Let's talk about 'growth' - seriously

 I started writing this blog post a few months ago. It didn't feel like the right time to publish it. Now does.

Newly potted seeds in the church garden greenhouse.

In the weeks following our posting of our two reflections on ‘church growth’, Angela Sheard and I have been delighted to receive enthusiastic responses from a wide variety of different locations and perspectives. Some were saying ‘yes! Thank you for articulating what I’ve been thinking for so long!’. Others have responded in a more critical and questioning vein, with ‘yes, buts…’, according us at most two and a half cheers! And still others have pointed us to work and reflection on this topic that has preceded our own modest contributions: this is not uncharted territory, even if there has not yet been expansive space within the wider church (in England, at least) for this conversation to be had. What all the responses seem to share, however, is a desire for more of this kind of conversation.

In the hope of adding to the momentum of such conversations, then, I want to offer a few further thoughts, prompted in part by one of the more critical readings of our blog posts, by Ian Paul (https://www.psephizo.com/life-ministry/should-churches-grow/). Loosely, these thoughts cluster around four themes:

·      What does ‘growth’ mean?

·      The desire for control

·      Church-related binaries

·      Doing, death, and the ‘dark night’

What does ‘growth’ mean?

I’ve been struck by how many vocal advocates of numerical growth will add, almost as a footnote, ‘of course, other kinds of growth are important too’. ‘Spiritual growth’, in particular, is often cited as being ‘just as important as numbers’. What seems rarely to be acknowledged, however, is that the same word can be used for very different kinds of ‘thing’, with very little family resemblance between them. And so when we read biblical texts, for example, that mention ‘growth’ without a qualifier, we should be careful not to read in extraneous assumptions.

⁶ I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. ⁷ So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. ⁸ The one who plants and the one who waters have one purpose, and each will receive wages according to their own labour. ⁹ For we are God’s coworkers, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building. (1 Corinthians 3:6-9)

What kind of ‘growth’ is Paul talking about here? There seems to be nothing explicit in the text to suggest it’s about numbers. Most of Paul’s explicit concern, in the first few chapters of 1 Corinthians, is about a ‘growth’ (we might say) into the wisdom of the Spirit, that is contrasted with an immature ‘jealousy and quarelling’. ‘You are God’s field’, Paul says: the growth happens within you. Something similar seems to be the context of the use of ‘growth’ in Ephesians 4:16, and Colossians 2:19, neither of which are obviously about ‘getting bigger’, but rather use the metaphor of the human body, and focus on its ‘held-togetherness’ in love, in contrast to divisive attempts at ‘trickery’, ‘condemnation’ or ‘disqualification’ within the body.

These concerns seem to align closely with one of Jesus’ primary uses of organic imagery, that of fruitfulness (e.g. Mt. 7:15-20, Mt. 12:33, Mt. 13:23, Mt 21:19 & 43 and parallels in other gospels; Lk.13:6-9; Jn.12:24, Jn. 15:2-8 & 16). Just as John the Baptist urged people to ‘bear fruits worthy of repentance’ (Lk. 3:8-9), so Jesus invests much time and parabolic energy in suggesting that the ‘gardener’ (which tends to refer, primarily, to God) takes a stance of patient attentiveness to digging, pruning and manuring, and urging the ‘branches’ (Jesus’ disciples) to a loving abiding in the vine. Fruitfulness and love are intertwined, and so it feels like a faithful midrash on Jesus’ words when Paul unfolds ‘the fruit of the Spirit’ as ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control’ (Gal. 5:22-23).

When advocates of numerical growth want to talk about ‘coming to faith’, then, I want to respond by asking where we see this kind of fruitfulness. ‘You will know them by their fruits’ (Mt. 7:16), Jesus says. Faith is enacted more profoundly than anything that is spoken (see e.g. the parable of the two sons in Mt. 21:28-32). It is lived more significantly than anything that can be counted.

From the time I’ve ministered in the parish of Hodge Hill, to take one little concrete example, I can tell you stories of local people who have participated for years in the living-out of the gospel of Jesus, in the work of ‘growing loving community’. One or two of these would say they have had an explicit encounter with Jesus somewhere along the way (in ways that cannot be ‘engineered’ by any church initiative). And those moments are, of course, to be celebrated. But the kind of ‘growth’ I can point to is of a messy collective of neighbours and friends on a life-long journey together of seeking to embody more fully the gifts of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. You will know them by their fruits.

The desire for control

Such a perspective feels like it sits in stark contrast to what we might call a ‘managerial’ perspective on ‘coming to faith’. In the latter, ‘knowing’ people is bound up with things we can count, boxes we can tick. Do they come to church? Would they tick the box marked ‘Christian’? Can we count them as a ‘new disciple’, for the purposes of the stated outputs of this funding bid?

Outputs and inputs, of course, are the language of ‘industrial business’, ‘production management’ and even ‘personnel management’, which is Dr Paul’s own employment background. Which is a curious world through which to frame a theological conversation. It’s a world dominated by the overriding desire for efficiency and productivity, and the method is one of mechanistic control: give us a system that allows us, as reliably as possible, to control the outputs through what we put into the machine. It is a capitalist logic which stretches back to the plantation – the epitome, perhaps, of human power and control over land and crops, and, by no means coincidentally, of elite white male humans’ power and control over bodies they determined as ‘other’ and less-than-human. Reincarnating the production machine of Pharoah’s Egypt, the plantations generated a pseudo-psychological diagnosis of ‘drapetomania’: the peculiar illness affecting enslaved people who wanted to escape their controlled, productive, plantation life. What madness! But as Angela suggested in her blog post, we might well ask where the Church of England today continues in a plantation mindset – and, furthermore, what labels are placed on those who seek to make exodus from its mechanistic structures of control?

Church-related binaries

There is a profound cognitive dissonance in the contemporary Church of England. On the one hand, the imperatives to numerical growth and institutional sustainability are everywhere. On the other hand, we find ourselves in the midst of an ongoing stream of revelations about unhealthy institutional culture, and unsafe and abusive spaces within the church. Do we really want to draw more people into this church? 

One of the profound costs of emphasising numerical ‘growth’ is that it reproduces and entrenches a hard boundary between ‘in’ and ‘out’, a binary of ‘church’ and ‘world’ that so easily veers towards another binary: ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Binaries are rarely truthful and helpful, and this particular binary is not only empirically untrue, it is profoundly dangerous. It both degrades and overlooks the multitude of ways in which the life of the Spirit is at work in the world beyond the church, and also eliminates the possibility of identifying sin and evil within the life of the church. 

