At a recent meeting of Clergy we were warned by a senior member of the Cathedral Staff that the future is 'coming towards us faster than anyone expected'.
At another meeting, asked to share our hopes for the future, the only consistent hope expressed was 'survival'.
What has gone so dramatically wrong?
Is it the 'undulations' of the C S Lewis's Screwtape Letters?
Have we simply become confused and discouraged? Are we sunk down into one of the 'valleys of life' Should we 'faithfully persevere until better times remain'?
Or is it something much deeper and more serious happening?
Will we collapse to the point where the dinghies cannot ever again be floated on the next rising tide?
This Christmas the indoor critic and I drove down to Manchester to meet her brother and have lunch.
The place we chose happened to be close to the parish where I became Vicar, aged 29, in 1974 so for old times sake we took a drive around the church.
It was a Sunday. The church was locked and tacked onto the closed gates was a handwritten notice that stated: Service 10 30 St Paul's.
In 1974 this was a thriving anglo catholic parish, average attendance was around the 100 mark and I was inducted as Vicar and had the freehold, which meant that if I had stayed, I would still, at age 70, be the Vicar.
A typical day for me in 1974, started with Mattins or Mass, continued with School Assembly followed by a session in the Study, afternoons were spent visiting and most evenings there were meetings ranging from Church Council to various organisations, study groups and the Youth Club.
Not much time left as R S Thomas has it, for the music of Cesar Franck or for fishing.
Nearby St Pauls had a full time staff and the other neighbouring parish had a Vicar and all were thriving.
Today the website suggests a staff of two with the Team Rector living in what was my old Vicarage.
This is possibly not a bad result for the three parishes as they are still open and still have staff support but the message from the handwritten notice was eloquent, survival was the best they could hope for.
So how did we get into this sorry state?
The first time I ever visited Holy Trinity, Brompton (HTB) it was for a wedding.
Personally I found the whole experience utterly depressing somehow the message was being compromised by the medium, carpeted nave, drums and guitars and definitely no vestments, but when I questioned I was told again and again that it was successful, it was bringing bright young people into the life of the church and into belief.
But as Bob Dylan once observed, I didn't believe it.
Years later I was cornered into running an Alpha Course (by public demand) and I found myself faced with the dilemma of really wondering how such nonsense could be pedalled so successfully, so successfully that a Catholic Priest I knew, thought it a great way to, as he expressed it, 'Catch the mums at the school gate'.
Well the mums I met at the school gate were far to sharp to confuse the medium and the message.
The thing is that the Church is not, cannot be, about success.
It is, or should be about weeping with those who weep. Sharing the joys and sorrows of people as they confront the challenges that life sends their way.
In the parish I revisited this last Christmas, the Methodist Minister, the Catholic Parish Priest and I ran a job creation scheme, by half way through the Thatcher era we were the largest employer in the area.
Today however the influence of HTB is felt across the Church of England, the author of the Green Report (see my earlier blog) was followed down the street refusing to answer questions from the Panorama reporter.
But The Rev'd Lord Green, himself is, together with the Archbishop of Canterbury, an alumni of HTB, as well as the head of a bank that handed out 'bricks of cash' as he called it in the title of his book, it was just money!
I cannot help make a connection here with another expression of evangelical thought which I suspect is closely associated with HTB.
Prosperity theology or gospel is the 'christian (?)' religious doctrine that financial blessing is the will of God. It proposes that faith alongside support for the Church and its ministries will increase your personal material wealth.
The spread of the evangelical view of the church and what it should be has spread corrosively through the institution. Such minister's no longer view themselves as 'parish' priests they act as chaplains to congregations, join up and you are part of the 'parish' stay out and you are on your own.
Alongside the prosperity gospel and the quoting of a bible verse for every occasion sits another danger.
What is being peddled is tantamount to what Bonhoeffer dismissed as 'cheap grace' compared to which is contrasted another altogether more powerful and challenging version of what the church is and should be.
It comes not from contemporary London but from a 17th century Dean of St Paul's whose erotic yearnings for love became the no less erotic yearning for a relationship with God, which was both personally challenging and costly:
Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
John Donne
This is the passion that the church has lost and along the way the affection and respect of people.
