Every individual church should instead just secede and go it alone with an proportionate slice of CofE assets. Get rid of the stultifying leftist bureaucracy and see what happens.
Edmund Burke was a strong supporter of the establishment of the Church of England. No true Burkean would support privatisation, still less the cultural vandalism of turning each medieval church into ten dwellings (!). You sound more like Gradgrind than Burke; I thought better of you.
Jon – chapeau for shoehorning Salvage Hunters into this thread. About the only thing worth watching these days.
Despite being a lifelong atheist, I don’t really mind the Church, at least in its former incarnation. Some of my work colleagues and neighbours are regular worshippers and the church puts on a great charity book and art sale annually. As a kid, I had to go in the village where I grew up, but mainly because my dad (also devoid of faith) was good pals with the vicar (a thoroughly decent chap) and used to go fishing with him. Christmas Day, Harvest Festival and Easter were always really nice and everyone in the village went. Along with the village pub it was basically a place to meet and bring people together – god optional.
No – God invented humans.
Environmentalism doesn’t, of course, offer any sort of afterlife nor any hope whatsoever of a life after death.
Would Mosques make reasonable blocks of flats ?
Like all the other Western imbeciles who sneer at Christianity, you’re simply handing over Britain and the West to Islam.
Enjoy !
Which God are we talking about? There have been ten or twenty thousand. You don’t believe in 19,999 of those Gods and I don’t believe in the other one either. We’re one God apart out of 20,000.
All societies either establish certain structures or they die out. One such is religion. Religions that evolve with their parent society allow that society to expand and become successful. Western religions have evolved to tolerate homosexuality. Those that do not – for example, President Rafsanjani declaring in 2008 that “there are no gays in Iran” – simply mire their adherents in the 7th century by forcing them to profess belief in nonsense. There is no hope of progress there.
But any religion can evolve in the wrong direction. The Aztecs’ gods told them to disembowel children. When the conquistadors arrived, every other disgusted mesoAmerican civilisation joined the Spaniards in destroying the repellent Aztecs’ morally bankrupt “civilisation”.
Christianity, certainly its farcically woke of CoE allotrope, faces the same fate, but the lethal weapon against it is not the sword but indifference. Once you don’t care about its supposed hell and so on, you still need something else. For some people, that’s David Icke. For others, well, environmentalism absolutely is all about a jam-tomorrow future. Kill people of fuel poverty today and the world will be a better place after we’re all dead. Induce a perpetual recession to reduce the human population to 100 million and the world will be nirvana. And so on.
Nobody believes in heaven any more (Islam’s heaven is simply a high-end brothel), but environmentalism does preserve the really important features of religion. It gives you the feeling – as David Icke does – of being in on something that the other rubes aren’t. But best of all it gives you permission to feel good about your own virtue, and hence to hate, or scold, or try to patronise de haut en bas unbelievers.
Just like every religion there’s ever been, in fact.
An excellent response Jon. Why anyone would mark that down is beyond my ken. It seems that many people hate to hear the ‘real’ truth.
I do cringe when I here the “relevant” music; it usually makes a service sound like a third-rate pop concert (not even a third-rate rock concert). Every young person I’ve spoken to about this (i.e. 3!) says it’s embarrassing but they still go to church dispite all this. Whereas, of course, many of the older congregants have left.
In the U.S black gospel churches incorporate guitars and joyful singing. Most soul artists had a background in church singing, Aretha Franklin being an outstanding example.
Decades ago, the C of E embarked on an ill advised series of changes to the Prayer Book….which provoked a wickedly funny parody of the Vicar of Bray poem:
In ’82 comes Series 4
Oh please, do not be vexed, Sir.
And verbal juggling galore
Is what we can expect , Sir.
Perhaps by then we’ll all be taught
To call the Lord “Old Chappie”.
And having thus reduced to naught
All reverence, we’ll be happy.
There is no future in appealing to the lowest common denominator. Note the Latin Masses in the Catholic Church which seem to have no problems in attracting the young, to the total bewilderment of Boomer priests.
