Recently I met up with an old friend from university days who, when we were undergraduates (50 years ago!) , became briefly and intensely involved with evangelical Christianity through the Christian Union before rejecting it, and all other expressions of the faith in a wholehearted manner and with passion. Moreover, unlike many other unbelievers or former believers, he is unafraid to share this with me, who has been a believer since my teens and a minister in the Church of England for 39 years. At our last meeting he expressed incredulity that the church still exists at all, saying something like this: ‘Any other business whose sales have declined to the same extent as church attendance would be asking if there is something seriously wrong with the product!’
Wanting to keep the conversation fairly amicable, I didn’t say what I wanted to, namely that the church is not a business (though I did assure him that those who thought so have been in the ascendancy in the C of E for some time and have had a large chunk of the church’s resources), nor deny the parlous state of attendance across most (though not all) churches. I did rather gently suggest there to be some anecdotal evidence of an increase in interest about ‘the product’ amongst ‘Gen Z’ people (those born around or just after the turn of the millennium) suggestive of another story and that I was reading a book about it.
The book in question was Lamorna Ash’s ‘Don’t forget we’re here forever’ written last year in response to the surprising news that two of her stand-up comedian friends from university had become Christians and now were seeking ordination in the C of E. (One of the small frustrations of her book is that we never get to meet these people and hear their story). In response she spends 2-3 years talking to many people of her age about their quest.
She starts, as many others have started, with a course organised by a church. The most popular of such courses is Alpha which originates at Holy Trinity Church, Brompton written and fronted by the Curate, later Vicar Nicky Gumbel, She opts rather for Christianity Explored, a course originating in the other central London evangelical Anglican mega-church All Souls Langham Place and its director of evangelism, Rico Tice. This is a very conservative presentation of the Christian faith – doctrinally and ethically- virtually unchanged from the type of Christianity my friend and I were exposed to at Oxford) and, as such, was never likely to resonate with Ash..
One of the appealing things about Ash’s quest is that she throws herself completely into it. Although she is extremely well read and the book extensively researched, there is not a whiff of the social anthropologist about her approach (‘what an interesting specimen we have here!). She paints a sympathetic picture of her fellow explorers, one of whose baptism she attends, but not so much of Rico Tice, who comes across as slick and rather arrogant), She also engages deeply with Mark’s Gospel, on which the course is based. In addition she lets you in to what is going on in her life personally with disarming honesty: ‘I was dating women for the first time. Actually I was dating a curly-haired lesbian couple (I had to read this twice) …I was also half in love with a man who did not love me back…’ In short, not the lifestyle you’d expect from a church course member, but very possibly that of many her urban contemporaries. She was clearly similarly open with her course members, one of whom informed her coolly that, whatever choice she made for Jesus, she would be condemned to hell eternally for her sexual lifestyle.
She moves from Evangelical Anglicanism to other conservative churches that report increased interest amongst young people, such as a troubled young man exploring Orthodoxy, attracted by the otherworldliness of the saints and sheer power of the Christos Pantokrator. (Creator of all), depicted on the church ceiling. Although he is personally quite rude to her about her sexuality, meaning she couldn’t bring herself to attend his baptism, she racks herself with guilt about so doing. She also attends the Training Centre for Youth with a Mission, where she meets an international group of young charismatic Pentecostals (the largest growing churches internationally) and attends their worship which, though impressive, does not quite cut through. She spends some time looking at the recent chequered history of charismatic, experience-based, music-driven youth movements founded by strong and flawed individuals, including Soul Survivor and the Nine O Clock service and meets both casualties and survivors.
The breakthrough for Ash comes when she starts attending residential retreats, the first of which is to the Iona community (off the west coast of Mull, founded by Columba in the 6th C, but rebuilt by George McLeod in the 20th with the help of unemployed Glasgow shipbuilders). This is where she stops observing and becomes a participant. The Island (often called a ‘thin place’ owing to the closeness of heaven to earth perceived there,) works its magic on her, and, for the first time she is asked to take part in the worship, which she finds very moving. She also meets other young people, like her, on a spiritual quest. I have been to the Island myself and can testify to the power of its unique mixture of history, prayer, beautiful music and serious engagement with the troubles of the world, surrounded by astounding beauty. She also attends a week’s silent retreat on the poetry of the 19th C Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins at St Beuno’s College, N Wales, where Hopkins wrote much of his greatest verse, and also spends Holy Week and Easter with nuns and others at the Shrine of our Lady of Walsingham, where she makes her first confession to a Bishop who clearly regards her non-Catholicism as her greatest sin.