The church is not identical with the kingdom of God – at best, there is some overlap. The church is much more messy; it is ‘corpus permixtum’, as St Augustine once put it. A ‘fruitfulness’ perspective here not only summons us to pay more attention to spaces within churches that might be profoundly unfruitful; it also invites us to consider how this expression of church, in this context, might be a gift or contribution to the life, nurturing and growth of the kingdom of God here. This also means that contextual discipleship becomes a vital task – perhaps the most vital task – of the local church: what does it look like to be followers of Jesus here and now?

Again, much of my work in Hodge Hill over the last 15 years has been asking that question. I arrived in 2010, two years after the church building had been demolished, and at roughly the same time as the austerity regime of the new coalition government. At that point, I couldn’t have imagined a global pandemic, or Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, or Donald Trump as President of the USA (twice), or the Archbishop of Canterbury resigning over safeguarding failures. I didn’t know about Black Lives Matter. We had never had far-right marches organised on our doorstep. Even ecological collapse felt like a worst-case-scenario nightmare rather than an imminent reality. We just knew something about living on an outer estate, and wanting to be involved in ‘growing loving community’ here. But all of these things, and more, have pushed us to let go of almost all our assumptions about what ‘church’ should look like here, what ‘the gospel’ looks like here, what kind of God we worship and how and where that God meets us. It has radically changed our liturgy and worship and daily prayer, the ways we hold spaces for conversation and planning and decision-making, the ways we explore and question and share our faith together, and, yes, how we understand the messy edge-lands between ‘church’ and ‘not-church’, ‘Christian’ and ‘non-Christian’, and how we seek to live out and share our faith in those ecological borders. 

An ecological perspective

There are good reasons that Scripture is full of organic imagery. Even as cities began to play more and more of a prominent role in their life and worldview, the children of Israel were a people who live in intimate relationship to the land. And Jesus spent the majority of his time among such land-loving people too.[1]Drawing together the insights of indigenous (including biblical) wisdom and contemporary ecology, we might say, among other things:

·      there is no hard binary of ‘life’ and ‘death’ (as per Ian Paul’s ‘living things grow, dead things don’t’): just as any organism simultaneously includes cells that are dying and dead, and cells that are developing and growing; just as most organic life has seasonal cycles of growth and die-back; so any ecosystem depends on some parts dying and decaying which are utterly necessary for other parts to come to life (compost being my favourite example!);

·      there is no such thing as (the Western, modern concept of) the ‘individual’, separate from an ecosystem: not for plants, nor animals, nor humans; instead, there is interdependence, entanglement, blurred and porous boundaries, a complex ecology of agency and aliveness; we might talk about individuals or organisms as if they are separable ‘things’, with completely autonomous agency, that are therefore easily countable – but the distinction is more a convenient fiction than we often care to admit;

·      organic life and ecosystems are not machines, or even approximate to machines: you can try making interventions with plant life (digging, manuring, pruning, for example) that might play with some of the probabilities of some parts of the ecosystem becoming more fruitful, for a time, but your contribution will only ever be one of a multitude of factors, and so at best can be a wisdom-informed, but always experimental, ‘tinkering’ within a wild, unpredictable ecology;

So we need to let go of fantasies of control, counting, and the kind of ‘growth’ that somehow comes without being entangled with death. And maybe in the letting go, we might begin to make space for the wind of the Spirit to blow.

Doing, death, and the ‘dark night’

‘What can we do, then, to grow the church – or to keep it afloat?’ The question begins to smack not only of desperation, but of denial. It comes from a place of anxiety, but also from a place that imagines the church as a machine, rather than part of a wild ecology. It clings to the imagination that we can determine our desired outcomes by our own ‘doings’.

Which is not a reason for not doing anything. But it is a strong argument for doing something different, and for a different reason. Ian Paul suggests a little list of ‘doings’: ‘invite, talk about faith, challenge the culture around us, stand out as different’. I’d agree with all of those – but I suspect we might mean quite different things by them. I too want to affirm the possibilities in an agrarian understanding of faith, that sees our Christian vocation as being ‘co-workers with God’: but not focusing (anxiously? confidently?) on the future, with a clear outcome in view; rather, out of a deep-rooted faithfulness, to God’s love for us, and to God’s love for the kosmos.

I am struck by the deep ring of truth in these reflections from community-supported farmer Adam Wilson:

If David Abrams[2] is right when he asserts that language is a characteristic of landscapes in which humans participate, we might find ourselves surprised by what we hear emerging from our own mouths. That happened at least twice for me in those three interviews. In the conversation with Hazel, I dared to name the root longing that animates the work here: to be able to see our lives as reflections of the persistent generosity that comes in our direction every single day from the surrounding landscape—to become agents of grace. I won’t soon forget that phrase agents of grace.

When grace becomes a verb, it describes the action plan of gratitude, with whom it shares a root.

The next day I spoke with a graduate student in Colorado researching “post-capitalist agriculture.” Partway through our hour on the phone, she said, “I am guessing you’re not going to like this question, but I am going to trust that you will rephrase it as you see fit. What will the Farm look like in five years?” Hazel had asked something similar, so I’d had a warmup. But what I heard come out of my mouth surprised me: “I can’t tell you what the Farm will look like in five years because I have a sense that to do so would be unfaithful.”

I had a sudden feeling that this researcher wasn’t trying to write a paper about faith and spirituality.

“Can you explain what you mean by that?” she asked.

“I’ll try, but it might take me a second to listen,” I replied. Then I heard it. “Imagine if I was going to have a conversation with you, but beforehand I told someone else exactly where I thought we were going to arrive by the end of it. That would seem a bit unfaithful, wouldn’t it?”

As we remember the landscape as a primary conversation partner, we might find it harder and harder to propose five-year plans. That’s simply not the etiquette of a real conversation.[3]

Imagine letting go of our five-year plans and strategies, and giving all our available time, energies and capacities to faithful, attentive presence. This is the kind of relationship I’m interested in, to give shape to our relationships with our landscapes, our ‘missional’ relationships with our ‘non-Christian’ human neighbours, our relationships within what we call church, and even – especially! – our relationships with God.

Which brings us back to the ‘dead whale’ metaphor with which I started my first contribution to this conversation. Is it (as Ian Paul misreads it) a death-wish for God’s beloved children who make up the CofE? By no means! Is it wishing for the end of the institution of the Church of England? Maybe – and on some days in the rolling polycrisis of abuse, evasion, self-protection and privilege-defending, it feels like a more or less passionate Yes. But I originally proposed it as neither of those. Instead, it was a ‘what if?’. What if the institution is dead, or dying – and what if embracing that reality might just offer the possibility of some kind of release, some kind of liberation? What if we were no longer burdened by the anxious need to keep the institution afloat, prop up its structures, plaster over the cracks? What if we were able to let go, let it fall? What, then, might be possible, imaginable?