When young, we Boomers were in rebellion against a stuffy, unimpressive (and sometimes harsh) Old Order.
When this happens, the baby tends to be thrown out with the bath-water.
Some of us have realised this; some haven’t – mainly because they are too cheerful, and thus complacent, about the changes.
When I was a child, we went along to activities run by the church or in the church hall (Sunday School, Brownies etc), we were taken to services there with school (my primary school was officially CofE; my grammar school wasn’t, but we still held termly services in the parish church), we joined the choir and, at 13, the Youth Club. Church was an integral part of our lives and, at 61, I am still singing in a church choir (although now as an alto) and still enjoying the traditional Anglican choral tradition and prayer book services that I did as a teenager.
We were working class children and our parents didn’t go to church. They sent us to those activities to get us out of the way. For many of us, however, Anglican church music, particularly, has remained part of our lives.
Sadly, the CofE has been plagued with child abusers, including in my own childhood church, and children who are sent to activities alone by disengaged parents are more likely to fall prey to abusers. Nevertheless, it is sad that there are no working class children in church choirs anymore. With effort, children can be protected without their parents having to be involved in everything that they do. Some working class parents might love to be involved, whilst others might be too exhausted from work or busy with other children. Their children should not miss out because of that.
Children love to sing and it should not be assumed that they cannot learn to read music or sing complex choral works. They can. And, when state schools are barely teaching music at all, a properly run church choir is an incomparable musical education and a gift for life
A small correction of your Hebrew. Michael in Hebrew “מיכאל” means “מי כאל” = “Mi kaEl?” = “Who is like God?”. The word “mi-מי” is only a questioning “who” not a demonstrative one. So the “angel” of the manifestation of the power of God-that-who-is-like-him is actually even less like a Mike than yours.
And a correction of your scriptural reference to Exodus 33. God doesn’t cover his face as he passes, but rather he covers Moses’ face so that he will not see him front-on but only his back after he has passed. Apart from the drama of the scene itself, this is significant, because God is saying that you cannot really meet him only see where he has been. This is all allegory of course because God doesn’t have a face or a hand to cover with, and anyway in Deut 5:4 it says that God spoke face to face with the whole people although Num 12:8 does say that Moses only saw a vision of God not God himself. But I digress.
Good point, a reminder of the sacramental responsibility of symbolic language, peculiar to us featherless bipeds. Your point about “only after He has passed” prefigures notions of the Holy Spirit, “the wind that bloweth where it listeth”, Ruah, the unmoved mover moving creation, the life spirit animating the clay. Our Anglican Book of Common Prayer came to us sanctified by martyrs, and its current bowdlerization is an example of the (evil) spirit of Belbury, as C.S. Lewis’s Hideous Strength so well portrayed it. To make the sacred banal is subversion indeed.
This passage is not talking about people being moved to faith by a mysterious spirit, but about God acting in history. Moses wants to know that God is with them, so God answers that the most that Moses can know is that God will pass by and Moses will be able to see his back after he has passed. The meaning is that looking directly into the “reality” of God is too mind-blowing even for Moses. All we can do is watch him go by, and see his traces.
Indeed. The notion of temporality is of course a kind of human fiction (about the time, not the eternal one). (Like the book, The Dot and the Line) This underlines, I think, the folly of trying to keep “up to date”. If religion is” that cult owed to the Creator of all that exists”, then it should scaffold individuals to spiritual knowledge of their place in creation. Trouble is, many of these modern churches seem stuck on the lower rungs — individuals are really yearning higher than that. My favorite 17th century divine, Bp. Jeremy Taylor, may have said something about “fringes, but no garment, sauces but no meat”. Churches have to offer more than sizzle and smoke. Where’s the beef?
A moving piece. I am not a believer, but to me the Church of England resembles a 1970s nationalised industry. Similarities are clear: confused leadership, apathetic middle-management and a demoralised workforce; an air of indifference to customers; and all surrounded by enormous wasted capital. I cannot imagine that many searching for transcendental truth, or inspired to preach the Christian Gospel, would be drawn to the current Church of England. The answer to the Church’s problems, I suggest, would be as for British Leyland, British Steel, BT and the rest: privatisation.
