Where on Earth is Erewhon?

According to Mrs May, 'If you are a citizen of the world you are a citizen of nowhere'!

Really?

What an astonishing statement. Surely we are all wherever we are born, or raised or indeed live are citizens of both our local place and of all other places.

I was born and bred in Manchester, in Ashton under Lyne, a citizen of the UK, a Northerner, with my feet firmly planted on the ground of my  City and my neighbourhood, but even as a child at school it was being made clear that I was also a citizen of something greater, and that 'something greater' was the world of which I was part.

Each crisis that impacted on the security of that world, affected me, Suez was the first crisis I became aware of, I was young but understood that it was significant in some potentially disruptive way for our security, Cuba and the bay of pigs came later but I spent days and weeks aware of the crisis and the potential for a conflagration that would engulf the whole world.

But what makes Mrs May's statement even more questionable and astonishing is that she is a daughter of clergyman because as I came to discover later when I found myself caught up in the life of the church and its liturgies the theology of the gospel and the essential teaching of the church is that 'here we have no abiding city' we are all citizens of a wider community that is not bounded by hard frontiers.

I was struck by one memory described in the newspaper, of Mrs May as a young woman receiving communion in her father's church whilst wearing a conservative party badge, clearly we have in Mrs May a person whose beliefs were established early and have not wavered.

As Home Secretary she authorised the infamous vans that drove around London advising those who were here illegally to 'Go Home or face arrest'.

Now we understand that whatever else might be negotiated, Brexit means Brexit and that means freedom of movement will be curtailed at whatever cost to the economy and the political stability of the country where the Governor of our national bank is presumably, by Mrs May's definition, a citizen of nowhere.

Perhaps what we are being told is that if you describe yourself as a world or global citizen you are by definition not a citizen of UK plc and therefore are not welcome and have no place here, this narrow, insular nation will not be your 'abiding city'.

As Jem Eskenazi wrote in the Financial Times:

'climate change, pollution or epidemics know no frontiers ... extreme poverty in one region has implications for the whole world; .... terrorism is a global problem with global solutions;' 

When I moved to Birmingham in 1987, having lived briefly in the USA, I had a powerful sense of making a new home in a global city, the intermingling of cultures, the strong memory of having been 'the workshop of the world' here there was no sense of civic small  mindedness rather a sense of a global city in which cultures and communities were working out new relationships, expressed most powerfully in the music of UB40.

My job in Birmingham was based in Selly Oak, where a constant stream of Muslim and Christian scholars came to learn and study.

In that multi-cultural context it became clear that 'citizenship' was a key term to describe and promote the idea of participatory democracy, a theology of citizenship inevitably points us towards internationalism as the only practical way to move towards a more peaceful and responsible world order.

Now in retirement my work in the Anglican Diocese of Europe has helped me to recognise and value the emerging vision of world citizenship working towards the possibility of peaceful co-existence across and beyond borders.

I am sure that on occasions such as Armistice Day, Mrs May will have sung in her father's church the hymn I vow to thee my Country.

The origin of the hymn is a poem by Sir Cecil Spring Rice, who in 1912 was the British Ambassador to the United States, the poem was entitled, The City of God, and describes how a christian owes loyalty to both their homeland and the kingdom of heaven.

The poem was set to music by Gustav Holst (British but of Swedish,, Latvian and German ancestry) in 1921:

The hymn's opening line 'I vow to thee my country', might well have appealed to the young Mrs May as it appears to appeal to the older, but those who sing this hymn are invited in the second verse to reflect that: 'there's another country' whose ways, as the last line affirms, 'are ways of gentleness and all her paths are peace'.

Those of us who seek the dual citizenship of the land of our birth and the world of which it is a part do so because we believe that all nations should discover and practise gentleness as they follow the path of peace and that makes us citizens of somewhere greater and more hopeful than the present.

So does it really come down to the tooth fairy?

Yesterday at the lunchtime Eucharist the preacher took as his text a letter he saw published in the FT.

Apparently the letter was an attack on religious belief as nothing more than believing in a 'fairy in the sky'. I searched the FT archive but could not identify the letter.

The preacher then went on to comment on the passage from Job which was read yesterday.