In the months since the ‘dead whale’ piece was first published, the cracks have begun to feel more like chasms. The Archbishop of Canterbury has resigned over safeguarding failures, collective and personal. As I write this, the futures of the Bishop of Liverpool and the Archbishop of York hang in the balance, as allegations of sexual harassment and assault by the former, and inaction by the latter, have become public. And through the last few months many, many bishops across the Church of England (with just a very few notable exceptions) have maintained a hard line of corporate silence, with some even writing letters to discourage clergy colleagues from expressing opinions in public, rather than (heaven forbid!) opening up spaces for concerns and dissent to find a hearing.

The inability to embrace death is, ultimately, a lack of faith. Who are we to imagine that a dead institution is the end of God’s work?! We are a resurrection faith. Of course new life will continue to spring up beyond, and in the midst of, the ruins of the Church. Our calling is to notice where we find ourselves in a collective impasse, hitting up against a dead end that no amount of growth strategy, or revised structures, or improved processes, or changed leadership, will break through. And once we’ve noticed that that is where we find ourselves, to embrace it, with utter seriousness, with sheer abandon: to enter the dark night of the ecclesial soul that God has waiting for us; to release what is dying; to let go of our anxious efforts to change the future or redeem the past, and to be present, as much as we can, to the breaking, crumbling reality of now; to stay with the trouble, to ‘tarry awhile’, to watch and wait, together.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

(Wendell Berry, ‘Our Real Work’, in Standing by Words, 1983)

---

[1] See e.g. Kenneth E. Bailey, Poet & Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes: A literary-cultural approach to the parables in Luke(Eerdmans, 1983).

[2] The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World

[3] Adam Wilson, ‘Agents of Grace?’, newsletter, 16 Dec 2024

In the ruins: the beginnings of a conversation

 

On 10th June, I had a wonderful conversation, in public, with Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani, as part of a day-conference organised by Reconciliation Initiatives: 'Being Missional Today: Disruption, Liminality, Reconciliation'. The setting was daunting: on the chancel steps of the vast space that is Coventry Cathedral, overlooked (and very much humbled) by the giant tapestry of 'Christ in Glory'. One of the many joys of the conversation was that, while it took much prior thought, we didn't plan it in advance. We agreed to be as honest as we could, and to embrace the possibility that it might go in directions that we had not anticipated. Which, indeed, it did. You can watch our initial conversation here (in many ways it's quite gentle - the Q&A with the wider gathering, later on, was more 'sparky' - but that wasn't recorded!). What I offer here, then, is some of the things I thought I might say, if our conversation took us there...

Where do we start? 

Perhaps by acknowledging the vulnerability of dialogue itself. The risk of clunkiness. The intentional resistance to things being too 'sewn up'. Stepping back from the conventional lecture mode of 'authoritative delivery'.

Perhaps also by acknowledging the particularity of the bodies we speak out of. And, for me, the particularity of a place within which I've been rooted and grounded now for 15 years. And a sense, as I come to a public conversation like this, of wondering how I do justice to the wisdom and stories of a particular community (many of whom have become friends and teachers to me over the years), and the particularity of its more-than-human ecosystem: its built environment, the M6 motorway, the Common land at the heart of my parish, the two rivers (the Tame and the Cole) that frame it. All these I carry not just in my head and on my lips, but somehow in my body too. All of these, somehow, I want to speak through me.

I wonder too how we might do justice to our wider context. The big picture. The multiple fallings-apart of our world: ecological breakdown; genocide in Gaza; dismantling of democratic government in the USA. And here in the UK: hostile borders; the rise of the Far Right; deepening inequality (in the name of economic 'growth'); anti-trans rhetoric and policies, reinforcing gender binaries against the far more complex reality; the combination of assisted dying legislation alongside savage cuts in disability support... And then the Church: anxious about survival: numbers, money, unity, theological purity. Resources and money being hoarded and siphoned off by the powerful. Unquestioning faith in 'new initiatives and programmes', 'vision and strategy', 'more effective processes'. And institutionally racist, classist and ableist, with legally enshrined sexism and homophobia held up as 'flourishing' and 'faithfulness'. How do we justice to all of this? How can we name what these dynamics are doing to us right now? How they are shaping and moving our bodies and souls?

I want to name the way so much of our collective life is shaped by anxious responses; collective, physiological responses in the face of threat or trauma. Fight, flight, freeze, fawn, force.. alongside other F words that might spring to mind... The urge to try and 'take back control'. A necessary survival response in moments of real threat and danger, but profoundly self-destructive when our bodies get 'stuck' in that response for the longer-term.

I want to name the way our ecclesial divisions are rooted, deep down, in profoundly different theologies: of church, of salvation, of God. And that we very rarely get anywhere near talking about these together. Perhaps we don't know how to. Perhaps we're scared that if we do, things really will fall apart. As if they're not already.

I want to name the ways in which we seem to find ourselves coming up against what theologian Constance FitzGerald called 'collective impasse'. When rational and strategic responses just don't seem to be making any difference. When the stories we've been in the habit of telling ourselves no longer seem to be working. FitzGerald, a Carmelite, identifies this collective impasse as 'the dark night of the soul'. And suggests that we need to learn how to dwell there. To slowly discover an imagination that has been nurtured in the dark.

What, then, if we choose to not try and 'manage' the multiple fallings-apart, but to face them, with courageous honesty? That's the invitation I hear in the conference theme, 'Disruption, Liminality, Reconciliation'. Although I'm nervous about it too. It still sounds a bit too easy. A bit too quick. As if 'disruption' is like the trains - an annoying but fairly temporary blip in service. As if reconciliation (a bit like 'unity') is something that's within reach, an initiative we can take, a project we can manage, rather than something that is only, really, in the wild hands of God. 

I want to talk instead about 'dead ends' and 'dark nights' and 'decomposition'. To give more weight to death and stopping and finality and not-coming-through-this-in-any-recognisable-form. To wonder out loud about what needs to die (racism and hetero-patriarchy in the CofE, to name but two). To explore the kind of radical 'Wintering' that writer Katherine May testifies to in her book of that name, and which I've experienced first-hand in the aftermath of my daughter's traumatic, life-threatening accident. A long, dark season of dormancy, when things like 'growth' and 'fruiting' are far beyond our present sensing.

If I'd fully appreciated the context of the Coventry Cathedral conversation, I would have talked about ruins. I would have recalled Dougald Hine's four tasks for the work we need to do in the ruins:

1. salvage what we can, that's worth saving;

2. grieve what we cannot save, but need to remember;

3. leave behind what was not as good as we once thought it was;

4. recover and re-weave some of the 'threads' we've dropped along the way.