As Tony Benn often pointed out, the C of E was the first nationalisation.
Yes, but with no compensation to the dispossessed owners.
Trendy vicars have a low opinion of Christ and Christianity. They don’t believe, so they have to compensate with gimmickry and gewgaws.
Another very good and thought provoking article. One of the appealing things about Islam (I am old fashioned C of E) is the unchanging nature of it. I know scholars argue about the hadith and so on, but no Imam has yet modernised Allah and made him more “relevant” or “loving”. He is a fairly unforgiving deity so far as I can see, which is much easier to live by than a modern God who will forgive anything.
Indeed, if God is by definition right, I don’t really understand that what was right is now wrong, or what was wrong is now right; this so undermines modern Christianity that it seems fatal to the whole idea. Forgiveness, generosity, kindness, helpfulness; the earthly requirements are not too demanding; then fear and love God. That would get us a long way without any modern repositionings.
Sorry to do my red-pen teacher bit, Giles, but the article should read ‘immanence’ (God being close) and not ‘ imminence’ – which I suppose could refer to Christ’s second coming being close!
I noticed that too, but gave him the benefit of the doubt when he spelt it right later in the article.
I am a member of another fellowship that adopts a habit of using a group conscience to regularly beg the question “Are we (the group) fulfilling our purpose?”. To an outsider like myself, it would appear the church stopped asking itself that simple question, long ago. Leadership whether it be moral, spiritual, religious or otherwise, cannot be necessarily relatable or all things to all people, if it is to have the courage of it’s convictions?
Poor old C of E.
Those titles vanish, and that strength decay;
Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid
When her long life hath reached its final day:
Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade
Of that which once was great is passed away.
We do not need to do any ‘attracting’ of people – young or old.
We just need to live as good, trusting, obedient, Christians – demonstrating and teaching that the Word is the truth through loving our neighbour, as we are commanded.
People have an innate need to understand the world and they either search and find it (with help from us going out and presenting it) or they reject it – usually because they cannot accept there is an authority above man (and woman). We must humble ourselves.
We all need love, and God is love. The Truth is loving.
I suggest that the Vicar of St Mikes just gets out into the community and people, young and old, will see the love ( Christ in us ) and start to search for the Source.
Would you recommend a church or a chapel? If a church, Catholic or Protestant? The point is that the article is about “The Church” and you have answered in a comment about Christianity. Not the same thing at all.
The term ‘The Church’ is generally accepted as being the Christian people – not specifically Protestant or Roman Catholic, or a building.
Yes this article is about the Church of England ( Vicars in particular ), and how to attract people to it. So perhaps referring more to the establishment than the people.
I do not see how that changes what the Christian message is however. Love your neighbour; love your enemy; bless those who curse you; do unto others how you would want them to do to you; proclaim the good news; go and make disciples…
It is very different to what the world teaches and we should never try and make it “in accord with the latest fad or fashion” i.e. trendy.
The message has been the same for thousands of years and has its own attraction to those who have a humble heart.
As the article author says: “But even so, the new St Mike’s scares me for the future of the church.” I am also concerned because it has been this attempt at making the message ‘more friendly’ that has caused people to miss the power of it.
C S Lewis observed that our view of God is too small.
One can only have genuine sympathy with a fellow Christian trying to stop the tide receding across Bournemouth beach, and who, in casting around for ways to make her church relevant and attractive, only makes that view smaller. If the ‘small’ view of Michael chimed with the smallness of the view of God that any of the young people of that seaside town might have, it should be very successful.
Did she stop to wonder if any of those young people noticed that her church, or any of the others in her town, were closed on government orders for months on end? If that fact didn’t register, why reopen them at all? In meekly obeying the government, does this Church have no king but Caesar? It’s not even as if Archbishop Welby used St Paul as a reason for obeying the governing authorities.