The preacher invited us to reflect on Job's understanding of God as mystery, from mysterium, or more accurately, mysterium fidei, which of itself raised the possibility of the 'mystery' being revealed in a variety of forms human and otherwise, or even as a 'fairy in the sky'.

Or, as the sculpture exhibition in the Cathedral suggested, as an Angel who accompanies us on our life's journey.

Another fairy was introduced recently in correspondence with a friend, this was the tooth fairy, who had caused trouble when it was discovered that the tooth fairy in our house was apparently more generous than the tooth fairy in their house.

Whilst, as far as I know, their children didn't picket their garden gate or mount demonstrations in their garden the negotiations were, as these things can be, tough and the final settlement was a compromise between the children, the parents and the tooth fairies union.

My response to this historic episode was to observe that I ceased to believe in the tooth fairy when I became the tooth fairy.

The de-mythologising of the tooth fairy was complete when I retrieved the cast off tooth and replaced it with the fifty pence piece or pound coin under the pillow of the child with the gappy smile who had appeared earlier in the day.

Of course as my treasury of cast off and detached teeth grew so my treasury of fifty fences and pound coins decreased.

The same process of de-mythologising happened at Christmas time it is hard to believe in Father Christmas when you find yourselves at midnight on Christmas Eve pacing the landing, listening to sleeping children, placing the sacks at the end of beds and then at four or five am waking to a chorus of ooh's and aah's and being shown what Father Christmas had so mysteriously delivered whilst the children were sleeping.

So we are left with the idea of a divine and supernatural being who is being defenestrated by contemporary secularism, although the danger in this is that it may be that not only God is thrown out of the window but also the 'fairy' or the baby with the bathwater.


Secularism is giving religion a hard time, but it always has, and as Richard Holloway commented in his latest book:  'the anvil of religion has weathered many hammer blows and may yet weather the hammer blows of secularism'.

Human consciousness aspires to wrestle with the critical questions of existence, who are we? Where are we from? Where or what, will our end be?

To these questions there are both secular and religious or theological responses, these responses tend to reflect the human understanding that God as our beginning or our end (Alpha and Omega) is qualitatively different from both the tooth fairy and Santa Claus or indeed the FT's correspondent's 'Fairy'.

But the question of whether God is the product of human expectation (consciousness) or whether humanity is the product of God's action as a creator continues to challenge philosophers such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.

God as the summation of human consciousness can of course imply that humanity has created an idea it calls God in order to answer its own existential questions, but as with the tooth fairy and santa such an understanding wouldn't survive being demythologised, I stopped believing in the tooth fairy when I became the tooth fairy.

God can be seen throughout history, as the full realisation of reality itself, but reality itself is partial and limited. God becomes the fullest expression of human consciousness emerging in this sense as the conceptualisation of 'beings of limited reality'.

Did God create us or did we create God out of the need to answer questions of existence?

The collusion between adults and children that creates both the tooth fairy and santa is in effect a collusion that reinforces bravery or good behaviour.

When children move on from the childish belief in tooth fairies and santa's is the point when they assume new kinds of freedoms, when they move into adulthood.

So for human beings the need to move into a fuller sense of humanity demands that their understanding of God changes from a static, albeit for the Christian trinitarian 'being', into an idea of boundless self determination, (mysterium fidei) intimately involved in the unfolding universe and gifting to human beings both inner freedom and and the possibility of self giving love.

In the christian tradition the person of Jesus represents the connection between 'transcendence' and 'imminence' but such a connection becomes unnecessary when God is seen as both transcendent and imminent.

God may be a bigger he, she or it than the tooth fairy whose usefulness ends when as a parent you realise that you are the tooth fairy but the constant problem this idea of God faces is the desire of the church to comprehend, understand and contain the boundlessness as though it were a commodity when in point of fact the preacher at yesterdays service may be right in reflecting with Job that it is indeed a mystery.

A Church in Crisis?

For me it came down to two things, a Cataract which meant that I simply could not see to read the text, so I had to stand down from the Rota, for celebrating Mass at the Cathedral.