I like these a lot, because they're nuanced enough to call us to the patient work of discernment. But they're bold enough to not let us get away with imagining that we're not living among the ruins. A patient honesty is what we need right now.

Our conversation came back round to wondering how we might nurture such spaces - 'small circles of radical presence' - for patient honesty, for discernment, for 'staying with the trouble' (as Donna Haraway put it). How we might inhabit and open up spaces for 'non-anxious presence'. In the Q&A later on, we were gently corrected: 'non-anxious' is both unrealistic, and also devalues the experience and wisdom of those who live with anxiety as a regular part of their lives. Perhaps better, it was suggested, we need to nurture spaces where we aren't driven by our anxieties, where our vision is not narrowed by them - but where we can pay attention to the messages they are trying to give us. And to the forces that are causing or exacerbating them. 'Compost heap communities', I've sometimes named them, where we can tend and attend to what is decomposing around us and within us.

The time went too quickly, as in all good conversations it does. We barely scratched the surface of the challenges, and the possibilities. I didn't feel I did do justice to the community and the place I'm rooted in. On the piece of paper that sat on my lap, I had a list of things that we've been learning to practise in Hodge Hill over the last 15 years: practical wisdom embodied in our place that might just have something to offer the wider church. But we mostly didn't touch on those. And I've not done here, either. That's for the next blog post...

"Burn it down": responses to/within the polycrisis in the CofE

I remember all-too-well those first few days of the COVID pandemic. As a team locally, with oversight of our youth and community-building work, we met daily, every morning, to try and absorb the latest news, make sense of the latest instructions, and evolve our practical, on-the-ground responses. Our meetings would often last for more than an hour. There was just so much to digest. It all felt so big, so serious. It had radical implications for all our patterns and practice, even the core values at the heart of our work. And it was changing constantly. The meetings together were absolutely necessary to pool our fragments of wisdom and understanding, to wrestle together with the stuff that was unclear, to bring together our imaginations towards creative ways forward, and as much as any of those, simply to support each other in the sense of shock, overwhelm, anxiety and rapidly-growing exhaustion. I remember us reminding each other that it was "a marathon, not a sprint" (little did we imagine how long the marathon would be), but there was so much that was coming at us at speed.

I notice, in myself and in those I'm connected to (both physically and virtually), something similar going on with the unfolding catastrophe in the USA. Sitting here in my study in Birmingham, England, I watch it from a distance, but I have friends either in the States or with family there, what happens in the USA affects the whole world, and I know too that the seeds of what is happening there are germinating here in the UK too. So there is a little distance, but little emotional detachment from it.

And then there is the Church of England. An unfolding polycrisis of historic and ongoing abuse, cover-ups and silencings, resignations and appointment stalemates, process failures, and entrenched disagreements over theology and practice which are, in some cases at least, actually matters of livelihood, life and death for faithful Christians, and human beings more widely, made in God's image and beloved by God.

And again I notice, in myself and among friends and wider connections, a similar sense of shock, overwhelm, anxiety, exhaustion. And anger, and grief, and fear, and more, profound, visceral feelings.

And there is, as many of us are all too conscious, a profound complexity to it all. There are multiple, intersecting dimensions of institutional failure and injustice. The Church of England remains institutionally sexist and homophobic (in ways enshrined in its structures), institutionally racist, classist and ableist (in ways that are all too visible, audible and tangible). It is deeply mired in systemic sin, and often it dresses it up as faithfulness to 'doctrine' and/or 'tradition', or a commitment to 'balance', 'mutual flourishing' or 'pastoral provision'.

'The fix'

There are quests and calls and proposals being aired, that purport to be able to sort it out. "We need more resignations!"... "We need different people at the top!"... "We need more effective processes!"... "We need to unite behind our vision!"... "We need a new strategy!"... "We need more supportive structures!"... and so on...

But the danger of all these quests and calls and proposals is that they veer towards imagining they are 'the solution'. 'The fix'. The thing that will make it all OK. That will 'steady the ship', make the machine work, make the structure more resilient, get the show back on the road... Save us.

The danger, as Nigerian post-activist thinker Bayo Akomolafe often says, is that so often "our response to the crisis is part of the crisis". Or, to paraphrase Audrey Lorde, that we are continuing to use "the Master's tools" to fix "the Master's House" - to try to save something that really shouldn't be saved. We're playing around with the position of a couple of pieces at the top of the Jenga tower, or removing the odd piece from a bit lower down - when in fact it's the whole tower that needs knocking down.

'Burn it down' - and other responses

"Burn down the Church Machine: Only radical reform will do." So went the title of a piece by Giles Fraser on 21 November 2024, a few days after Justin Welby's resignation from the role of Archbishop of Canterbury. I must confess, I'm not much of a fan of Giles Fraser these days (he was my hero when he resigned from St Paul's Cathedral in solidarity with the Occupy London camp, but it seems both he and I have moved on since then). But when I saw the title of Fraser's article, it resonated with me on a gut level. When I read on, however, I was left a bit underwhelmed. Underneath the rage of the title, Fraser was mostly in proposal mode: dismantle Welby's managerial structures, appoint a woman as Archbishop (who should have their remit narrowed to the Church of England), move away from ultra-conservative theologies, re-emphasise divine transcendence. Shifting the balances, re-drawing some of the lines, tinkering with a few of the Jenga pieces. Reform? Yes. Radical? Meh. But I still wanted to pay attention to my gut response of resonance. So I found myself returning to these words from Black theorist Fred Moten, who can much better claim the 'radical' tag: 

‘what it is that is supposed to be repaired is irreparable. It can’t be repaired. The only thing we can do is tear this shit down completely and build something new.’ [1]

That feeling in my gut was one of deep, roiling anger, mixed with despair. And it's clearly not just me. It's a significant emotional current swirling around the CofE at the moment. This is beyond repair. Tear it down. Burn it all down. And I don't want to distance myself from that response - because I recognise that for many of my friends and siblings in Christ it comes out of lifetimes of hurt, frustration, marginalisation, silencing, that are felt at the deepest levels in their bodies and souls. And if I feel just a fraction of those feelings, who am I to deny their authenticity and necessity for others?

Another response, closely related, is to look for an exit. To walk away. Finally to reach the point of no return. I have dear friends who have done exactly that, with deep sadness, over the last few months and years. I have friends who are giving time and attention to developing exit strategies, building up skills and experience in areas that will enable them to move into other expressions of their vocations, beyond the church. And I recognise some of those impulses in me too.