As the book nears its conclusion, she brings it all back home to the North London where she had started thinking about the project in the isolated Covid times of 2021. She explores Quakerism through the experience of members of the Muswell Hill Friends Group where she long struggles with the corporate silence but eventually plucks up courage to speak (or ‘minister’ in Quaker language), another turning point for her. She also finds a local Anglican church where, consumed with sadness about her mother and her growing dementia, she learns to pray in earnest: ‘I find the structure of prayer to be a reverse fractal. You begin with yourself, then the people closest to you, and then your thoughts inevitably expand from the local to the global, the net widening until it covers much of the earth. Now I know how to pray, though, I always starts with my mother.’
I found ‘Don’t forget we’re here forever’ to be one of the most moving and thoughtful books on Christianity I’ve read for a long time. Yet it was quite different to how I imagined. In the last year or so it has often been quoted, and Ash interviewed, in relation to the so-called ‘quiet revival’ hypothesis in the Church some of which, it turns out, was based on faulty data. I imagined this book to be a string of encounters with young people who’d become Christians and started swelling church ranks. Yet there is nothing in her book which suggests that the tide of numerical decline has turned, and the church can relax. Nor does Ash come to the church entirely from outside: she was confirmed into the Church of England when young and her mother worships at her local church
What it does however suggest is that the faith climate may be changing, which is important. When I went to Ghana 25 years ago, I was struck by how I’d moved – in faith terms- from a cold to a hot climate, from a place where religion was deemed a private thing to one where people asked me at airport check-in and on public transport (when I wasn’t wearing my clerical collar) about the Bible and if I could pray for them. That coldness is still there in people of my generation down to my Millennial children’s generation. Yet Ash’s research suggests that the sceptics and atheists (Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry and others, the likes of whom Schleiermacher called ‘religion’s cultured despisers’, who have dominated debate for so long) hold increasingly little sway with her generation, who just want to find something that works and helps them through life. Amongst her friends, says Ash, it is no longer weird to be a Christian or interested in faith.
The other striking thing about Ash is the way she wrestles with things and looks way below the superficial to the truth that lies beneath. She starts and ends the book with the story of Jacob and the angel in Genesis 28 where Jacob, fleeing his family and the wrath of his brother, whom he’d cheated, wrestles with a stranger who turns out to be an angel, saying, ‘I will not let you go unless you bless me.’ There are many things that could have stopped this book in its tracks and quickly caused Ash to give up on the quest, notably her Christianity Explored experience, not to mention the baffling complexity of the Church with its many denominations and splits within churches, but she doggedly perseveres in her quest. This gives me considerable encouragement and confidence in the ‘product’ which my old friend found so obviously wanting. Our faith and our faith communities have a depth and richness that can still nourish and excite the imagination in people young and old..
It helps that Ash writes so beautifully and evocatively, introducing me to words such as ‘soughing’ and ‘limning’ to mention just two. Her love of poetry brings out the lyricism of the Bible and other literature with which she has become acquainted in a very short time. Her own lyricism has led to the book being widely reviewed, way beyond the religious press, which is in itself unusual these days for a ‘religious’ book. I actually bought it from Waterstones, where it was on prominent display, something I can’t say of my last 10 religious purchases.
One final thing that puzzles me, and that’s the title: ‘Don’t forget we’re here forever. ‘ This phrase never appears in the book, so it leaves me guessing. I can think of two possible meanings. 1) The ‘we’ could refer to those who have most of their life ahead of them (ie her generation) or 2) It could refer to all of us, to the eternal destiny we all face, and the importance of not forgetting it in the welter of other demands.
But it’s always good to end with questions, like Jesus’ parables and (ahem!) the songs of Bob Dylan……
‘I can’t think for you, you have to decide..’
Hugh's Views 