Perhaps more importantly was having to decline the Bishop's invitation to lunch on the grounds of the indoor critic's deteriorating health and the fact that the Bishop's house (He having recently downsized from a  Castle) was not accessible for a wheelchair.

In both of these events one of the Cathedral Clergy has responded pastorally and out of friendship.

But despite the seriousness of the indoor critics situation I have yet to hear from the Bishop, not much of the pastor pastorum there!

And all of this set me thinking about what I expect from the Church?

Well I guess I like to see the Mass celebrated fittingly and appropriately with due dignity, however recently I have found  myself thinking, when I have attended, that I'd prefer to do it myself than watch it being done badly or with the celebrant in a lounge suit rather than a cassock alb.

I guess I like to hear a sermon that struggles to make the lectionary readings relevant to the real world context in which I struggle to live out my faith instead of being patronised from the pulpit by a rehearsal of what we 'learned' in the recently completed Alpha Course.

I like to be welcomed as a member of the family rather than viewed with suspicion in case I am really  there to blag the vicar for a few bob after the service.

So on the whole a cup of coffee, my FT Weekend and a pleasant walk with the dog in the afternoon and supper with the indoor critic in the evening makes my Sunday pretty complete without church.

Last week I received a letter from the two Archbishop's, I read it twice, but after reading it again I really hadn't a clue what it was that I was being asked to do?

If the future of the Church is being placed in the hands of God then I imagine that asking S/he (the alleged deity above) to get on and sort out the mess we have made of it makes some kind of sense but there was, throughout the letter a sense of hopelessness, what a mess we have made and are still making as the Church we inherited sinks slowly into a crisis that is becoming a chronic, and ultimately I suspect fatal, decline.

Recently in the FT I read an article by Philip Delves Broughton which reviewed a paper called Netflix Culture: Freedom and Responsibility.

The paper explains that as companies grow, so do complexity and bureaucracy, the effect of this is to drive the best people out of the organisation , the effect of this is that even more bureaucracy is required to manage the incompetency that remains.

Netflix's antidote to this is to hire ever more self managing, high performing people and not cramp their style.

By all means lay out a strategy, establish roles and objectives, but then get out of your employees way.

By comparison, and I have to accept that I am these days merely an eaves dropper, I seem to see and hear of more and more micro management of the Church emanating from the top, which is where my letter came from, with clergy seeming to think that survival is the best that can be hoped for and complaints coming forward that most of what was traditionally perceived as the role of the parish priest being abandoned in favour of 'management' with far to much time spent in front of the computer.

As a Parish Priest in Salford, Greater Manchester in the mid Seventies my experience was of very little interference from the hierarchy, once licensed I was allowed to get on with it with the offer of light touch support from the Rural Dean whose Parish was next door.

The collegiality of the Chapter was very real and as the congregation grew I was always aware of the very real evangelical opportunities offered by the christenings, the marriages and the funerals which it was my duty to officiate at.

As it said in the prayer at Mass, it was a 'duty and a joy'.

But the world has changed in the past forty years, now the naming ceremonies and the marriages take place in hotels or other licensed venues and, having recently attended two funerals of near neighbours, the funerals are conducted by a secular funeral celebrant who will tailor the service to your individual requirements. In fact the Co-op Funeral Director told me recently that the bulk of the requests they receive specify a secular rather than a religious celebrant.

Add to this the degree of theological speculation and reorientation, reflected in for example Richard Holloway's recent book, A Little History of Religion, where in his conclusion he observes that it is:

'the attraction and the difficulty of religion for secular-minded men and women. They may admire much of what religion has achieved, but they can no longer accept the supernatural beliefs on which it is based. They are suspicious of forms of authority that claim to be above human correction. They have noticed how slow religion is at adapting to good changes in human behaviour, as well as in accepting the consequences of new knowledge. Far from daring to know the new, religion usually prefers to cling to the old'.

So the tectonic plates that kept the Church relatively stable from the reformation until the 1970's when I was made Vicar have shifted, but the 'groaning and travailing' we can hear is  not the 'giving birth' described by Paul or a future becoming rather, it seems, they represent the agonising death throes of an organisation and institution experiencing an existential crisis for which the leadership sees no solution.

Time for some radical rethinking as part of a new post Europe Settlement .....