At another meeting, asked to share our hopes for the future, the only consistent hope expressed was 'survival'.
What has gone so dramatically wrong?
Is it the 'undulations' of the C S Lewis's Screwtape Letters?
Have we simply become confused and discouraged? Are we sunk down into one of the 'valleys of life' Should we 'faithfully persevere until better times remain'?
Or is it something much deeper and more serious happening?
Will we collapse to the point where the dinghies cannot ever again be floated on the next rising tide?
This Christmas the indoor critic and I drove down to Manchester to meet her brother and have lunch.
The place we chose happened to be close to the parish where I became Vicar, aged 29, in 1974 so for old times sake we took a drive around the church.
It was a Sunday. The church was locked and tacked onto the closed gates was a handwritten notice that stated: Service 10 30 St Paul's.
In 1974 this was a thriving anglo catholic parish, average attendance was around the 100 mark and I was inducted as Vicar and had the freehold, which meant that if I had stayed, I would still, at age 70, be the Vicar.
A typical day for me in 1974, started with Mattins or Mass, continued with School Assembly followed by a session in the Study, afternoons were spent visiting and most evenings there were meetings ranging from Church Council to various organisations, study groups and the Youth Club.
Not much time left as R S Thomas has it, for the music of Cesar Franck or for fishing.
Nearby St Pauls had a full time staff and the other neighbouring parish had a Vicar and all were thriving.
Today the website suggests a staff of two with the Team Rector living in what was my old Vicarage.
This is possibly not a bad result for the three parishes as they are still open and still have staff support but the message from the handwritten notice was eloquent, survival was the best they could hope for.
So how did we get into this sorry state?
The first time I ever visited Holy Trinity, Brompton (HTB) it was for a wedding.
Personally I found the whole experience utterly depressing somehow the message was being compromised by the medium, carpeted nave, drums and guitars and definitely no vestments, but when I questioned I was told again and again that it was successful, it was bringing bright young people into the life of the church and into belief.
But as Bob Dylan once observed, I didn't believe it.
Years later I was cornered into running an Alpha Course (by public demand) and I found myself faced with the dilemma of really wondering how such nonsense could be pedalled so successfully, so successfully that a Catholic Priest I knew, thought it a great way to, as he expressed it, 'Catch the mums at the school gate'.
Well the mums I met at the school gate were far to sharp to confuse the medium and the message.
The thing is that the Church is not, cannot be, about success.
It is, or should be about weeping with those who weep. Sharing the joys and sorrows of people as they confront the challenges that life sends their way.
In the parish I revisited this last Christmas, the Methodist Minister, the Catholic Parish Priest and I ran a job creation scheme, by half way through the Thatcher era we were the largest employer in the area.
Today however the influence of HTB is felt across the Church of England, the author of the Green Report (see my earlier blog) was followed down the street refusing to answer questions from the Panorama reporter.
But The Rev'd Lord Green, himself is, together with the Archbishop of Canterbury, an alumni of HTB, as well as the head of a bank that handed out 'bricks of cash' as he called it in the title of his book, it was just money!
I cannot help make a connection here with another expression of evangelical thought which I suspect is closely associated with HTB.
Prosperity theology or gospel is the 'christian (?)' religious doctrine that financial blessing is the will of God. It proposes that faith alongside support for the Church and its ministries will increase your personal material wealth.
The spread of the evangelical view of the church and what it should be has spread corrosively through the institution. Such minister's no longer view themselves as 'parish' priests they act as chaplains to congregations, join up and you are part of the 'parish' stay out and you are on your own.
Alongside the prosperity gospel and the quoting of a bible verse for every occasion sits another danger.
What is being peddled is tantamount to what Bonhoeffer dismissed as 'cheap grace' compared to which is contrasted another altogether more powerful and challenging version of what the church is and should be.
It comes not from contemporary London but from a 17th century Dean of St Paul's whose erotic yearnings for love became the no less erotic yearning for a relationship with God, which was both personally challenging and costly:
Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
John Donne
This is the passion that the church has lost and along the way the affection and respect of people.
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