Secularism and the Parish
Alison Milbank, a COFE Vicar and advocate for Save The Parish argues the new expressions and re-organisation of the COFE Parish system will damage the Church not see the growth many are assuming.
All Saints’ Waterden from the south © John Fielding
We live in a secular age, in the sense that secularism has now achieved the status of a founding myth in western culture. As a process, secularization also runs through the churches as well as society at large. We have moved, writes Charles Taylor in A Secular Age (2007), ‘from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others’.
My own Church of England has, to a great extent, embraced this myth, so that its evangelism through ‘new worshipping communities’ or ‘fresh expressions’ stays in the secular, in the sense that it avoids challenge of the individualist, choice-driven mode of being and works with it. The Archbishop of York articulates the aim of its missional project, ‘Vision and Strategy’ thus:
The overriding aim for the future is that any worshipping member of the Church of England, when asked by their friend where they could go to explore their faith, would be able to recommend an expression of Church locally that would really suit them.
Surely, we should be calling people to their local church, to wonder, awe, reconciliation and transformation, not to a club ‘that would really suit them’. The problem is that like other Protestant denominations, the Church of England makes a sharp separation between what it calls, ‘inherited church’, which means the traditional credal faith and scriptures, liturgies and practices, which it does not consider missional but rather a burden, and ‘emerging church’, where liturgy and theology are jettisoned, and the faith is reinvented. Pioneer ministry often involves no liturgy as such, no eucharist and is so concerned to build up faith from ‘where people are’ that it can remain at the level of community engagement. In the same way, charismatic evangelicalism, while holding to a conversion model and a strong focus on atonement and baptism in the Spirit, also pays almost no attention to Anglican liturgy, sacraments, or orders. They have lost trust in deep Anglicanism.
Money follows this policy, so that dioceses receive for mission projects millions of pounds from the Church Commissioners, at the expense of providing priests for pastoral care and worship in parishes. A resource church funded in this way, may be bought an ex-restaurant or auction house, expensively reordered and have a staff of twelve, while the local parish priest is a lone minister for several churches. Between 2014-21 £176 million pounds were spent by the Church Commissioners on these forms of mission, promising 89,000 new disciples, but ‘witnessing’ under 13,000, and this number, according to the Church’s own Chote Report, ‘does not always reflect the reality on the ground’.
Secularism means that we do indeed need to reach out to those who are detached from and indifferent to the transcendent. It is wholly right to evangelise people wherever we may find them. But to give up on the whole habitus of faithful practices, the Christian imagination, is to stay within what Charles Taylor calls ‘the immanent frame’ of a materialist account of reality and is not really to bring good news. We live in a society in which the proportions of those suffering mental illness, anxiety and self-harm are greater than they have ever been, people are desperate for connection and love, and we know that even on the practical level, prayer and church attendance help mental and physical health: regular public worship adds three years to your life!
To break the immanent frame of people who are shaped by this founding myth of secularism, however, we need quite dramatic modes of defamiliarization, in which they can be taken outside their assumptions to see that there is a different way of looking at the world. This will happen more readily through sacred practices, such as candles, incense, silence, beautiful words, repetition and music - than imitating secular forms of transcendence. It is possible to offer worship that brings us to our knees and also speaks right into contemporary concerns. Furthermore, it is no accident that among those of Generation Z who find their way to faith, the Book of Common Prayer or the Tridentine mass hold such appeal, because they are just so counter-cultural. A recent article in the New Statesman by Imogen Sinclair showed that not only is Generation Z more sympathetic to religion, but that many young people long for community, secure family life and tradition.
The Anglican parish church, in particular, is uniquely poised to respond to our contemporary problems because it is still a presence in every community, open to everyone, a mixed body of worshippers with a priest who holds the cure of souls for anyone who cares to make use of him or her. The church is a public space of beauty and age, which witnesses to a God who is stable and universal. In a time in which locality will grow ever more important, and in which environmental crisis causes us to revalue the natural world, the idea of a parish has new valency and reach. Moreover, there is good evidence that where traditional ministry is done well, churches still flourish.
The problem is that instead of resourcing its core work, the Church of England lavishes money on glitzy short-term projects and at the same time dioceses merge or amalgamate parishes, and sell off vicarages, and even churches. In Leicester Diocese, for example, 23 parishes with 35 churches will be served by one priest and an administrator, unless congregations double their parish share (the money they pay to the diocese). In the Manchester area, a recent report reveals that churches in the most deprived areas are twice as likely to be closed as those in affluent districts. In many dioceses, rural churches are left in vacancy for up to ten years, without a priest, in the hope that they will disappear. It is a miracle that so many manage to keep going when they are so neglected. For if you deprive people of priests and services the churches will die. Long vacancies and mega-parishes are recipes for failure and for nervous breakdowns for the ‘oversight’ clergy appointed to such unmanageable positions.
Secularization is, however, not an achieved project, and one only has to look at the crowds at Christmas services to see this. The world is also becoming ever less stable, and the tide of faith may once again turn and come in at the full. Each church has its charism, its specific gift, and for the Church of England this has been the parish system and its liturgy. These are equally flexible and creative in their own way, and we would be insane to abandon them. The rhetoric may all be about ‘mixed ecology’ which sounds cooperative, but the reality is division and competition. You cannot run two parallel systems of 12,000 parishes and 10,000 ‘new worshipping communities’ unless the latter are connected to the former, which, apart from messy churches, which are parish initiatives, is not the case. It is more like opening a rival Tesco by every Co-op.
So much of our problem is a lack of confidence in the Church as a divine gift to the world. If we have lost faith, why should outsiders want to join us? I am not suggesting we be triumphalist or arrogant. Any church in the present climate needs to be humble and accept its vulnerability, working with all other groups in its locality who seek the common good. Our task is to be faithful witnesses, by building up the faith of those believers we do have, binding together in ever deeper and more meaningful solidarity, and being as holy as we can, in our understanding that we are God’s forgiven and redeemed people: a sign that there is a different way of being.
The Church of England is fortunate in that it has resources. It has money but also a treasure in its faithful laity who keep that national heritage of parish churches in good repair of their own resources and pay for their clergy and dioceses. They are a shrinking group and no wonder, given the disrespect with which they are treated by our leaders and the bureaucracy with which they are burdened. We have reports with titles like, ‘Setting God’s People Free,’ suggesting that lay people need liberating to minister instead of priests. Catholics may regard this as an advance, as they are currently seeking a synodical system, with voices heard from those beyond the clerical caste, and hope for a new appreciation of the contribution of the laity. But the Church of England has long given lay people significant liturgical and pastoral roles. This is more about getting ministry on the cheap and devaluing secular lay vocations as well as undervaluing sacramental worship.
Nothing will stop secularization of itself, but the traditional church is not the cause of decline. Every social institution from trade unions to pubs, hockey teams and political parties has a crisis in membership in an individualist world. We cannot, however, continue to live like that, for it will make us ill. In that context, a modest redirection of Anglican resources to resource their parishes, and to fund more priests, whom we are recruiting in greater numbers than those retiring, would be a start, so that we are there when people realise their need of God and each other. But above all, we need a mode of re-enchantment in our ecclesial life whereby we open ourselves again to the beauty and power of our traditions and find treasures old and new to offer to a needy world.
By Alison Milbank
Alison Milbank is Professor of Theology and Literature at the University of Nottingham and an Anglican priest. She is the co-author with Andrew Davison, of For the Parish: A Critique of Fresh Expressions (2010) and her follow-up, The Once and Future Parish, comes out at the end of September 2023. Lectures based on the book can be watched at https://www.youtube.com/@sshoxford5856/playlists