The Referendum has effectively destabilised the British Political Settlement. Before long we may see an Independent Scotland and a United Ireland, both nations supporting remaining as part of the European Economic Community.

So we could conceivably have Borders to the North of us and Borders to the West of us and we will have become a dis-united Island.

I always suspected that Brexit would shade it and on the day it did and so many peoples worst fears were realised.

There is a lot of sadness about.

However I'm not sure that in or out will make that much difference, although it has 'shaken it all about', but time will tell.

I think the real tragedy here is that 'Europe' has been made a scapegoat for what is happening to our economy, to unemployment, to austerity and to welfare.

Mendacious promises won the day but don't hold your breath, tomorrow will be just the same old same old.

It never was 'Europe' it was forces much larger, globalisation, technological change, large scale emigration from nations torn apart by war and famine and climate change.

Cameron did not change welfare and certainly did not improve it and the poor paid the price, given a voice they have used it.

What next?

Possibly a reconfiguration of party politics, possibly a new post-European settlement, possibly the bankruptcy of a nation not too big to fail.

My thought is that we need to reflect on how best to help the poorest in our society whose cry of rage has been heard.

Pope Francis is showing us the way:

In a recent Papal statement Evangeli Gaudiem the Pope called on the wealthy and on political leaders:

'to ponder the words of [Saint John Chrysostom], one of the sages of antiquity: "Not to share one's wealth with the poor is to steal from them and to take away their livelihood. It is not our own goods which we hold, but theirs'.

Thirty years ago, in the mid eighties, Faith in the City was published at a hearing in Newcastle the commissioners heard of the three problems facing the North East:

Poverty, Poverty, Poverty.

Thirty years later in Hartlepool the vote to leave the EU was inspired by these same problems as the Midlands and the North East have been de-industrialised, have seen jobs and whole industries relocated to Europe, India and China and then been told by both the Con-Dems and the latest incarnation of the Tory Party under Cameron and Osborne that they must pay the price as the brutal realities of austerity and judgements and scorn have been laid upon those who have been categorised as 'shirkers' often men and women with deep memories of their work as shipbuilders and miners and engineers, work that has now vanished in response to a political agenda and a failure to reckon with the impact of  new technologies..

Faith in the City failed in challenging the Thatcher administration, as I came to realise when I worked for the Task Force in East Birmingham. 

Because it was recommending a Welfare Response to deep seated and permanent structural change the response was not adequate.

Some years ago, with others, I started an organisation, Church Action on Poverty which is still pursuing its welfare agenda as the queues at the Food Banks grow longer.

But welfare is no longer the answer.

As Pope Francis suggests the best way to address poverty is to give people the cash, so I want to see charities, the Labour Movement, right thinking folk from across the political spectrum begin to debate with the urgency that Brexit has brought in its wake, a Universal Basic Income.

Martin  Luther King 'wanted the government to eradicate poverty by providing every American a guaranteed, middle-class income'. (As quoted in The Atlantic).

The underlying principle of a Universal Basic Income is that every citizen over 18 years should be paid an income commensurate with the housing, clothing and feeding of her or himself, those with added needs, for example those with disabilities, might receive extra to cover the cost of those needs.

A Universal Basic Income is affordable, it makes us all consumers, it allows for choice and for freedom allowing each individual to make their own individual life style choices and decisions.

The costs can be raised by spending the welfare budget in a more constructive manner, by using money spent on other, usually piecemeal programmes, and inevitably by raising taxes.

Individuals will be free to spend their UBI or Citizens Income as they wish, such an income could free individuals and unleash a tsunami of creativity amongst artists, musicians and writers.

Those who chose to work might choose more interesting or worthwhile work, or opt for shorter hours or part time work but taxation would be levied at a rate that reflected the value of the underlying basic income received.

Means tested welfare is no longer a valid response to the impact of de-industrialisation, or indeed to the forthcoming challenges posed by technology, AI and robotics, UBI is a practical, sensible and fair way to distribute the wealth of a country to each and everyone of its citizens.

Walls and Bridges

1961 began with Johnny Tillotson at Number 1 with Poetry in Motion.

1961 ended with Danny Williams and Moon River.

