Interesting Article from Cambridge England

To see ourselves as others see us: Mike Good takes a sideways look at his membership of a ‘dying’ church

The well-known phrase in my title is the second line of the final stanza in Robbie Burns’ To a Louse, a poem which came to him one Sunday morning as he sat behind a well-dressed young lady in church and noticed a head louse roaming through the fancy bows and ribbons of her hat; for it is the supposedly lousy Church of England that I wish to consider here.



I was born in the mid 1950s, that wondrous new Elizabethan age of post-war optimism, when church-going was actually in the ascendant, with over 75% of the population regularly attending divine service once a week. Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher was on the throne of Canterbury, resplendent in his episcopal gaiters, hard at work revising the Church of England’s Canon Law of 1604. John Betjeman outlined some features of an average mid twentieth century suburban Sunday service in his introduction to the Collins Guide to English Parish Churches of 1958: ‘The Sung Eucharist is probably from the Prayer Book and with a crowd of acolytes at the altar. ..The English Hymnal is used, and plainsong or more probably, Eyre in Eb or Tours in C...The purple Lenten chasuble of the priest is worn over amice, alb, stole and maniple, and there is discussion of these things after the service and before among servers and the initiated. We are in a world which feels itself in touch with the Middle Ages and with today. This is English Catholicism. There is much talk of... correct furnishings and vestments, the Prayer Book and how far one is justified in departing from it. After church the acolytes in their Sunday suits stand round the porch, and the young curates too, and there is a good deal of backslapping and chaff. For months the Mothers’ Union and the women’s guilds of the church have been working on banners and a frontal to be ready for Easter. From these suburban parishes much of the church life of modern England has sprung’. Does some of that ring true in readers’ memories?

In 1961 the new Archbishop of Canterbury was Michael Ramsey. Fisher was not in favour of the appointment, and told the PM so in no uncertain terms (though there is some uncertainty about his exact words): ‘Dr Ramsey is a theologian, a scholar and a man of prayer. Therefore, he is entirely unsuitable as Archbishop of Canterbury. I have known him all my life; I was his Headmaster at Repton.’ Harold Macmillan thanked him for the advice, adding ‘you may have been Dr Ramsey's headmaster, but you were not mine’. Like the PM, I was in favour of Ramsey as Archbishop: he gave me half-a-crown in return for carrying his train at the Easter service of 1965 in the Cathedral, slightly above the going rate for junior Canterbury choirboys in those days. Thus far that has been my only involvement in the upper echelons of Anglican church life. A saintly, intellectual figure, Ramsey’s appearance and eccentricities were a gift to journalists, but fortunately the 1960s were gentler times than our own. The press, however, made hay with the publication of Bishop John Robinson’s Honest to God in 1963, and most popular analysts would date the start of the decline in Church of England congregations to somewhere around that year. Our church is now generally referred to in the press as a ‘dying’ church – though one hopes that it lives a little longer, if only for the sake of those journalists who derive many of their column inches from what they presume to be its death throes.

Almost half a century after the Collins Guide, a disillusioned former curate named Michael Hampson could write a book entitled Last Rites: the End of the Church of England (2006). Interviewed in The Times of 23 September 2006, he described a typical Sunday morning liturgy like this: ‘in most places it combines the tedious with the embarrassing. The preaching is patronizing in presentation and content, the music is turgid and set too high, there are hierarchical processions of church and clergy at the beginning and the end, long passages of unfamiliar and unworthy text are read out from photocopied sheets, and attention is focused continuously on the miserable sinfulness of all those gathered’. This seems to me rather less accurate in 2009 than Betjeman was in 1958, indeed, apart from the reference to photocopies, Hampson might still be describing a church service of the 1950s. Like those modern journalists who have never darkened the doors of a church (they at least have some excuse), he falls back on caricature. One can see the same process at work in the regular journalistic treatment of Archbishop Rowan Williams, who, like Michael Ramsey, is saintly, scholarly and careful in his choice of words, but unlike Ramsey, is obliged to communicate through the increasingly unsympathetic and even aggressive representatives of the media. They are unwilling or perhaps just unable to understand what he is saying, though I admit that is not always easy: try reading Rowan’s latest book Dostoevsky, Language, Faith and Fiction (2008) and you will see what I mean. We are nonetheless lucky to have a man of this spiritual and intellectual calibre for our Archbishop.

Symptomatic of modern press treatment of the Church of England is an article in The Times of 28 November 2009 setting out the impact of the credit crunch and low stock market returns on church finances: ‘Church set to lose a tenth of its clergy in five years’. Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society is quoted as saying ‘the Church of England is, to all extents and purposes, finished’ (I rather like that extents). Ruth Gledhill, the article’s author, points out that if the trend continues ‘in just over 50 years there will be no full-time paid clergy left in Britain’s 13,000 parishes serving 16,000 churches’. Is this decline in staff as well as customers a good argument for disestablishment, she wonders? Or does it, I wonder, perhaps point to a church in transition rather than degeneration, with an ever-increasing lay involvement? Certainly this is a picture I can see in my own parish, and the wide spectrum of activities, including services, that takes place within it. I observe a variety of Anglican and other traditions, a healthy ecumenism, a diversity-within-unity that one would happily see translated to the national stage (and if it were so, might the 7.5% of the population who now attend church regularly be more enriched by the experience than the 75% who attended half a century ago?). Our Ministry Team is actually contemplating expansion rather than contraction, in the face of large new housing developments in north-west Cambridge. Take a look at the new parish website http://www.churchatcastle.org/ and you will get the impression (the name says it all) of a church serving the community and offering practical as well as spiritual resources to all those who live within the parish. If this is the ‘dying’ Church of England then I am glad to be a part of it.

Mike Good
December 2009