Celia Walden in the Daily Telegraph has joined those responding to a recent survey in the Times of CofE clergy. A lot of people have reacted to the survey’s apparent suggestion that churches and vicars should in effect just give up on the faith in order to fit in with society around.
Walden particularly focuses on the desire of those participating in the survey to open up church buildings for other groups and activities in the week (as though that’s a new idea). She writes
“To those who criticise the church’s gradual descent into community centres hosting fashion shows and helter skelters, they’ll say that it brings in money. That historically – certainly in the Middle Ages – the church was always seen as an all-purpose building, buzzing with secular activities. And just maybe once people are inside these holy confines, playing crazy golf along the nave, their dormant Christianity will be reawakened, and they’ll be inspired to return as worshippers?
That won’t happen. When you’re ripping out pews, the message couldn’t be clearer: “we’ve given up”. The church should be a place where you can escape yourself, escape stuff and reflect on something bigger. But we’ve given up on trying to elevate people above themselves, to get them to focus on the spiritual or the metaphysical. As someone once said: “civilisations don’t give out, they give in” – to the cult of the physical, in this case, to the tangible, the relatable.”
In that respect, she is partially right. I think churches have been tempted to either hire out their premises or run lots of activities throughout the week in the hope that this will gradually draw people in to Sunday. The truth is that this isn’t how people work. No more than my use of the gym at our local sports centre got me into swimming or signed up for 5 a side football. People will make use of the particularly provision that interests them without making a connection with church.
However, I think she is missing two crucial points. First, she focused on church as “escape.” She wants to have a spiritual experience not “pedestrian” illustrations about B&Q. Yes, God is bigger, greater and other. In that sense we are drawn out of ourselves and our gaze is turned outwards and upwards. However, Christian faith is not about escape from this world into something vague and mystical. Rather, it is about the God who steps into the mundane of our world and lives, the son of a carpenter who would be very much at home in B&Q.
Secondly, notice how she introduces things.
Not long ago, I attended a wedding ceremony in which the vicar referred to the state of holy matrimony as being “a little bit like a garden shed”. In order to protect that shed from the elements, he sermonised, “we need to paint it with creosote. That means regular trips to B&Q. It means putting in the work.”
The rest of his pedestrian little analogy was drowned out by my outrage – for the bride and groom, and for the congregation as a whole: the people who had gone there to celebrate the sacred union of two loved ones, yes, but also to be lifted up, just for an hour, to a loftier place – only to be brought crashing back down to “You can do it if you B&Q it.”
The pious language disguises the point that there is little concern for what might be helpful for the bride and groom. She rather makes the wedding all about herself. Imagine beign the guest who complains that the vicar didn’t satisfy your craving for a mystical experience because he was too busy trying to offer practical wisdom for the couple getting married. The piety and traditionalism is a mask to hide the fact that you can be just as consumer orientated when demanding traditional religion as when you turn up at the contemporary charismatic service. We can also be assume we are theologically spot on when we’ve got completely the wrong end of the stick.
Let’s be careful to make sure that in our attacks on consumer religion that we aren’t being just as consumerist.
Faithroots 