In the same year Helen Shapiro walked back to happiness, Shirley Bassey reached for the stars, Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers charted and the East Germans (not a pop group!) built the Berlin Wall.

It would seem that no-one climbed the Wall to enter East Germany although many East Germans died trying to leave.

The Berlin Wall encircled West Berlin cutting it off from East Berlin and Eastern Germany.

The rationale for the wall was to protect East German's from fascist elements in the West who were 'conspiring' to prevent the 'will of the people' from building a 'socialist state' in East Germany.

Now in America the Trump Wall is proposed, paid for by the Mexican Government although there is no suggestion that Mexico is either a fascist state or seeking to prevent the American people building a capitalist state.

It is questionable that any of the East German's who tried to escape to the West were walking back to happiness rather seeking to escape the deep unhappiness they experienced in the East.

President Ronald Reagan  was a Republican like Donald Trump, but unlike The Donald he had no patience for building walls in fact in a famous speech in Berlin he called on President Gorbachev to 'tear down this wall'.

Now wherever you look in Europe walls are being erected whether in Hungary, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey, walls to keep people out, like the wall built between Palestine and Israel.

Right wing parties are engendering displays of deep-seated hostility even welcoming the prospect of the Donald trumping the Democratic Candidate with a strong hand supported by the angry brigade consisting largely of white working class men.

Against this however we are left with the words of an admittedly Republican, admittedly elderly, ex Film Actor, whose most memorable lines, indeed whose  memories, appear to have come from the scripts of the films in which he starred.

Yet, in his speech in Berlin on the 12th June 1987, Reagan said:

'we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace ...... if you seek peace .... if you seek prosperity ...... open this gate (the speech was made at the Brandenburg Gate) .... Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

The same sentiment surely must be offered when ever walls are built? The peace they represent is and always will be insecure.

Living where I do in the North West of England Hadrian's Wall is a site of historic fascination, but more fascinating is that as peace settled and the warring tribes began to become farmers building homes, villages, communities and with them churches and abbeys, it was the stones from the wall that became the primary source of building  material.

Of course it was no surprise when the Pope chose to attack Trump's distorted vision of a wall to hold back not only Mexico but the whole of South America, after all the Pope gets his title from the Latin Pontifex meaning 'bridge builder'.

Rome was a city of bridges and the Pope or Pontifex Maximus was seen as one who built bridges between God and Humankind, between peoples, and so it is really no surprise that wherever walls are offered as a solution to keep people out, to separate peoples, so the Pontifex Maximus must demand that people recognise that, under God, the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace.

I moved to Newcastle upon Tyne in 1978, I had moved from Manchester and one of my first jobs was to Preach at the service for the new Lord Mayor.

I preached on moving, as I expressed it, from a city of underpasses to a city of bridges and, in the sermon I rehearsed the names of the bridges over the Tyne, unfortunately my pronunciation of the  name of one bridge caused some amusement amongst the congregation and afterwards, whilst I was complimented on the sermon, it was pointed out that the proper pronunciation of Redheugh was Redheugh.

The Berlin Wall was demolished over a period of two years, the Gate was opened in 1989 and the wall finally came down in 1992.

In May 1989 Ferry Cross the Mersey was number one proceeded by Madonna's Like a Prayer and when the wall finally fell it was Jimmy Nail the Geordie actor who had starred in Auf Wiedersehen Pet with the Song, Ain' No Doubt.

Why are we being promised a referendum we neither need or want?

How do politicians get themselves into such a mess?

Given the critical issues facing Europe at the moment, any one of which from money to migration, could result in an existential crisis for the European Community, with the Euro, the Schengen agreement, Grexit and Brexit, why decide that this is a good moment for a referendum?

Some commentators reckon, given that Osborne and Cameron had no real expectation of winning the last election, that they larded the manifesto with a variety of offers, none of which needed to be followed through, because failing to deliver on anything from welfare cuts, tax credits or a referendum on Europe could always be blamed on the Liberal Democrats in coalition.

Maybe so.

It is often said that we get the politicians that we deserve which raises the possibility that we must have been pretty bad in a previous life to deserve the politicians we have now.

