Challenging our Culture: What you need is hope

Time running out, time running out
For the fool still asking what his life is about
Time running out time running out.  (Jackson Browne, Black and White)

Sitting in a quaint tea-shop in the village of Clare the other day and musing on the problems of rural ministry, I found myself looking around at the other diners and asking myself, “What, really, has Christianity got to offer these people which they might possibly recognize that they need?” That is surely a question we need to answer before we can think about reversing the decline that affects so much of the church in this country.

At one table were a couple of women in their twenties gleefully discussing a recent trip to Paris. What could belief in God give them that they didn’t already have? At another were an older woman and someone who was probably her daughter. They looked well-off and comfortable. What did the ‘God-shaped gap’ in their lives look like?

And then there was my wife and I. What would make the other diners want to swap their lives with ours?

What I think we can’t say is, “Come to Jesus and your life will be happier and more fulfilled.” Frankly, I get very irritated by the stories in UK Focus along the lines of “My life used to be an utter mess but then I did an Alpha course and now I’m married and it’s all brilliant.”

Maybe it’s just envy on my part (it may be!), but life can be an utter mess after you become a Christian. Indeed, it can go downhill from that point. Certainly I don’t feel that I could personally offer such a ‘package’ with any integrity.

So what can we offer, if not that? Certainly one thing is the experience of God. Indeed, I would go so far as to say this is the key to Alpha’s success. I once had a very long one-to-one conversation with Nicky Gumbel, who insisted this was integral to the Alpha ‘model’ —that they wanted to give people an experience of God, not just a message about him. This is why the ‘Holy Spirit weekend’ is meant to be a non-negotiable part of the Alpha package. It is the point at which ‘theory’ translates into ‘practice’.

And although I can’t endorse the Alpha model, I certainly wouldn’t deny the importance of the experience of God in my own life. The great difference that becoming a Christian made to me was the sense that now I knew that I knew God —that, and an otherwise hard-to-explain enjoyment of things I’d previously avoided, like Bible study, Christian Union Meetings and church.

This, however, is hardly a ‘unique selling point’. Or rather, it is unique, but is it a selling point to happy twenty-somethings and contented fifty-somethings? “Come to Jesus and you’ll start enjoying church” —hmmm.

There is, however, something which is very much part of the Christian message which intersects precisely with people’s experience of daily life and present need, without making unjustifiable promises. And whilst it relates to our subjective experience it stems from an objective fact.

We are all of us, young and old, rich and poor, happy and sad, black, white, brown and yellow, running out of time. That is a hard, objective, fact; an undeniable reality. Indeed, it is not just we who are running out of time —the world is itself running out of time, and I am not talking about global warming. On present models, the universe came into existence about 15 billion years ago. Our solar system has existed for about 5 billion years. In far less than another 5 billion years, this whole planet will be gone. We will never ‘save the whale’, much less ‘save the earth’. All we can do is stave off the inevitable demise of everything we know for less time than it has taken it to get here.

But, some will say, we could migrate elsewhere, to other planets. And even if we couldn’t there must be life on other worlds —the story will go on. Well, for a while, perhaps, though why that story should matter is hard to define. However, (again on present models) the universe itself has a finite capacity for existence. Due to the increase of entropy, eventually every single atom and molecule will simply stop vibrating. When this point is reached nothing else can happen.

I read somewhere once that this ‘end point’ for the universe would be reached in 10¹⁰⁰ years. That is an astonishing length of time. To put it in perspective, it hasn’t yet been around for 10¹¹ years. But it is not an unimaginable length of time. On the contrary, yu just have to imagine ‘lots of the same’ and you’re there. In fact, it doesn’t require much imagination at all

Our human lives, meanwhile, are less than the blink of an eye. Moreover —and here’s the unwelcome bit —we occasionally become conscious that they evaporate just as surely as the energy of the entire universe is evaporating. I can still remember the morning I woke up at the beginning of the school summer holiday in 1957 with the awful realization that one day, inevitably, the holiday which was just beginning would be over, and it would be back to school. It was a difficult moment for a seven year-old!

Now, as I approach sixty, I am even more conscious that the same is true for life itself. One day —perhaps one day soon —I will wake up one last time.