A third response is to join or form networks and movements to organise for change within the church. To build numbers, representation and relational power, to try to affect decision-making. I'm part of some of those too. I've been in some of those strategic conversations. I admire those friends and colleagues with strategic minds, that can see clearly the pragmatic goals, and the steps needed to achieve them. Although, I often have to quietly confess a nervousness that such work risks being a matter of tinkering with the deckchairs on the Titanic, or at best restructuring the vessel - without paying attention to the deeper currents, of theology and culture, for example, that profoundly shape the direction of travel.

There's a fourth response that is pragmatic in a different direction. It disconnects from as much of the wider institutional 'noise' as possible, and re-focuses on the parish: the local, the neighbourhood, the church community. It's a relational and mental and emotional scale that feels manageable - more human, even. A re-centering for many of us on our core vocations: of attending and tending to the faithfulness and fragilities and day-to-day lives and losses and loves of these people in this place. One of the gifts of parish ministry is that there is in fact a huge amount of autonomy from the wider structures. Most initiatives, strategies, data gathering and the like can only ever be framed to the parish as invitations, requests. It is possible, in theory at least, to build buffers between parish-scale life and the anxieties and pressures of the institution.

Clearly, these four aren't 'either/or' responses. I recognise impulses within me towards each of them, and I recognise too that each of those impulses within me is part of larger, swirling emotional currents within the communities, networks and the wider church structures in which I participate. I'm not interested here in 'judging' any of these as 'right' or 'wrong' (in moral or theological terms), or 'effective' or 'ineffective' (in more pragmatic terms). Beyond noticing them, I think all I want to do here is offer some re-framing, for each one, which may or may not offer helpful additional contributions to the deepening polycrisis and our array of responses to it.

Starting local: 'small circles of radical presence'

In my Crucible article of July 2024, 'Simpler, Humbler, Bolder?', I finished with the suggestion of Otto Scharmer's that one of the vital things we need within the unravelling of our world is 'small circles of radical presence' that can 'tend the flame' of attention, courage, and maybe even hope (maybe). And wondered whether what we know as 'parish' might be (might always have been) one primary context for such work of presence. I want to go a little further here, to suggest that such 'small circles of radical presence' need to be the places where we learn to practise something that is the opposite of institutional anxiety. Where we learn to 'show up' with one another in our complex embodiedness, with our swirl of emotions, with the fragilities of our own personal lives and our collective lives on multple scales. They need to be places where we can courageously hold open space for the voicing of dissent and uncertainty. Where we can 'stay with the trouble' without expecting quick, easy - or often any - resolution. Where we can 'tarry awhile' with each other in the midst of our dark nights. The local is surely where this work has to start: in the places where we are bodily present to each other on an infuriatingly regular basis, with all the joys and difficulties that that involves.

Resistance is often not a movement

Looking wider, beyond the local, I find myself wondering about something which on the face of it sounds like the opposite of 'movement-building': resistance. The word suggests a push against 'movement', but often it is co-opted into the rational and the strategic. I wonder what resistance might look like when it begins with the embodied depth of our emotions: in our refusals, our tears, our cries of anguish, our uneasy silences and our holy 'No's. I wonder towards what philosopher Sara Ahmed, and then theologian Karen Bray, have termed 'affect aliens': those who refuse to go with the dominant emotional flows of the structures within which they find themselves. As Bray puts it: 'these affect alien prophets exist as blockage... To feel  rather than to flow is their prophetic character', to 'persist', rather than to 'overcome'. This may sometimes take the form of disobedience, she suggests, but '"can [also] take the form of an unwilling obedience: subjects might obey a command but do so grudgingly or reluctantly and enact with or through the compartment of their body a withdrawal from the right of command even as they complete it." When one must obey, one may do so unhappily, with expressions of unwilling acquiescence.' [2] I wonder how it might be to be more intentionally an 'affect alien', as a parish priest or officer in relation to the diocesan economy, or as a representative on General Synod, say.

'Exit' doesn't necessarily mean leaving

'Quiet quitting' has become one such non-moving movement of affect aliens, especially in the wake of COVID: 'doing the minimum requirements of one's job and putting in no more time, effort, or enthusiasm than absolutely necessary; opting out of tasks beyond one’s assigned duties and/or becoming less psychologically invested in work' (Wikipedia). The multiple levels of parish ministry (relationships within the congregation, with the wider neighbourhood, and then with the diocese and wider church) mean that 'quiet quitting' could, perhaps, happen on the latter level alongside a passionate ongoing commitment to the first two.

I was struck, recently, in the midst of preparing a 9-month journey of 'wild' baptism preparation (for our wonderfully messy expression of church on our estate here in Hodge Hill), by theologian David Benjamin Blower's description of baptism as a 'ritual of exit', rather than - as we often think of it - a ritual of inclusion or incorporation. Baptism is rooted in the ancient story of the exodus, Blower reminds us:

'the Hebrew slaves were not struggling to be included more equitably in Pharoah's power structure. They left it behind and wandered into the wilderness. ... By being buried in the waters of death, one passed beyond the jurisdiction of the present powers who have enclosed the world in law... Baptism was understood as a ritual of exit, from an enclosed and managed life under the powers of the present age.' [3]

As we journey together locally on this journey of exodus, I can't help wondering if the baptismal call, today, includes an exodus journey away from the institutional church as we know it. I'm feeling increasingly uncomfortable about the idea that we need to call in a bishop to 'confirm' those who have made this exodus journey, bringing with him (or, indeed, her) all the patriarchal liturgical conformity that we have tried so hard locally to decompose and transform.

What if the whale is already dead?

And finally, to return to the angry impulse to 'burn it all down' [*]... what if it's not about actively burning it down, but already in the process of crumbling? What if the whale that is the Church of England is already a decaying carcass? That was my starting point for the Crucible article: not in itself a 'death wish' for the church, as some have mis-read it, but a 'what if...?' What if the institutional Church of England is already dying or dead: what then might be possible, conceivable, imaginable?

Fred Moten's imperative to 'tear this shit down' that I quoted above, is riffed on elsewhere in the same book by queer theorist Jack Halberstam:

[W]e want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls. We cannot say what new structures will replace the ones we live with yet, because once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming. What we want after “the break” will be different from what we think we want before the break… [4]

This articulates so well my resistance to all the efforts at 'vision', 'strategy' or 'reform': we cannot yet see, or imagine, what we want, or need, or are being called to 'after' whatever this is that is happening at the moment. It's another way of describing the necessity of entering into the 'dark night' that some of us are wanting, perhaps tentatively, to say is coming upon us, collectively, as the Church of England. In such times, patience is one of the most essential virtues (alongside anger and courage, to name but two). 