Margaret Thatcher's legacy was the Poll Tax, accompanied by mass unemployment, de-industrialisation and the ascendency of financial sector together with its bonus culture.

Harold Wilson's legacy was the Open University.

Depending on the outcome of the forthcoming referendum what will David Cameron's legacy be?

An isolated and broken Britain, separated from Scotland and limping along with underinvestment, rising austerity and dependent for its energy supply on Chinese and French Companies with the profits generated recycled to China and France.

With the Brexit Campaign now led by Lord Lawson it is suggested by the media that the Tory Big Beasts will begin to snarl and roar in support of Britain exiting the European Union, big beasts they may be but they are also Little Englanders, resisting the powers of the European Parliament, to which we elect representatives, of deciding what can happen in the UK, legislation developed abroad and imposed is not, we are told repeatedly, acceptable and of all the anathemas the greatest is the dreaded social chapter.

But what is the story so far.

In 1986 I developed together with an Architect and craftsman, Rolf Rosner, himself a refugee from his native Germany who found a home and a welcome in the North East of England, a project that we called Benchmark, Benchmark recruited a group of young unemployed people and provided them, under Rolf's expert tuition, a grounding in Arts and Crafts, this led to an exhibition of work and helped the young people to develop their own practise or to move into employment following their exposure to Rolf's re-imagining of the European craft school environment from which he benefited as a young man.

This project was funded by the European Commission.

Other projects with which I became involved benefited equally from being associated with and part of the wider European Community.

I will be voting yes to remain part of Europe for four significant reasons:

The fact that the nations of Europe have co-existed peacefully since 1945. Prior to that date Europe had torn itself apart in two Great Wars and had all but bankrupted itself, its recovery enabled only by the effects of the Marshall Plan. Clearly there have been moments when nations have held their breath, the Balkan's post Tito and now the shifting tectonic plates of conflict in the Middle East and especially Syria, resulting in the displacement of generations caught in the crossfire and washed up on Europe's shores, but the agreement implied by the idea of a European identity transcending nationalism offers the hope that despite increasing right wing 'noises off', those who arrive will be welcomed and will enrich European society.

In retirement I have travelled in Europe and have benefited from the freedom offered by the Schengen Agreement, I have lived from time to time in both Italy and Spain, there is it seems to me a cultural freedom when travelling, whether by air, by train or by car. My wife is a wheelchair user and we have benefited from the support and assistance available across Europe, whether eating in a restaurant in Milan, wandering the streets of Genoa or Paris or Barcelona or sitting down to Paella in the Restaurante El Mirador in the El Chorro region of Andalusia in all of this there is a sense of becoming inculturated and experiencing the true benefit of being a European Citizen recognising yourself as the inheritor of a broader European sensibility.

One particular expression of the value of Europe and our membership of the European Union is the Diocese of Europe. Once known as the Diocese of Fulham and Gibraltar, the Diocese exists to serve the interests of what are sometimes known as ex pats. But whether it is framing and shaping a humane response to the tragedy of refugees from war, whether it is representing an open and inclusive sense of what at its best it means to be 'church' or whether it is celebrating the rich culture and way of life of different communities within Europe as a continent, the Diocese is at once a place where what it means to be part of a community of  fellowship can be celebrated.

Fourthly, the economy. Britain is by definition on the periphery of Europe, we are an island nation. There is no doubt that in economic terms there are both centrifugal and centripetal forces at work. At the commercial and economic centre the Rhine-Ruhr conurbation is a key centre for manufacturing and those companies who wish to 'invest' in 'Europe' will seek to invest in that region, the economic effect of this will be on the one hand for money to flow into the centre and for the centre to become profitable but in order to ensure that markets remain viable to is politically essential that money and other benefits flow out. For Britain, a key peripheral market, it is essential that we remain active in both the political heart of Europe, Brussels and Strasbourg, that we continue to welcome those manufacturers who base themselves in Britain because of our access to European markets. But it is also essential that we become whole hearted in embracing our partners across Europe. America and Britain are sometimes described as two nations divided by a common language. Interestingly enough, despite the language differences across the nations of Europe it is becoming easier to communicate as English becomes the Lingua Franca of Europe.

