HEALTH WARNING!
"Another Place in the Same Land" is reproduced from an A5 booklet I produced for discussion in local churches in September 2019.
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By it's nature it is about Christian issues and the expression of faith. It makes assumptions that readers will be familiar with these things. It represents the opinions of an imperfect and fallible author! Hopefully others will take on the process of sifting, correcting and refining the ideas expressed.
ANOTHER PLACE
IN THE SAME LAND
"Another Place" by Antony Gormley
OBSERVATIONS AND THOUGHTS ABOUT
OUR PRACTICE OF ‘CHURCH’
IN SMALLER CENTRES OF POPULATION
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a work in progress
To fellow travellers
Like others, I have questions about how we express ‘Church’. There is a book-load of things roaming around in my head! Rightly or wrongly, I sense a call to travel to ‘another place’. I have come to see that we are stuck in thinking and systems which will lead to a time when churches only thrive, or possibly only exist, in larger centres of population. Rather like branded supermarkets, they will serve their networked constituencies depriving many of any resident Christian community witness. This I believe to be a viable and serious threat.
A visit to Antony Gormley’s sculptures at Formby, was a moving experience. It helped me focus on the reality that the aim is not to travel to another place but to find a new place in the same land. For me the strange isolation and togetherness of these figures as they face the ravages of the ebb and flow of the tide, is a haunting commentary on ‘Church’. They also touch a key Christian tension: our investment in eternity expressed in the urgency of the task of the hour. (1)
My thoughts have taken me to an uncomfortable place where I find myself challenging the familiar and raising taboo topics. This could even be upsetting or offensive to some. To change the analogy, it is like encountering a mountain range of difficulty. In some ways our current expression of church is not fit for purpose. Is the time is ripe to work in new ways: to aspire to be more coordinated with the Lord and each other to create the highway and see the mountains removed ? (2)
I have been asked to elaborate upon an early open letter on these matters. I start by sharing and explaining my unfinished journey that requires others to help in discerning the validity or otherwise of my experiences and in determining the ways forward.
Peter Bevington
Autumn 2019
1. Luke 12, Romans 12:11-13
2. Isa 35:8, 40:3, 49:11, 62:10; Jer 31:21; Matt 17:20
1. MY JOURNEY
INSIDE LOOKING OUT
THE BACKGROUND
Most of my adult life has been in Anglican parish churches in large villages. In many ways we have been blessed. However there are remorseless issues that do not go away. They are intensified by a deeply secular society and the way church structures often fail to adapt thoughtfully. Communities lose their young people to education and work in the big conurbations. The move back rarely comes anywhere near replacing this on-going deficit. Christians are drawn away to the large churches in the area and this compounds the issue.
It is a familiar pattern. Churches in small villages disappear. Those in larger communities struggle. The problem is not just rural. Suburban districts suffer as Christians go to churches elsewhere that have the ‘eclectic pull’ to attract the large congregations of ‘thriving churches’. These are networked institutions that can attract a big enough following to run all-age activities, pay salaries and recruit enough volunteers to run ‘the model church package’.
In my village, which is not a typical ‘traditional village’ but a ‘district’ created by lines drawn on a nineteenth century map amalgamating several villages and a load of hamlets, these problems have beset us for decades. The ’parish’ used to contain around nine churches and chapels! There are now three. Two are extremely small. The Anglican church has an average attendance around 35. About 30% come in to worship from other communities. We would struggle to survive without them. An informed estimate would be that now only 1.1% of the population of just under 3,000 worship in the civil parish on a normal Sunday. There are few children. There is a well attended monthly Messy Church. This, ironically, contains a majority of local children whose parents take them to other churches on Sundays! The parish is growing significantly and more houses are planned.
Unless God does something very special, it is reasonable to surmise, as the 60+ age group become less able to contribute practically and financially, that our church may not survive. Eventually there may be no resident Christian group living and worshipping in this growing large village. Many Christians who live in here attend churches elsewhere. It is a microcosm of all the problems of history, culture, structure and purpose that we face in “Being Church”.
MY INITIAL RESPONSE
I started writing about this several years ago as a way of dealing with my thoughts and feelings. I gave up after some weeks. I felt I was not ‘in the right place’. I continued to discuss the problem and discovered extensive empathy. Many were experiencing exactly the same issues but all seemed as stuck as I was: feeling powerless to say anything let alone do anything significant except remain faithfully doing more of the same without addressing the issues. The obstacles to change are so immense that we do not even contemplate starting. In human terms alone, we continue to stare down a barrel of inevitability.
An additional problem is that the very expression of these thoughts carries a perception by some that one lacks faith! The normal formula to address church growth is that we should have more faith, pray more, listen to God more, be more committed. In other words: do more of the same thing better and more imaginatively …… and God will respond. Questioning this verges on the taboo. Failing to do so could repress the possibility that God may wish us to modify or change to achieve his objectives?
Stopping writing did not work. The ‘burdens’ in my head did not go away.
2. FROM THE OUTSIDE
LOOKING IN
Jenni and I have done a lot of trail walking. To facilitate connections to one walk, we found ourselves in a county town at the bus station not far from the cathedral. An abandoned cinema was now a new church. Then we noticed another new church in a converted building on the other side of the bus station. Then we passed a Baptist church close by in the next street. What is going on?
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More and more I began to see ‘Church’ from the outside looking in. Once this process starts, nothing is quite the same. So, I was well set up for another trip. We decided to have a once-in-a–life-time retirement holiday in New Zealand in 2017. (1) We were spending six weeks there so we determined to make a point of going to church every Sunday. Here we really were outsiders looking in on a country and a culture that is remarkably similar to our own in the UK.
Where do you go to church when visiting a new country? An internet search for our first Sunday at a seaside community with a population of about 2,000 revealed four churches in the centre of the community and more not far away. What was striking was that the church scene was almost identical to the UK. Our ancestors did a great job of exporting our faith and our church culture.
We ended up attending a fellowship church with less than 10 people. Each week we attended a different ‘flavour’ of church. The sermons were mostly good quality biblical teaching but the worship culture was strikingly different. It seemed that the churches were divided more by culture than by theology. Being an ‘outsider looking in’ one could not help wondering what was going on and conclude how pathetic such arrangements are for Christ’s mission.
In 2018 we went to a wedding in California. After, on a ten day tour of Canyonlands, we saw the ultimate church scene. Page is a relatively new town, founded in 1957 as housing for workers during the construction of a huge dam on the Colorado River. Page, with a population about 7,500 has developed as a stop-over for The Grand Canyon, Lake Powell, and other tourist hot spots. On our last day we drove out on a different road and became aware that the planners had put all the churches together on one road: a religious shopping mall! (2.) (3.) Of the dozen or so churches, a few were not mainline orthodox churches. Nevertheless we could not help asking :
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What would Jesus do on Sunday ?
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[Obviously he would go to my church!]
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1. Completely out of the blue, we now have family in NZ - so we are going to have to go again!!
2. In our nearest larger centre of population there are six English speaking orthodox protestant churches within 500m of the town centre and another proposed.
3. It is unfair to compare Page to other places: virtually no-one lives in the surrounding area except in the tiniest of settlements. Whereas here, the populations of town and district are close to a balance. The comparison serves to underline how ‘church’ looks from the outside.