Page 9 - PT Winter 2021-2022

lacking in depth. None more so than the idea of 10,000
house churches led by lay people, each having no fewer
than 25 members. My first reaction to this was that it was
a safeguarding nightmare-in-waiting at a time when we
have more than enough of these to deal with. My second
reaction was that this was a firmly middle-class initiative,
and if it was aimed at neighbours they would all be living
in very wealthy areas where houses could accommodate 25
people at a meeting.
poorly with me when I think about the £8bn reserves of the
A Church for the poor? Church Commissioners and wonder about the parable of
So maybe we’re not really interested in poor people in the the buried treasure.
Church of England; perhaps with a clergy and hierarchy The other area of ministry that concerns me, is that of
predominantly from the middle and upper classes, we social action. There is so much ministry that is wonderful Photo Credit: istockphoto.com/chrisdorney
don’t really have an ear for the working class and the poor. being done in parishes up and down the land, yet it is not
As someone who grew up in a single parent family on a seen centrally as what gives the Church its meaning, its
council estate, I have certainly felt a foreigner in the higher purpose. Food banks, pantries, shelters, street pastors,
echelons of the Church on a number of occasions. refugee supporters, and so many more initiatives, are
There is something else that concerns me about the doing amazing work in parishes around England. They are
ideas and proposals in the Governance Review – it’s that it being the neighbour, they are the welcome to the stranger
ignores the nature of rural ministry. This is nothing new in a foreign land. This is not being done in order to bolster
in the Church of England, where the focus is on cities and attendance and income, it’s being done because it is coming
towns with their large populations, and the rural Church is from the heart and is in response to the Gospel imperative
often viewed as costly and ineffective because of low Sunday to love our neighbour.
attendance. Yet, it is the rural parish system that gives me Yet the people in these parishes respond to the Church
the ideas for the future of the Church, having been the because they can see that the motivation is genuine, and
vicar of rural parishes in the past. they recognise the values they expect to find in the Church.
In a rural community the Church belongs to everyone While church leaders praise these projects, they too quickly
– and they know it. You can’t be extreme – whether that turn their focus away to projects that they hope will bring
means ‘high’ or ‘low’ church – you have to serve everyone ‘young families’ into the churches, in order to perpetuate
because they can’t nip down the road to St Elsewhere’s the institution. I have always found the notion of seeing
if they don’t like what you’re serving up. You have to children as the ‘church of tomorrow’ offensive: they are
be the church of the neighbours, pároikos. So it is, that in most surely the Church of today as much as any of us are. It
rural communities we can see a clear vision of what a seems that those leading the latest round of strategies have
parish means and how it relates to its community. It can taken their focus off the Kingdom that is here and at hand in
be frustrating when people who rarely come to Sunday favour of sorting out financial and attendance issues. While
services object to your faculty application, but they do so people can smell the desperation and ulterior motives, they
because they believe it’s their church too, and they also are unlikely to consider membership of our Church.
cough up when there’s a fundraising appeal, and attend
church social events. One last chance
In cities and towns, we have lost much of this sense of Some years ago, I was on retreat in Wales and I met a vicar
belonging and ownership, and instead of looking at what who had been asked to take on a church in London that was
makes rural ministry work, that could be helpful, the due to be closed – to give it one last chance. Within a year,
Church simply ignores it and spreads clergy and resources the regular congregation had gone from under two dozen
ever thinner in these areas. This pleading of poverty that to over a hundred.
we cannot afford to grow ministry (lay and ordained) sits I asked what they had done, and he replied that they had
gone into the community to find out what the need was,
and then they had ministered to that need. The parish is
most certainly not on a collision course with extinction,
and while new initiatives have always been added to
complement this ministry, and rightly so, it is not ripe for
replacement.
It is the presence in every community of a beating heart
that lives for the neighbour, and for the stranger, the widow
and orphan. The Church of England would simply vanish
without it, because it is the Church of England.
Photo Credit: istockphoto.com/Halfpoint
1 Matthew Parris in The Times, p33, 20 November 2021, Anglicanism was
never really about God.
2 Governance Review (https://www.churchofengland.org/media-and-news/
press-releases/recommendations-made-church-england-governance-reform)

Find us online at www.plain-truth.org.uk Winter 2021-2022 The Plain Truth 9