As a nation we may be 'peripheral' geographically but increasingly if we choose to be we have the potential to be at the cultural centre of the emerging continent of new Europe. The Government has chosen to  make our membership of Europe 'problematical' lets hope that the referendum situates us at the heart of the European project as it develops.

Shaping the churches response to a post faith world .......

It is easy to imagine the primates of the Anglican Communion meeting in the Crypt of Canterbury Cathedral.

Gathered like Monks in the habits of a lifetime, chanting: cup hands here comes Cadbury's.

Like a Gothic tragedy, maybe one of the primates will be found face down on the Chapel floor, and like an ecclesiastical version of Cleudo people will be required to guess, was he throttled with his own rosary by an unseemly looking evangelical Archbishop of a certain distant province.

All churches are in difficulty, including those claiming to be successful celebrating their biblically based self righteousness as they exclude those with whom they disagree from their meetings, their worship and their churches.

The Anglican Church, like Methodism a few years ago, is now facing an existential crisis of its own.

As the Archbishop noted in his address to the Primates of the Anglican Communion meeting in Canterbury the statistics published today show that the year on year decline in attendance and membership continues and the age profile of those attending worship in Anglican Churches is growing older, raising serious questions about the churches ability to continue to survive, not just in its present form, but to survive at all.

Argument flourishes about the reason for this decline? Is Sunday Trading to blame? Did Evensong ever recover from The Forsyte Saga on BBC? Is it the churches confusions about gender and sexuality? Is it because we didn't ordain women? Or possibly because we did?

Too few vocations, too few clergy, bizarre attempts to rethink what ministry is or might be, clergy no longer visit, people would rather be married whilst hang gliding naked, woodland burials and secular officiants who provide what you ask for instead of telling you what you can have. The loss of the BCP and a a range of special liturgies from Series 1,  through Iona, a whole raft of Celtic Liturgies and flush theologies?

In 1985 I spent a semester at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It proved to be a great experience and I learned a great deal about how a contemporary church needs to radically re-evaluate its mission in a post faith world, whether auditing a class entitled The Common Genealogy of Racism, Sexism and Classicism with Professor Katy Cannon, rehearsing the great arguments surrounding the development of a Post Christian Ethical Conversation with Secular Society or examine in the life and writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer what the Costs of Discipleship are and were to be in the coming post faith world.

I thought that the Archbishop of Canterbury delivered a moving address to his fellow primates in Canterbury at the start of their gathering but I did not see any serious attempt to engage with or understand what the challenges of the post faith world will mean.

The fact that the Church of England has schools which are popular with parents or runs food banks which are essential for people who are going hungry is making little difference to what is happening to the one hour on a Sunday Morning upon which the whole inverted pyramid is precariously balanced.

Contrary to the Archbishops reference in his address I certainly see little evidence that the church is seriously concerned by 'climate change' despite the flooding locally which breached not only flood defences, but flooded at least two local churches.

At a recent meeting of local clergy the complaint was made that Cumbria was a hard place for ministry and that there was little hope of a 'harvest'.

How do we shape the Churches response to a post faith world?

Well here in Cumbria the answer is simply retrenchment, as numbers decline fewer clergy can be afforded, and their role is re-designated as 'leaders', leaving the pastoral care of aging congregations to lay people.

Meanwhile the senior team continues to defend the traditions and values of the church as though it remains relevant, when in fact it has become more and more to represent a strange, forlorn and out dated 18th Century sect.

I have coined the phrase 'secular ecumenism' to try to imagine the kind of relationships that needs to be promoted if the church, in whatever form is to flourish in a post faith world.

What do I mean by 'secular ecumenism'?

I suppose that what I mean is that agencies in society, of which the church could be thought of as one or several, engage with the many issues across health, social care, the environment, gender, human sexuality, poverty, injustice and that, as and when these issues are addressed locally' there will be christians involved as part of these agencies, charitable and statutory, who can and should be supported by the church qua church so that the churches voice can be heard as one voice among many.

Secular ecumenism implies that the church adopts the stance of servanthood, of one among many, unacknowledged and unassuming as it seeks to show in practice the love of God it has often proclaimed in words whilst denying by its actions.