And this knowledge has a very immediate impact. In fact, it has more impact as each year flashes by. (It is not yet Christmas and already we are planning the Easter outreach for our churches.) For it directly affects my hope about the future. When I was seven, life was full of hopes, stretching off into the infinity of the twentieth century. And there are still hopes for this life at the present time —but realistically they must be limited by the fact that there is so little of it left.

Now these may sound like the ramblings of a born pessimist, but I would respond they are the uncomfortable awarenesses of a realist. They are precisely the truths of which we should all be aware, and in the light of which we should all live our lives. The reason most people don’t think along these lines is that they are in a state of deliberate denial or blind ignorance —and in this category I would put most of our current crop of militant atheists. (If you want to read an atheist who’s got it right, try Charlie Brooker who writes for the Guardian and occasionally manages brilliant streams of invective prompted by just this awareness.)

I am reminded of the Alpha Mummy blogger who wrote how, given her “otherwise-strident aethism”, nevertheless when her children asked about death, “I JUST DIDN'T WANT TO TELL THEM THEY ROT, OK?” But yet in the same week, she wrote,

... I had a revealation [sic]. I interviewed Eddie Izzard — pretty much the most urgent and driven man in the world; which he all puts down to his mother dying when he was five —and realised that so much of what screws up this world comes down to not having a sense of urgency: of time passing, and, eventually, completely running out.

Quite so. And perhaps losing my own mother in that year of 1957 explains my own acute awareness of this reality. But shouldn’t everyone be made aware of this, as soon as possible? Shouldn’t we give little children a ‘memento mori’ — a reminder of death — as did those funeral clubs that Sunday Schools used to run for their own members? That particular Alpha Mummy’s column is revealing in the disingenuousness of its own conclusion:

Next time they ask about death, I’m going to say, very gently, “The amazing thing is kids, we’re alive! We can do anything we want now, if we put our minds to it. We can think and talk and feel and move, and make our lives pretty much however we want. So that when we die, we don't regret anything. We die with our diaries full.”

Recently, I have started taking Communion to a parishioner who knows she has only months —perhaps weeks —to live. Contrast Alpha Mummy’s message to her children with the words of the Collect we heard together for the first Sunday in Advent:

Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Which would you rather teach your children? Keep your diaries full of busy-ness, or keep your mind full of hope? At least if the collect for Advent Sunday reflects the truth about this world, then it offers a true hope. The words of Alpha Mummy, and all such ‘consolations’, are self-consciously untrue, even in the hope they pretend to offer.

The picture of a life remains
And the high ideals and the promise
You once dressed the future in
Are dancing in the embers with the wind.

Time running out, time running out ...  (Jackson Browne, Black and White)

John Richardson
9 December 2009

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Rural churches need ministers, too

This morning I was chairing a meeting of our Deanery ‘Growth Task Group’, set up to look at ways of increasing Sunday church-attendance across the deanery of Saffron Walden.

As readers of this blog may recall, this is the same deanery which has just been told that whilst its contribution to diocesan central funding this year will be £640k, its provision of full-time stipendiary ministers will soon be cut from 8.7 to 7.7.

Much of our conversation therefore consisted of how patterns of ministry need to adapt to these new circumstances. Like it or not (and some clearly don’t) clergy are going to have to allow the laity a much greater role, and not just in ‘behind the scenes’ work.

It needs to be said loudly and clearly, however, that there is no reason why this should be the special prerogative of rural ministry. Sometimes one gets the impression that ‘rich’ rural areas are expected to provide finance for ‘gritty’ urban ministry, whilst surviving on a minimum of ‘professional’ ministry-input.

By contrast, my firm conviction is that rural churches need just as many ministers as do urban churches, provided one understands the dynamics of ministry.

A few years ago, I did an informal review, based on our diocesan directory, of the relationship between the sizes of urban (as distinct from rural or inner-city) parish populations, church electoral rolls and the numbers of stipendiary ministers per parish.

This suggested that there was actually a correlation between electoral roll size and parish population —but only until the parish population reached about 4,000. Below this number, a smaller parish population correlated with a smaller electoral roll. Once the electoral roll reached (on average) 110, however, an increase in parish population saw no corresponding increase in the electoral roll. Parishes of 7,000 and parishes of 17,000 still tended to have churches with electoral rolls of around 110.

