Yesterday, I participated in a Symposium organised by Affinity to help churches learn lessons from COVID. One of the challenges we have with the attempt to learn lessons and one that the Public Inquiry will face too is that even with hindsight, it is possible to focus in on the aspects of experience and expertise that fit with our preferred narrative and the result of it is that we don’t learn new lessons. We are not good at learning lessons for ourselves, we are better at spotting the lessons that others need to learn.
I want to pick up on one specific example here. One of the key points of discussion at the symposium was around the place of protest including legal challenge. One of my fellow panel members suggested that the Church as a whole had been pretty much absent and failed to give proper witness to the glorious hope we have in Christ. Now, my initial response to that was to point out that in fact, what we saw, up and down the country was many church congregations doing exactly that.
Pastors and elders were busy ensuring that they found alternative ways to help God’s people gather. Even those who for philosophical reasons didn’t think that things like Zoom counted as an assembly of the church still went out the way to provide those things. Church members were busy phoning one another, delivering shopping etc. And a significant element of this was the desire to ensure a public witness. We could have perhaps found ways to go underground, to secretly gather and hope not to be caught. However, what we did was to find ways to be as publicly present as possible.
This is important because a frequent lament I’ve heard is that people hoped the pandemic would in some way lead to revival. Yet, we have not seen a mass turning to Christ. It feels to me, and I hope to be corrected if wrong, that the sense there seemed to be of a more mystical sudden turning of hearts. Now, like anyone else I would have rejoiced to see a Great Awakening style event. We did not see that.
Yet, what we did see was two things. First, we saw many Christians engaging with God daily both corporately and personally. Our church at the time saw people coming together using Facebook and Zoom for Sunday worship, then four times a day through much of COVID plus our online life groups. Those gatherings were an opportunity to pray, praise, hear Scripture and be taught from God’s Word. We were not alone in terms of this kind of intensity which echoes the kind of experience from church history of revivals being an intense period of prayer, praise and teaching in the church. And I believe that much of our prayer at the time was a crying out to God.
Secondly, because those things were visible and public, there was engagement with non-Christians. Our own experience was that neighbours listened in and joined in, that after things begun to open up we found out how much so. That this led to further opportunities. I know churches that ran well-being courses that led into Alpha and Christianity Explored. When we joined a new church in 2021, we started meeting people first in a community group and in our group was someone who had become a Christian through that route. I understand this was replicated in other groups. I know of churches planted and revitalised in the pandemic. We wondered if we had gt the timing wrong but we are seeing fruit and growth.
Now, I think that what the panellist meant was that we did not promote our Gospel hope in the style and manner that he hoped for. He is part of one of the public campaigning bodies and so if he means that a lot of us did not get behind campaigns such as signing letters and petitions, join in legal challenges or even take the risk of going against guidance and regulations if we thought they were wrong and restricted worship, the I think he is right.
So, the risk on one side, is that because there is a specific view of what public witness means and particular political/philosophical views of what should have happened more broadly in the pandemic that some will miss out on things that God was doing and make faulty assumptions about the church. This will limit lesson learning.
However, here is the other side of the coin. Perhaps for some of us, especially if we had concluded that measures were necessary, even if we didn’t agree with them all and if we prioritised things like submission to the authorities, we were reluctant to engage with protest. I admit that there were thigs I couldn’t sign up to in the pandemic because I agreed with parts but not all of what was said. I must confess that there were times when I saw protest and was concerned by the tactics and tone which was reflective of a lot of how Christian engagement in public affairs seems to come across.
The result is that I might be at risk of missing a lesson too. I may miss out on the place of public engagement. One questioner asked if there was really any point to us attempting to challenge State over reach, what good would it do. There were some helpful responses and a lot centred around a specific case study.
In 2021, church leaders took the Scottish Government to court for a Judicial Review hearing and that JR concluded that the closure of churches in Scotland that winter (distinct from the first lockdown) was unlawful.
Now, it’s important to be clear about the findings of the case and the reasoning, quite a bit of which has been skated over, again risking the wrong lessons being learnt. First, the case was Judicial Review, so it was about whether or not the Scottish Government had acted unlawfully (note the important distinction from illegally) by going beyond its authority or exercising it incorrectly.
At the heart of the argument was that there is a constitutional separation of powers between state and church in Scotland. Therefore, the plaintiffs argued that the State could not interfere with public worship. Now, it is worth noting two things here. First, that as I understand it, we are talking specifically about the Scottish settlement and secondly that this acknowledges the status of the Church of Scotland. I would argue that the constitutional intent is to acknowledge the disestablishment of the Scottish church.[1] This means that we cannot assume that the judgement would have had wider application to the rest of the UK, nor that it would have settled the question about who has authority to make decisions for each individual congregation, especially non-conformist churches.
We also need to be clear that whilst the court, and the Scottish Government’s counsel recognised the constitutional separate spheres of authority, that the ruling was not a straight forward prohibition on the state in effect interfering in the affairs of the church. Whether or not we like it, the court’s view was that there are good reasons as to why the state might need to intervene. The ruling was however, that such measures had to be proportionate, that the burden of proof was on the Scottish Government and that in this specific case because of wider circumstances they had failed to prove proportionality.
This is important for two reasons. First, again, it was argued in the symposium that the ruling had wider implications and perhaps indicated that the regulations in England, Wales and Northern Ireland were unlawful -and perhaps the earlier ones too. However, we need to be clear that making a proportionality judgement is a lot more nuanced than that and is circumstance dependant.
It might be helpful to pick up on an illustration used in the symposium. Does the state have the authority to tell you what your children should eat? I guess we could add a few other things to that such as what they wear, when they go to bed and how you discipline them. In general we would see such things as an overreach of authority. However, we recognise that there are situations in which yes the state may intervene on all of those matters, not through primary legislation from Holyrood but
- Schools have a significant say in what your children eat and wear.
- Local authority social services may be concerned about all of the above issues where there is concern about neglect.
- The Government does legislate to restrict your children’s consumption of substances regarded as harmful.
So, I think that the question of state authority and jurisdiction is a little more complex than some have been suggesting. One of the things we did learn yesterday was both that often the Government doesn’t understand the church/religion/faith and that the church doesn’t really understand the Government. I would broaden the latter to suggest that some of the arguments concerning church and state authority arise out of one view (Lex Rex) of the distinction of spheres of authority but if we view the state through that lens, we may continue to fail to understand what the state is and how it functions.
Having said that, my purpose in highlighting the Scottish case was to note that its conclusions were useful, vital even for Scottish Christians. It demonstrates that there is a benefit to being willing to robustly, publicly and legally challenge decisions. It suggests that the courts may at times be a better place to help people understand what Christian worship entails. From that perspective, I may have been at risk of missing the lesson that there is benefit to challenging. Perhaps if we faced lockdown type restrictions again in England, especially given that many of us had huge questions about some of the measures last time that we might be more ready to challenge.
I think too that this points to something else. Do I just want to challenge to protect my rights? Of course not. However, and this is where I think those who took action recognised something important. We act on behalf of the church’s rights in these situations because there is a wider, common grace public good in taking such action.
In future articles I intend to pick up in more detail on some of the things that came up during the symposium.
[1] Pages 34-35 of Lord Baird’s ruling are crucial here. 2021csoh032.pdf (scotcourts.gov.uk)
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