Having attracted all the young people, is the Bournemouth vicaress going to tell them about sloth, gluttony, pride, envy, greed, anger, and lust (properly, any strong attraction, even to stamp collecting)? When did you last hear a sermon about such things?
Some twenty-five years ago I did hear a thunderous sermon preached demanding we have gay marriage now. This was met with spontaneous applause from most of the congregation, complete with catcalls and whistles of approval. The only ones who didn’t join in were a few old timers who were left.
Now the young people don’t have to attend church to hear such things, and all the oldies who haven’t been called home have been converted. Has our Bournemouth priestess diagnosed the illness accurately, never mind prescribing the correct medicine? Is the condition one of lack of relevance or that of chronic indifference?
Where in the landscape, in the broadest sense of the term, does the priestess’ Bournemouth Victorian pile feature? The churches that Paul wrote to were organised in the same way as all the other free associations that honeycombed the Roman world. It was Roman civic society that gave them their existence and of which they were an intrinsic part. Witness Paul having to tell the converts not to mistake the Christian gatherings for dining or debating clubs. It was that easy to do.
In an out of the way thoroughfare you can suddenly come across a large and distinct building that was a telephone exchange built in the 1930s to house the mechanical switchgear. Once full of the voices of the women operators, they are now silent and part of a civilisation that no one now remembers or understands.
Likewise are the churches long since converted to modish apartments or to other uses, in which prayer was once valid. In the churches that are used as sleeping accommodation for tourists, these holidaymakers find these places ‘spooky’. Now even that feint sense of the numinous shows promise.
In the fifties, the parentals heard, “I find the Gospel according to Paul appealing, but the gospel according to (Norman Vincent) Peale, appalling.” Later at University I heard, “Drop kick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life!” SMH, I just think, If your child asks for bread, would you given him a stone?
Over the years I have been part of both traditional Protestant churches, including Episcopalian, the C of E’s American cousin, and more modern, evangelical ones. Currently I am part of a large (4000+) Presbyterian church that holds both traditional and modern (i.e. guitar-driven) worship services. Here on the West Coast of the U.S., there are many large and vibrant churches with plenty of young people. I think the problem comes when a traditional-style church tries to change its way of worshiping to draw in youth, as the church highlighted in this article was doing. People can sense if someone is being authentic or not. There are many ways to worship God, and different styles will draw in different people. No one church can please everyone, not should it try to.
Thanks Giles, and a great last line.
‘It is a cliché… to compare the violent austere God of the Old Testament to the loving warm and cuddly God of the New Testament as captured in the person of Jesus.’ Bit of a conversion, that, on god’s part. Or were they different ‘gods’? Nope, not with Job in the mix. It’s organised religion which needs ‘churches’, not god, whether he’s real or imaginary.
Jesus is my friend…He said so. Jesus is also the Lord of Everything. He said His sheep hear His voice. Not many sheep in the UK these days. Being trendy is not something Jesus approves of.
He was big on challenging liars, the corrupt and those who were persecuting his sheep ……………..Hmmm has much actually changed in 2000 years ?? And what would ‘He’ suggest today – the planet is overrun with those 3 types – and many of the sheep are truly persecuted. And does ‘meek’ mean to quietly opt out of the crazy system and somehow live a ‘natural’ spiritual life – as Paul Kingsnorth ??