This time last year, we were preparing in Hodge Hill for our series of Lent talks that we entitled 'God in the ruins'. The title was inspired, at least in part, by the book by Dougald Hine, At Work in the Ruins: Finding our Place in the time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics & all the other Emergencies (2023). Hine mostly gives his attention to the crumbling of the worldview and institutions most obviously grounded in Western modernity, but there is much wisdom here for the Church (which is arguably more dependent on modernity than it cares to admit). Towards the end of the book, Hine points his readers towards four questions that might guide our ‘work in the ruins’:

1. what good things can we salvage from the ruins, to take with us on the journey from here?

2. what good things do we need to mourn and remember, that we accept we can’t take with us?

3. what things are we beginning to notice were never as good as we thought they were, that we need to let go of?

4. what ‘dropped threads’ have we left behind, further back on this journey, that we might be able to recover and weave back in?

More recently, I've rediscovered a wonderful little book by American Methodist missiologist Elaine Heath, who reads afresh the letter to the Galatians as speaking good news to a contemporary Church caught between anxiety over its declining influence, and defensiveness in protecting its traditions. Heath describes a fourfold practice, a 'contemplative missional stance', through which local congregations might ‘learn to respond to systems change from a position of belovedness and inner freedom rather than fear’:

1. Show up to God, ourselves, our neighbours, and our world.

2. Pay attention to what is there, what is going on inside and outside of ourselves.

3. Cooperate with God as God invites, instructs, corrects, or encourages in the situation at hand.

4. Release the outcome of cooperation with God. Consciously let go of the outcome, recognizing that God is God and we are not. [5]

Neither Hine nor Heath are offering a 'vision' or 'strategy' for 'reform' or 'renewal'. But between them, we might discern passionate attempts to be faithful to what we have inherited, to be attentively present to the dying and decomposition that is happening around us and within us, and to refuse the fantasies of control for a contemplative desire to be open to what the wild Spirit of God is bringing to birth. That's the kind of work that I am drawn to at the moment.

[1] Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, p.151 

[2] Karen Bray, Grave Attending: A Political Theology for the Unredeemed, pp.149-50, quoting Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects, p.140.

[3] David Benjamin Blower, The Messianic Commons, p.52.

[4] Jack Halberstam, 'The Wild Beyond: With and For the Undercommons', in Moten & Harney, The Undercommons, p.6.

[5] Elaine Heath, God Unbound: Wisdom from Galatians for the Anxious Church, p.76.

[* edit (9/2/25): Since I've dared to confess this impulse, it's clearly both resonated with many others, but also touched on a deep and justified fear. It sounds all too like the rhetoric of Trump and Musk's fascist bonfire in the USA right now. This is not a game. Setting fire to the structures leaves casualties, and they are usually those already most vulnerable. This is wise pastoral and political pushback. It's why already I wanted to nuance the impulse in the way I conclude this piece above. 

But I sense there's also something else to face, that's perhaps even harder. There is a reason Trump's language and Fred Moten's language are sometimes not too easily distinguishable. There are many, many people who have never been very well-served by the structures that we have - the structures that are both being actively torn down and already crumbling - and sometimes the 'least worst option' (another Democratic government in the USA, for example) is simply not good news enough to stem the tide of despair. Is that what the fascists like Trump and Musk play into, and draw power from?

In the evolving ecosystem in and around the dead whale carcass, some of the early arrivals on the scene are the 'enrichment opportunists', consuming all they can eat and (if we extend the metaphor a little) grabbing as much resource and space among the decaying remains as their significant power allows. As in the USA, so in the CofE. But there is a further phase in the whale's journey of decay:

"in a process that can last a hundred years, bacteria break down what’s left of the whale’s skeleton to provide nourishment for mussels, clams, limpets and sea snails. Over time, these deep-sea ‘whale fall’ sites become hotspots for evolutionary diversity (‘adaptive radiation’), enabling the generation of a multitude of new species and ecological communities in and around the carcass of the dead whale."

It is this small-scale work of decomposition, and evolutionary generativity, that I think we need to paying attention to, even while the enrichment opportunists are dominating the news and hoarding the most visible resources. It is at this level that I think Hine's and Heath's contemplative suggestions aid us in that attentiveness.]

Why we need an anti-growth coalition in the Church of England

I'm delighted to host this guest post from Revd Angela Sheard. Angela and I had a conversation a few weeks ago in which we discovered we had a shared passion: for a space to be opened within the Church of England for an honest, questioning, and theologically rooted conversation about the dominant language of 'growth'. We offer this piece, and a companion piece from me, in the hope that it will prompt more contributions from others, and the beginnings of that conversation we are both longing for.

If the phrase ‘anti-growth coalition’ causes you to come out in hives, foam at the mouth in rage or tremble in fear, don’t stop reading just yet! I’m keen not to shut down conversations about the church’s future but instead to open them up and create space for new perspectives to emerge. What I’m about to share is by no means the final word – I hope it will be the start of an ongoing dialogue.

The concept of anti-growth may seem like an impossible one to consider in the Church of England at the present time. The dominant narrative describing the state of the church is numerical decline – we even have a measured R (reproduction) number of 0.9 in one set of mathematical modelling, indicating that we are likely to die out around 2062.  The dominant response to this narrative is that we need to reverse the trend, defying all predictions – we need to grow, otherwise we will die.

This narrative is, I believe, at the heart of much of the vision and strategy of the Church of England. Our focus is on growth in order to survive – our mission is powered by our fear of dying out and our instinctive need to safeguard ourselves and our institution. The argument continues along the lines of, ‘What else do you expect us to do? Can there be any more urgent priority than ensuring there is a viable church to hand on to future generations?’

This sense in which church growth is the obvious and (really) the only priority, has the effect of closing down further reflection on what we mean by the word ‘growth’ in the first place. Very often, ‘growth’ is used as a catch-all term to describe good things happening. Think of how often we might hear in the same breath, a prayer for ‘growth in numbers, in resources, in relationships and in faith’. With reference to numbers of people and countable resources, the kind of growth being prayed for here is numerical growth – the intention is for the number to get bigger. But what does growth in relationships or faith mean? Can our relationships or our faith get bigger in some way? Are we really asking God for numerical growth here? If not, what we are asking for?

At this point, I want to further complicate the concept of growth by considering how it’s used in other areas of our society. Politically, perhaps the most well-known use of the term ‘growth’ in recent years was by Liz Truss. She ran on a strapline of ‘Growth, growth, growth’, which meant economic growth without redistribution throughout society. She also labelled her political opponents as being part of an “anti-growth coalition”.  

