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The Eucharist Makes the Church1 Scott Cowdell Career­minded clergy are wise not to say this publicly, but there is a crisis of identity and purpose in our Church today that defies easy solution. I am not referring to the fallout over clergy sexual abuse, though this excruciating development does help to explain the problem that we face. Which is that the Church in general and the Eucharist in particular have become optional extras in living a good life, even for living the Christian life, and widely derided options at that. Hence a glaring failure of spiritual vision, compassion, and pastoral leadership on the part of abusers and Church leaders is matched by a new pitch of scapegoating rectitude directed toward the whole Church by its cultured despisers. We are paying the price for our longstanding fascination in the Church with respectability and for claiming the moral high ground, since our institutional feet of clay and our share in the ordinary traffic of human ill will, folly and misery have now been fully exposed. Such respectability was what Church and worship were all about during my suburban 1960s Queensland boyhood, though of course winds of change had begun to blow throughout the Western world at that time, in the direction of moral autonomy, and the exhilaration of being able to choose how our lives are to be lived. Church as a valued part of community life, a marker of respectability, and even a badge of social status are now by and large limited to smaller rural communities in Australia, if they survive at all. A leading layman once told me that he came to church for the music and to keep his wife happy—but he was in his 70s; no­one under 50 would think like that anymore. The former Scots bishop and now atheist, Richard Holloway, paints an unsparing picture in his memoirs of this increasingly bygone type of Church that is more habituated than embraced, providing for many people little more than a sense of connection with the past and a vague feeling of something transcendent.2 For a time the Church suited Holloway’s own romantic and melancholy temperament, but eventually the dysfunction associated with Church membership among many of his fellow Anglicans got the better of him. A lot of psychological and spiritual immaturity clings to the Church still—those people seem to hang on in there where many more confident and healthy­minded people have had enough and have moved on. The Canadian theologian Gary Badcock gets to the bottom of today’s mass exodus from the Church, explaining why so many have opted out since the personal and social benefits once associated with the Church are now recognised as being more widely available: the hungry sheep look up, remain unfed, and have decided in the hundreds of millions that they can find the same thing (and it is the same thing) in more convincing forms from the other available consumerist alternatives that equally serve the end of individual flourishing: popular culture, environmental activism, uninhibited sex, the fulfilment of career ambition, politics, or even crass materialism.3 For those healthier­minded ones who stay with the Church, there is often no clear sense of why they have stayed, or a strong likelihood that their belonging would survive anything much in the way of provocations or setbacks. Even the real, genuine believers who are trying to make a go of following Christ, with a clearer sense than their parents may well have had about what being a Christian means, are typically less clear about the place, the necessity and the authority of the Church in their Christian lives. !eli%ious Consumerism The reality is that our postmodern Western culture of choices rather than givens, of optional obligations and personal agendas, is a world of consumers, yes, of joiners, sometimes—as long as whatever you join provides you with worthwhile benefits—but it is no longer a world of unquestioned belonging. In matters of religion things are no different. For example, the second generation immigrant youth chooses to embrace radical Islam because it provides him with a clear sense of identity for the first time in his life, since he belongs neither to his ancestral culture nor fully to that of his family’s adopted country. So, even fundamentalists are really shoppers in the spiritual marketplace. The young Christian fundamentalist, too, has essentially chosen a product—one that will help him or her to negotiate the difficult transition from adolescence to adulthood, whereupon another lifestyle product will most likely take its place. Even for serious adult Christians, their Church and parish affiliation falls nowadays under the sway of consumer 2 forces. And increasingly, the choice is not just which denomination, which congregation, or which style of worship, but whether churchgoing is necessary at all for my “spiritual needs” to be met. This is akin to the question of whether marriage is necessary for my “relationship needs” or even my sexual needs, so­called, to be met—as if sexual needs and relationship needs, like “insurance needs” or even “motoring needs”, are things one might best address by shopping around. But that is the extent of our belonging in this postmodern Western culture, which even for Christians means that today’s agenda of consumer­driven therapeutic individualism trumps any properly theological and spiritual account of belonging to the Church and participating in its central act of worship. Let me offer a clarifying metaphor, from the now ubiquitous language of computing: that of hardware and software. The hard)are, the basic equipment, of our lives is provided nowadays by our personal needs, while these “needs” are met by various forms of soft)are. Just choose whichever package or “app” is compatible with your priorities. For your software needs in the personal realm, go to the Church if you like, or to whichever other provider of personal spiritual sustenance—from a “wilderness experience”, to a theatre or Musica Viva subscription, to a spa retreat. As for your “worship needs”, if you have those, they might be met by a traditional Eucharist but increasingly it will be anything but that: a “public Christian gathering”, perhaps, for Evangelical teaching and fellowship, or a Pentecostal praise event, or one of the proliferating “fresh expressions” of Church that typify today’s “Emerging Church” movement. A variation of this state of affairs, perhaps its precursor, is the original Protestant instinct that personal faith in God constitutes the hardware and Church involvement constitutes the software; or else, that Word and Gospel are hardware while worship forms and habits are software. As long as you have an iPhone, there are myriad software resources in the “app store” from which you can choose. Likewise, we hear that as long as you are a Christian, then where you worship, how you worship and, increasingly, whether or not you worship, are entirely up to you, because of course these are essentially software options that are secondary, interchangeable and, by extension, disposable. 3 Software Church5 Optional Eucharistic 9app: This state of affairs is represented in every stripe of Australian Anglicanism, though the most obvious examples are Evangelical ones. Let me offer some vignettes, to illustrate aspects of the problem. ,-angelical I once accepted an invitation to preach and preside at an Adelaide evangelical service for youth, which was held in a basketball court. The sermon was to be on Psalm 10, for some reason, because of course the lectionary is considered optional (indeed, as something of an imposition). No robes were to be worn, so I celebrated in a suit and tie but insisted on putting on a stole for the consecration. I remember a youth in the communion line who came forward in a baseball cap drinking a can of Fanta, to which he stuck his chewing gum before thrusting out his hand to receive the sacrament. While I have been impressed by the recollection and dignity of Sydney’s Archbishop Jensen and Bishop Davies at the altar, even though their beliefs and approach are plainly low­Church, nevertheless it is clear that their sense of the specialness of Holy Communion, shared with great nineteenth­century Evangelicals like Charles Simeon, no longer represents the Evangelical norm. Today’s push in some Evangelical circles for so­called lay administration of the Lord’s Supper is at least in part to ensure that the Word and preaching retain their Protestant supremacy over sacrament and cult, which are tolerated for the sake of obedience to Christ’s ordinance rather than embraced enthusiastically as foundational practices. Even the older Evangelical commitment to Matins and Evensong is waning as prayer book worship ceases to be the Evangelical norm. A priest friend in Tasmania informed me that the clergy gathered with their bishop for a few days could not get organised to say evening prayer together let alone celebrate the Eucharist, though they did manage a scratch clergy rock band for a session of praise songs. An Anglo­Catholic priest­musician in my own diocese, whose efforts at introducing some contemporary catholic hymnody represented something entirely new at a Clergy Conference, was thanked by an Evangelical clergyperson afterwards with the words “I don’t normally go in for Holy Communion, but that was very nice”. 4 3nglo45atholic Lest I seem to be harsh about Evangelicalism, we can find similar issues arising within Anglo­ Catholicism. There is a preference for high­culture performance in some Anglo­Catholic showpiece parishes, and in some places for antique forms of the liturgy, often celebrated with the full panoply of elaborate ceremonial.

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