‘Such a shame about W,’ someone said to me, as I entered the premises where the Guitar Club rehearsals are held last week. ‘Why?’ what’s happened to him?’ I queried. ‘He was found dead in his house on Christmas Eve.’ W was a member the Guitar Club, but on the edge, where he liked to be. He’d come on to us when his busking stint had finished, sit on the edge during rehearsals and then, when we came to the Open Mic where our songs would be performed, he’d sit in the audience listening before playing his own songs (usually Country & Western or Rock ‘n Roll with a deep croon) at the very end of the evening when many people had left.
W was a very shy man who held a lot of sadness inside. I was just getting to know him a little when I left the parish. Did I know (he asked) that he helped his Dad make the Central Altar for one of our churches in the 60s and he’d been an Altar Server there for a while? When I moved to the town where we now live and regularly walked past him as he busked in the dark alleyway near the centre, he’d stop playing and tell me about how he chose that pitch because no-one else wanted it (there was a rival, for a brief time) and how he was born in a maternity home just 2 streets away. A big man, but very gentle and unassuming, both in character and the style of his guitar playing. I don’t think he ever made much money.
And now he’s died. It’s out of my hands now, of course, but I hope he has a funeral in the church in the town where he lived all his life, because he was much loved and there’ll be a big turnout and it’ll give a chance to the eccentric jazz band, of which he was a member, to parade up the streets into the church.
W hadn’t attended church for many years and could not be called a church member, yet he played a small but important part in the life of the parish. That word ‘parish’ is a rather old fashioned word, yet it is at the very heart of a debate going on in the Church of England at present with far greater ramifications, I would suggest , than the more obvious one about sexuality. The heart of the matter is this: Is the church a (failing) business, needing the remedies of the market to grow, or is it an organism? Business experts will tell us to focus in a laser-sharp way on our USP, our core purpose, which is deemed by many in the hierarchy to be ‘making disciples.’( =getting recruits) As the Archbishop of York (a writer who has inspired me with the breadth of his theological vision and yet who bizarrely seems to have bought into this view) said not long ago, ‘Starbucks makes coffee; McDonalds makes burgers; the C of E makes disciples.’ If that is truly the case, then spending time with the likes of W or hosting his funeral, is time wasted, because it’s not leading to disciple making. The same could be said of many community improvement projects which take up much of a parish priest’s time.
Yet if the church is not a business but a body ,an organism which is both worldwide yet locally based in a parish (a geographical area with boundaries encompassing all its inhabitants, with a church building and a worshipping community at its heart) then such activities are central to its life. At the heart of the idea of the parish is the belief that God created the world, saw that it was good, and then confirmed this by taking flesh and becoming one of us in Jesus Christ. This means the entire life of the patch of earth and its peoples entrusted to priest and people (the parish) is sacred to God. It is just as much the work of the church to care for them and to celebrate their lives than to convert people to Christ (make disciples).
These thoughts have come to my mind partly because of a book I was given for Christmas, entitled ‘The Once and Future Parish’ by Alison Milbank. All my working life as a parish priest I have lived and worked by that principle outlined in the last paragraph. I have known for some time that this idea has been under threat from the minority that really didn’t believe in it, who had little interest in the material side of people’s everyday lives but only in their ‘supernatural’ potential to be ‘saved’ Christians, removed from this wicked world and keen to bring others into the Ark. 23 years ago I even wrote a dissertation on this theme for an MA for which I was studying, arguing against those who saw the parish as the ‘enemy of Christianity.’ I concluded: ‘For in bearing witness to the God who is the Creator of all people and alongside them in the various conditions of their lives, the Parish is far from the enemy of Christianity. It is, rather, a treasure, a distinctive and gratuitous gift by the Church to the people of this country, mirroring by its presence the goodness and generosity of God..’
Yet over those 23 years the decline in numbers of clergy and churchgoers has led many more in the church hierarchy to oppose this parish ideal (though they will seldom be honest enough to admit to it) on the basis that it is simply unmanageable. In so doing they have not always been motivated by the desire to convert and ‘make disciples’ but to cut costs and manage efficiently. Hence the backlash (mainly lay-led but with clerical and academic spokespeople of which Alison Milbank is the most eloquent) called ‘Save the Parish’. I have never been a great joiner of church pressure groups but this is one to which I feel drawn, for there is much work to do.
Looking back over my ministry I can see how lucky I have been to minister in parishes small enough to put the parish ideal outlined above into practice. I have also been heartened by the recent emergence of Bishops including my own who are still committed to this ideal alongside the ‘recruitment drive’ approach to which they have to also pay attention. It takes bravery to set their faces against the wholesale reorganisation of the system making clergy into ‘regional managers.’
So, to return to my starting point, what about W, who spent his whole life in the same town and died a few yards away from his boyhood home? Parishes are made up of people like him and it is right that he will be laid to rest and his life celebrated in the same church as prominent churchgoers and the great and good of the parish. The generous God created all people in His image and so it falls to us, as His church, to mirror that generosity through our buildings and in our lives.
Hugh's Views 