In response a number of people declared themselves to be members of this coalition, including the environmental writer George Monbiot. Monbiot breaks down a false relationship between economic growth and general prosperity, which is assumed to be true by Truss and others.  The economist Kate Raworth has also argued against unrestricted economic growth with her model of ‘Doughnut Economics’. This model conceptualizes the ideal size of global economies as being bounded by both a (minimum) social foundation and a (maximum) ecological ceiling.  According to this model, the world’s larger economies need not to grow but to shrink in order to enable human beings and the wider planet to flourish. Achieving maximum economic growth (whatever that might be) is an assumed ideal which is not questioned by either of the UK’s major political parties. The great irony is this maximum growth scenario is actually a harbinger of doom not only for us but for all people, in the form of total planetary destruction. 

Monbiot’s concluding comments on Liz Truss’s growth agenda are worth repeating in full: “Her “pro-growth” agenda performs the same role as tax cuts for the very rich. It’s a transfer of power to the wealthiest people, among whom are the bosses of corporations headquartered abroad, ruthless foreign oligarchs and British plutocrats who channel their money through tax havens. In other words, it is a further manifestation of the class war the rich are waging against the poor. Growth, in her vision, is not a promise. It’s a threat.” 

I think that in the Church of England, growth also functions not as a promise, but as a threat. However, it is a threat disguised as a promise to make it inconceivable that anyone could stand to lose. The promise is that everyone gains through the church growth vision and strategy – that church growth is for the many, rather than the few. One way that this promise is communicated is by placing church growth in an ecological context, rather than an economic one. In nature, everything grows – and it’s obviously good that everything grows, right?

Anderson Jeremiah writes brilliantly about how the Church of England uses language of ‘mixed ecology’ to describe what is in fact a ‘mixed economy’, a primarily capitalistic economic system driven by competition in a free market, and survival of the fittest. By contrast, mixed ecology describes diverse ecosystems sustained by interdependent relationships in which each organism has its own valuable role to play. In a mixed ecology, success is about maintaining finely balanced equilibria that enable the whole ecosystem to flourish; but in a mixed economy success is about growth at any cost.  

Here lies the threat hidden underneath the promise, revealed once all the greenwashing façade has been stripped away. The threat is that parishes which do not grow will be seen as failures; that they will systematically lose physical resources as they under-perform compared to their neighbours; that they will lose psychological resources as they continue to compete and lose; that they will lose spiritual resources as people wonder why the Holy Spirit is not working to produce numerical growth in their context, despite their fervent prayers and best efforts. 

So is there an alternative to our current model of church growth? I think there are many possible alternatives, but I’d like to explore one which takes as its starting point the story at the beginning of the book of Exodus. Here’s how the story begins: the enslaved Israelites were pushed to work harder and harder by Pharoah, who refused to let them go into the wilderness to worship God. Instead, they had to keep making the same number of bricks with less and less straw. In fact, they were deliberately kept so busy that they could not conceive of an alternative to their situation. Eventually of course, Pharoah did let them go and they journeyed through the Red Sea into the wilderness. In the wilderness, they were finally free. And yet, the people frequently wished that they were back in slavery, where they had better food and more security and stability.

I think that in the church, we have been striving for so long to make the same number of bricks with less and less straw, that we have become our own Pharoah. We no longer need any external commands to work harder – it has become part of our own collective psyche. In fact, I think that the voice of Pharoah – the unrelenting shout of the mixed economy to grow, grow, grow – is drowning out the voice of God, calling us into the wilderness. Like in the book of Exodus, entering the wilderness is a radical abandonment of the structures and resources that we associate with safety and security, despite the anxiety and burnout that they also bring to our lives. Even though we can often feel the wilderness lapping at our ankles in this precarious age, we are desperate not to enter those chaotic waters. We would rather keep working harder and harder to try and produce the same number of bricks, becoming so busy that we have no time to think about what happens when we there is no longer any straw at all, when we are grasping in frenzied fashion at the empty air.

The great irony of course is that, while the Israelites grumbled about being in the wilderness, God provided for them. They received manna to eat, they were commanded not to work but to rest, they could see God’s presence physically leading them through the wilderness during those 40 long years. The wilderness was a time when the people deepened their relationship with God, when they received God’s commandments that would define them, when they had to trust God because they could no longer rely on their own resources. Entering the wilderness was a kind of death – but a very fertile death, out of which came transformation. Entering the wilderness was essential for the people of God then – and it is essential for us today.

'wilderness': the Negev desert

The wilderness was also very important in Jesus’s life and ministry – after his baptism the Spirit drove him into the wilderness for 40 days. When he emerged, he went to his home town of Nazareth and read from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah the words which were the manifesto for his public ministry. The Spirit, which drove him into the wilderness in the first place, appears again as the one who has anointed Jesus for the task that lies ahead of him, for his unique vocation as the Son of God. Perhaps his time in the wilderness was a time when the Spirit was forming him, a time of preparation for him to exercise his calling.

If we can find the courage to intentionally enter the wilderness as a church, I think we will be better able to hear our vocation, our collective calling as the people of God. This must be the starting point for our ministry and mission; if we don’t do what God is calling us to do, there is frankly no point in us existing as church in the first place! I think that we cannot hear the call of God while we are still enslaved to the idea that we must grow at any cost. We cannot hear God while we are dragged into the wilderness kicking and screaming. We can only hear God when we accept this time of trial and tribulation, this time of danger and instability, this time of radical loss of all the things that maintain institutional safety and security. 

Perhaps this radical approach isn’t for everyone! If we are still in the business of making bricks (as I am and as I suspect many of you also are), perhaps we might try defying Pharoah in smaller ways by making bricks at our own pace, resting when we need to, not desperately seeking more straw but accepting whatever is available to us. Perhaps we might try simplifying our production, quietly resisting the various psychological pressures to produce more, gathering instead of more straw the courage and faith that comes from God and that prepares us (someday, when we are ready) to walk that wild road, to leave behind all that we know as The Church, to die and to be born again by God’s call upon our lives together. 

I’d like to end by returning to where I started – by taking some unlikely inspiration from Liz Truss and her political opponents. I feel that those of us who are resisting Pharoah, however big or small our efforts might be, should recognize ourselves not as fragmented individuals but as a collective. Therefore, I’d like to mischievously suggest that we might emerge, out of these turbulent times in the church’s history, as the anti-growth coalition of the Church of England.

If this piece by Angela resonates for you, and you'd like to contribute your own reflections, experience, wonderings, invitations and more, then get in touch with me at hodgehillvicar@hotmail.co.uk. We want to nurture a conversation with depth, breadth and a real diversity of voices. We'd love to hear from you!

