In a heart-felt blog for ViaMedia, Trust and Transparency – it’s Time for Change, the Revd Dr Charlie Bell, Fellow at Girton College Cambridge, Assistant Curate, St John the Divine, Kennington and a consultant to the LLF Implementation Pastoral Guidance Working Group writes of “a sense of almost total, paralysing powerlessness amongst ordinary churchgoers and clergy.” He says it’s “absolutely the case that many now speak of ‘the church’ as though it is an entity which does things to them, rather than of which they form a part.”
My hyper-critical, angry and frustrated-with-the-Church-of=England-self, thinks the same as Charlie, but without proof to back up such a judgement. I suspect the statements he makes are true, but no research has been done to collect the evidence – has it? I have plenty of experience of online and virtual encounters with members of the CofE that suggest Charlie’s analysis is right, but I meet people – maybe you reading this – who attend church and may be actively involved locally, but who are not talking about, let alone motivated by, a sense of almost total, paralysing powerlessness.
Is this the general experience of members of this group, or are you mostly content with the performance of your local church, your priest and congregation (apart from the systemic prejudice in the institution’s attitudes to LGBTQIA+ people)?
I agree with Charlie that “As a church, we need to commit ourselves to undertaking a serious spiritual health check.” I’m thinking this all the time. Changing Attitude was founded in 1995 with the understanding that our personal attitudes to our Christian life, our faith, spirituality, awareness of the divine, transforming theology, magical thinking, needs to change as much as does the institution’s attitudes to sexuality and gender.
The movements in the Church seeking new manifestations of Christian life and witness, some long established, like Watch and Modern Church, some more recently established, such as Mosaic and OBOF, do not actively, publicly campaign for the CofE to undertake a serious spiritual health check. Not all are campaigning groups anyway.
As founder of Changing Attitude, integral to my vision is the sense that I am a contemplative activist. Integral to my spiritual life is an extended time of silence, a daily spiritual health check. In silence, open to the Now, to my body, heart and soul feelings and awareness, to the unconscious and the undefined mystery called God, into the stillness thoughts about the shockingly inadequate state of the Church of England float. And I might begin thinking, but how is this going to be changed, who is going to take responsibility for initiating this?
And thanks to Charlie’s blog, I’m now thinking - who is going to initiate a movement that persuades the Church of England, the Archbishops, Archbishops’ Council, House of Bishops and General Synod, to initiate a spiritual health check? And would we be able to agree on a definition of spiritual health? And can I really be bothered to get involved at the age of nearly 78?
An awkward nobody
Charlie, self-deprecatingly, says that of course, his musing “will all likely be dismissed as the complaints of an awkward nobody.” I know that thought well. “Who am I to think that I might call the Church to order, to suggest that devoting time and space to the National Church Governance Report and Recommendations from the National Church Governance Project Board the General Synod, the Archbishops’ Council, and the House of Bishops should as a priority devote themselves to a national Church spiritual health check. In my daily contemplative silence, I’m also conscious (and fearful) that I am just an awkward nobody with intense, visionary awareness and feelings that I am fearful of pursuing. Why me? Who am I to think such things? But I didn’t get where I am today by ignoring my intuition.
I’m sure, with Charlie, that if we don’t do something like this then the current period of bloodletting in the church will not simply fade away – “although the church might.” The structures are clearly not fit for purpose, accountability leaves a lot to be desired, and the laity and parish clergy – far from being empowered – are frequently left raging against a machine that doesn’t appear to either hear or care about them, quoting Charlie.
A campaign for a serious spiritual health check
I’m with Charlie, frustrated by how things are, wanting the church to be not just better, but radically transformed into a body inspired by the life, teaching and practice of Jesus, wanting a Church that knows what “life in all its fulness” looks and feels like. Charlie is fuelling my courage to take the risk. Yesterday’s Unadulterated Love blog about the current safeguarding crisis in the Church attempted to set out in some detail what the landscape looks like to me. When and where is such a radical movement going to start? Will it arise from the Changing Attitude England Facebook Group or from people’s reactions to Unadulterated Love blogs? I’ve no idea, but going public is the only way such a movement to persuade the Church of England to undertake a serious spiritual health check stands a chance of achieving anything.