The relevance of ‘traditional” religions has well and truly passed because they forgot to keep reinterpreting spirituality alongside the developments of history (the masters thesis I never got around to doing). “Inspiration,’ whether written or ‘in the moment’ , arrives or arrived via the human consciousness of that individual thinking and/or writing AT THAT PERIOD IN TIME. And the challenges of spirituality during a particular period in human history need to address the challenges to spiritual growth of that particular time in history. Spirituality that fails to do that is superfluous and bunkum. And at the heart of spirituality is the attitude of LOVE – working towards what is the best for all . Note love is not a warm fuzzy romantic feeling but an attitude in action. Real spirituality is love in action and if that is accompanied by a groundedness in a sense of transcendence and a post ‘this particular space-time continuum’ perspective then so much the better for that individual. If ‘Satan’ could be described as a metaphor for ‘that which obfuscates the true spirituality/Reality of life’ then ‘Satan’ is fully successful and rampant in this day and age – as ‘he’ (as human primitiveness) as always been. The only thing that can improve the human condition is spiritual renewal and that is not and has never been led by organised religion (except maybe in patches led by Jesus’ true followers). The Apocalypse most often is depicted as four nasty creatures bringing into being bad things for humanity – apocalypse actually means ‘revelation’ – revelation of what HUMANS will bring into being if they continue their primitive ie non-spiritual practices. There is no judgemental ‘God’ – just a loving, creative life force that gently points out the best way to be in this space and time dimension – what we make of this opportunity is entirely up to us and is informed by whom we choose to be ‘informed’ by. IE is entirely rational/karmic/cause and effect – plus doing the best with whatever part of the gene pool one springs from. So then make your choices with fear and trembling-or at least plenty of respect and dont go wingeing to ‘God’ if you made bad choices cos all the information for good choices were always out these. That is info is LOVE and applying it to the world can only cause ‘good’. Agreed that some actors on the human stage will need solid ‘boundaries’ and that those committed to sin/anti love might need their freedom curtailed in the name of love for all…………
-and that the application of the love-principle is not complicated. But robust honesty would be a great refreshing start……….
Very enjoyable and true, but it’s been going on for ages. Who can forget Mel Smith’s wonderful Vicar who was keen to reach out to the Satanists with a welcoming “less of the ‘Get thee behind me Satan’ and more of the ‘come on round for a cup of tea”?
The central problem is that more and more people have come round to the conclusion that there isn’t a God. I’m not sure how congregations can be restored when this cat is out of the bag, but it certainly isn’t going to happen through the Reverend Mountjoy approach.
Wasn’t it Rowan Atkinson rather than Mel Smith, or am I recalling something else?
Rowan did the intro, it was Smith
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWa3LyvFOdc
Very funny!
Cheers!
An interesting article. I read it as an unpacking of the communication dissonance between those suitably established within the subculture of their faith and resultant civil society values. And those who are in the psycho-dynamically plastic phase of finding their place and existential purpose in the world in which they find themselves in – both the external world and its sense of opportunity and future, and their inner worlds so tacitly formed in them by upbringing, generational and media norming and explicit educational messaging
Two vastly different worlds between the established and those becoming established. Yet all players being common in their humanity and the universal need and benefit of each individual, to stumble somehow, someway, across the reality of an incarnate God. And then to find a relevant context in which to nurture and evolve such an experience into personal, relational and civic benefit
Each world speaks out of their own framework and therefore mostly past the other
My own hunch is that the measure of refilling of the pews to be commensurate with the size of historical investment in building facilities and current overhead, will not be achieved by creative, energetic attempts at youthful dressage, nor by reaffirmed traditional formats and stern rebukes of ‘today’s young people’
I think it’s possible that here and there, a messaging platform from within the established church world can fruitfully engage with the world views, concerns and hurts of todays young people in ways that have some chance of being heard.
But also think that it will most likely require ‘missionaries’ – leaders, called ones, innovators, from outside the established church subculture. Speakers of truth-in-love of the same historically grounded, revelatory offer which has been spiritually transmitted from one generation to the next, since the Commissioning.
The visible church’s best hope of maintaining societal relevancy is perhaps by continual renewal of Peter’s reminder to Paul in Galatians – don’t forget the poor. And spare us the screeching for more state managed care while you’re at it
This always reminds me of an Alex cartoon from the 80s where Alex and Penny are in his car at night, with the roof down, looking up at the sky. Penny says something like, Doesn’t the vastness out there make you feel humble? Alex says Not really, how many 25-year-olds can there be out there who make £150k a year and drive a BMW convertible?
2% utilisation and it’s still open? Crazy. These people have too much money.
We have too many churches and not enough homes. Whatever could the solution be?