Has the Parish a Future?

John Hughes Memorial Lecture Rev Dr Alison Milbank – Wednesday 24th October 2018 Has the Parish a future? It is a great honour for me to give a lecture in memory of John Hughes, who apart from his undoubted academic brilliance, was a true parish priest, and one of the main reasons I hope for the future of the parish is the commitment to it of many of the brightest and most committed young people coming out of theological colleges today. And it is a delight to be giving this address at St Michael and All Angels, where he preached the sermon included in our sermon collection, Preaching Radical and Orthodox, in a church with such a heart for Christian education and formation. In this talk I shall begin with some background about the history of the parish, and then turn to the challenges of our contemporary situation, before offering some ideas about what might give the parish a future in Britain. So first to its origins. The word means in Greek, ‘beside the house’, and referred originally to those beyond the centre of the city or town, from the time when the Christian community met centrally under the presidency of the bishop. As faith spread to the paroikia new assemblies were made within the diocese. The Celtic missionaries in Britain would set up a preaching cross or reuse a standing stone to gather people for teaching or worship, and as time went on, buildings replaced these stones, often also built on pagan sacred sites, following, as Bede tells us in his Ecclesiastical History, the advice of Pope Gregory to Augustine, when he came to evangelise southern England. There may have been churches much earlier, as St Martin’s in Canterbury, Queen Bertha’s own chapel, was built into the ruins of a much earlier church from Roman days. Parishes grew up around these churches. There was the cathedral with its importance as the seat of the bishop, and in Anglo-Saxon times the collegiate church with a group of clergy who would go out to evangelise a wide area, 2 which is a model now again being promoted. And there began to grow up smaller, local churches built by those holding manors, which were the main units of population outside towns, and the first parishes. By the twelfth century England was nearly completely organised under the Normans into parishes, with the task complete in the reign of Edward III, although the odd ‘peculiar’ survived much later and some to this day. The parish was the local and democratic unit with elected officials, and you can see from my slide what multiplicity of roles it performed: law and order, taxation, worship and offices, celebration and church ales, care of the poor, sick and infirm. There was no separation between sacred and secular, and you can see this ancient mode of parish life reflected in the television comedy, The Vicar of Dibley. All this survived the Reformation and elected churchwardens went on being central to their communities, and rogation days crucial for maintaining boundaries. In 1897 however, the church parish and secular parish were separated, so the parish council and parochial church council were created that exist to this day. In my own childhood in downtown Portsea the church was at the heart of community life with about eighty children in our mainly working- class Sunday School, and a raft of parochial activities. Secularism has taken its toll, however, and the turning of Sunday into an ordinary shopping day, so that, along with trade unions, political parties and other organisations, the Church of England has suffered a steep decline in worshippers and adherents. The figures on my slide speak for themselves. This has caused something of a panic, and the parish system, with its universal coverage of every area and person, is straining under the pressure of the lack of people and money. My son-in-law is a vicar in rural Lincolnshire with twelve church buildings and nine operating regularly. The Bishop of Willesden, Pete Broadbent, one of the architects of Reform and Renewal, claims that ‘all the demographic evidence shows, we’re in the last chance saloon. Unless we do something in the next five or 10 years, we’re shot … we’re facing 3 a demographic time bomb’, by which he means that the Church is failing to attract or keep younger people and if the rate of decline continues, the Church will die.1 The Director of Theos, a religious thinktank believes that the parish especially holds the church back from mission, because it is so expensive to maintain and because of a parochial mindset. Martyn Percy, by contrast, believes that the parish church is fully resilient, and is held back by the gathered nature of contemporary ecclesial practice and evangelical particularism. He really believes in the Broad Church tradition of an inclusive Church of England, and has confidence in its stability.2 A cradle Anglican, I naturally come somewhere in the middle, in that I do think there is a decline and even something of a crisis, and I do not think a gathered ecclesiology is the primary cause for the drop in baptism figures. The swiftly insidious secularism of our society has to be acknowledged. On the other hand, like Percy I do believe in the resilience of the local church, precisely because it is local and has a commitment to place and context. I am not going to spend this talk analysing the relative severity of the situation we face, but to offer a vision of first why and secondly how I believe the vocation of the parish can be rethought, both to strengthen its resilience, and to counter and respond to our contemporary and future challenges. I do so, however, in a positive, hopeful mode. Instead of worrying about what we have lost, we should value and delight in the gifts of the people we have, and empower them to be good disciples and evangelists. For me, the best thing to come out of the Reform and Renewal agenda in the Church of England, is the report about the laity, Setting God’s People Free, though even its title is negative, suggesting that the people of God are all being currently chained up. 1 Quoted in a Guardian interview on 21st November, 2015 at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/21/justin-welby-church-england-new-synod , accessed 1st May, 2017. 2 See Martyn Percy, The Future Shapes of Anglicanism: Currents, Contours, Charts (London: Routledge, 2017), 157-8. 4 At the end of the TV drama, Broadchurch, the characters gather to hear a sermon by Coates the vicar, after which the curmudgeonly detective, Alec Hardy, greets Coates with the words, ‘If I knew you peached like that, I’d have come more often’. For Coates’s mistake as a parish priest was one that I have witnessed all too often. He was in many ways exemplary: kind, accommodating, really standing alongside the grieving parents of the dead boy, and even the murderer, Joe Miller, much against the local mood, but he failed to offer a confident, positive religious vision to the community. Only when he was going did we hear powerful words from Hebrews, garnering that response from Hardy, who desperately needs hope in his own life. Without a vision, the people perish. If the local church is to survive it must be confident about its gospel message and its own value. But why should a commitment to place and parish be a feature of a contemporary evangelism? Have we not been told a thousand times, ever since the Mission-shaped Church report that we all live rootlessly, and associate in networks, and the territorial parish is a feature only of ‘inherited church’, and is no longer relevant. Andrew Davison and I argued in For the Parish that such a perspective first, could describe only a very middle-class life-style, with time and transport and money for such mobility, and secondly, ignored the way that such networks were themselves rooted in place – the local school being a key example.3 Thirdly, in such a situation we envisioned the church as all the more important a place to honour but integrate our many fractured identities and commitments. Since then the social and political world has moved on. Not only has locality as a mode of radical resistance to globalisation been acknowledged, but we have seen in Brexit, in the French Presidential election and in the election of Donald Trump in America a sometimes toxic but none-the-less potent popular 3 Andrew Davison and Alison Milbank, For the Parish: A Critique of Fresh Expressions (Norwich: SCM Press, 2010), 75-85. 5 localism. David Goodhart’s recent book, The Road to Somewhere divided the population into two broad groups, ‘anywheres’ and ‘somewheres’.4 The former had usually moved away from home for higher education, gained success in their profession and economic autonomy, and held socially liberal views. They failed to understand the less affluent ‘somewheres’, who were much more dependent on community and local identity. Goodhart believes that ‘without a more rooted, emotionally intelligent liberalism … the possibility of ever more unpleasant backlashes cannot be completely ruled out’.5 Goodhart’s reasons are not purely strategic: he believes we have truly lost our way when we float free of our social, geographic and bodily emplacement. I would argue that the ‘anywhere’ view of reality still has a sense of place but it is more like a spatial grid. If all places are equally meaningful, it is as if one operates a private panopticon – the all-seeing view from the London skyscraper office – in which one has conquered space and knows it from a privileged vantage point.

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