Now I would immediately want to emphasise that these findings were based on very rough figures. I would note, also, that the 110 ‘average’ was somewhat bigger than the more ‘typical’ figure, due to the presence of three or four exceptionally large electoral rolls (in excess of 200). However, the survey included over 75 churches and all were from the same Episcopal Area. With the exception of the few very large roll figures, the pattern was sustained from the smallest parishes (below 2,500) to the largest (above 19,000).

The point I want to make from this is that, above quite a low ‘ceiling’ in urban areas, parish population is a very bad guide indeed to ministerial ‘need’ or ‘reach’. To put it bluntly, you do not minister to more people just because there are more people to be ministered to.

This becomes especially so when we consider the ministry in terms of word and sacrament, which is both the special calling and the special preserve of the clergy. Congregations, gathered around the ministry of word and sacrament, seem to reach a similar size irregardless of parish population, once this exceeds 4,000 in an urban area. At this point, you are reaching the typical number of people who are be ministered to by the normal Church of England patterns of ministry.

Furthermore, whilst it is not to be doubted that some clergy and congregations, with energy and imagination, will be reaching a greater number of people than are represented by the electoral roll, there are good grounds to presume that the same principle will apply and that, beyond a certain parish population, this extra ‘reach’ will not be increased by increasing the size of the parish.

Where this matters for rural ministry is that we need to clear from our minds any notion that, beyond a relatively low ceiling, ‘bigger population’ equals ‘more ministry’. Rather, beyond this ceiling, the size of a congregation that demands a certain level of ministerial input will be the same, irregardless of population size. Heavily populated urban areas and sparsely populated rural areas are thus in essentially the same boat when it comes to ministry need —what matters is not population density but congregational size.

Of course, this also means that both urban and rural areas have the same need in expanding ministry. Once the size of a congregation which can be maintained by one pattern of ministry has been reached, you either need another minister or a new pattern of ministry. But this is as true of an urban area as it is of a rural area. An urban church with a congregation of 200 would be regarded as a ‘success’, numerically speaking, whereas a rural church with a congregation of 25 might be regarded as ‘struggling’. Again, the urban congregation might be regarded as ‘deserving’ a full-time minister, whereas the rural congregation might be regarded as scarcely needing, let alone being able to afford, one.

Yet if the urban congregation is set in a parish of 8,000, it is reaching just 2.5% of the population, whereas if the rural congregation is in a parish of 450, it is reaching over 5% —twice the percentage. The urban church’s apparent ‘success’ in terms of congregation size is actually masking a failure to reach thousands of others, whereas if the ‘reach’ of the rural church were repeated in the urban area, the congregation would be over 400.

And this, not untypical, scenario indicates another reason why rural churches actually need as much ministry as urban churches, which is that in rural areas the level of church attendance is generally higher. Paradoxically, however, it sometimes seems this is taken as a reason actually to reduce staffing levels —‘If you can get the same ‘results’ with less effort, why waste the manpower?’, seems to be the outlook.

In reality, however, those people need just as much ministry as urban dwellers, and the clergy attempting to provide that ministry will reach ‘full stretch’ at the same level as their urban counterparts. The result is that opportunities for outreach, and indeed revival, are going begging in rural areas where the ministry is being run down, since the ministers are already coping with a full workload of individual needs, combined with the demands of running an excess of meetings, PCCs, services, etc.

This is not, I would emphasise, a demand to ‘privilege’ rural areas above our urban areas. Rather, it is a challenge to the view that urban ministry demands high staffing levels whilst rural ministry does not.

The apparent policy of running down rural ministry is, I believe, based on a misconception not only about rural ministry but about its urban counterpart. Big urban parishes do not provide great opportunities just because of their size. And by the same token, ‘small’ rural parishes do not need less ministry because fewer people live within their boundaries. A church is a church, whatever its setting. Ministry is ministry, whoever the people. And a limit is a limit, however many other opportunities there may be around.

There is, I believe, real potential for ‘revival’ in our rural areas, which would benefit not only those areas but the church nationally as more funding might thereby become available for other ministries. Without proper support, however, such funding as already exists will disappear as the generation of rural Christians diminishes.

John Richardson
8 December 2009

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