Simpler, Humbler, Bolder? Towards an anti-growth coalition in the Church of England

This article is reproduced from the July 2024 issue of Crucible: The Journal of Christian Social Ethics, which was titled 'Simpler, Humbler, Bolder? Smaller church theology', which also contained a number of other brilliant articles reflecting on smallness and church. I'm sharing it here in tandem with a brilliant new piece by Revd Angela Sheard, 'Why we need an anti-growth coalition in the Church of England'.

whale carcass, from wikipedia.com

When a whale dies in the ocean, the ‘mobile scavengers’ are soon on the scene, feeding on its flesh, as the carcass slowly falls to the sea bed. Next come the ‘enrichment opportunists’ who feed on the remaining blubber, and burrow into the bones. And then, in a process that can last a hundred years, bacteria break down what’s left of the whale’s skeleton to provide nourishment for mussels, clams, limpets and sea snails. Over time, these deep-sea ‘whale fall’ sites become hotspots for evolutionary diversity (‘adaptive radiation’), enabling the generation of a multitude of new species and ecological communities in and around the carcass of the dead whale. 

What if… the Church of England, as we know it, is in the process of decomposing? What if the institution we inhabit is akin to the carcass of a dead whale? Perhaps some of the biological terms in the description above might feel a little bit uncomfortably close to the bone (‘enrichment opportunists’, anyone?). Perhaps the starkness of the analogy is horrifyingly bleak for those who are committed to digging their heels in and ‘saving the parish’. But what might that starkness jar us into paying attention to, that we might otherwise be missing?

A ‘stunning of the imagination’

‘The Great Humbling’ is a podcast that began in April 2020, where ‘recovering sustainability consultant’ Ed Gillespie and author Dougald Hine reflected together on some of the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic might be experienced as an (unchosen) stripping of pride and self-importance, a ‘bringing down to earth’ (humus in Latin) in ways that are both a kind of defeat and the beginnings of re-connection. Series 3 of the podcast, in Spring 2021, proposed some ‘new moves’ that might be called for in these times: ‘keep it foolish!’, ‘move your ass!’, ‘be like water!’, ‘see double!’, ‘get on your knees!’. In the episode entitled ‘small yourself up!’, Gillespie and Hine move from the tendency of those of us with multiple structural privilege (through gender, ethnicity and class, for example) to disproportionately take up (physical) space and ‘air-time’ in conversations, to the inherent unsustainability of a global economy premised on endless growth. Via economist E.F. Schumacher’s book Small is Beautiful and the work of social philosopher Ivan Illich (both writing in the 1970s), Gillespie and Hine invite us to pay attention to the importance of ‘enoughness’, ‘proportionality’ and ‘a literacy of scales’. ‘What becomes possible and what ceases to be possible, as we move between different scales,’ they wonder. What are the ‘hidden costs … when we pass a certain threshold of speed, of scale, of intensity’? There are ‘qualitative side-effects’, they suggest, including a ‘stunning of the imagination: that we don’t even have words to describe what has been lost; or worse, that our attempts to do so may conjure up something poisonous, some travesty of the thing towards which we are trying to gesture.’ 

Jesus’ parables and actions, his life, death and resurrection, breathe life into the imagination of the significance of the small: the tiny seeds, the yeast hidden in the dough, the lost sheep, the little children, the five loaves and two fish, the widow’s coin, the small circle of disciple-friends, the near-deserted crucifixion, the nail-wound in a hand, a breath, a couple of strangers on the road, the breaking of bread… These are witnesses, to those of us who have received them as such, of divine smallness. As theologian Graham Adams develops brilliantly in his new book God the Child, in the midst of and beyond ‘the colonial matrix of adult power’ (including its racist, ableist and heteropatriarchal dimensions), the biblical witness, centred on Jesus, invites us to discover a God whose power and agency are characterised by smallness, weakness and curiosity, solidarity, playfulness and imagination.  So why does the Church seem obsessed with ‘big’?

Institutions and strategies

Ivan Illich, who we’ve encountered already in passing, had some ideas about this. A Roman Catholic priest and theologian as well as author of books like Deschooling Society (1971) and Medical Nemesis (1975), he repeatedly charted the way in which the institutions of Western modernity (including education, charity and medicine) have become, in their over-reaching ambitions and their technocratic quests for efficiency of scale, counterproductive to their own best intentions and stated values, colonizing, pathologizing and stoking dependence in the lives that they were created to support: corruptio optimi quae est pessima (the corruption of the best is the worst). In Illich’s analysis, the Church is utterly complicit in this corruption – since at least the late Roman Empire – in its attempts to ‘scale up’, institutionalise, and thus deform, Jesus’ radically egalitarian, liberating gospel of neighbour-love.

Illich would, I think, have taken a perverse delight in a Church of England strategy for institutional survival, development, and growth, that nevertheless held the words ‘simpler, humbler, bolder’ near its heart.  Of course, much depends on what those words mean in practice. ‘Simpler’ focuses in on centralising decision-making, and emphasising ‘efficiency’ and ‘effectiveness’ in how resources are distributed and used. ‘Humbler’ includes admitting safeguarding failures, and acknowledging the need to work in partnership with other denominations, to be ‘effective’ in mission. And ‘bolder’, it seems, is insistent in its aspirations for numerical growth: doubling the number of children in church, starting 10,000 ‘new Christian communities’, and showing the world that ‘what we have is what the world needs’ (I paraphrase, but only a little).  These kind of strategic commitments strongly suggest an undergirding assumption that the whale that is the Church of England is largely alive and splashing, if ageing a little, and not quite as lively and independent as it used to be. 

But what if we were to re-locate the attractive strapline ‘Simpler, Humbler, Bolder’ within a more radical story? What if the whale is already beginning to decompose?

‘When Church Stops Working’

As the story of the prophet Jonah testifies eloquently, finding oneself within the belly of a whale can be a reminder of our tendency to assume that we already know where that calling will take us, and have predetermined what its ‘outcomes’ will be, only to be interrupted and diverted, often in an all-encompassing way, by the relentless insistence of God’s calling and longings. The ‘sign of Jonah’, as Jesus adopts it, is a story, ultimately, of death and resurrection – and for those of us who follow Jesus, individually and collectively, that death and resurrection (of our sense of identity, purpose, worldview, security) seems to be not a one-off moment, but something that needs to happen again and again along the way of obedience and discipleship: the lifelong conversatio morum of the monastic vows.

This is one of the core arguments of Andrew Root and Blair Bertrand in their recent book When Church Stops Working: a future for your congregation beyond more money, programs, and innovation. As the title suggests, Root and Bertrand argue that the crisis of church decline tends to compel churches ‘to go faster, to do more and more’: ‘[o]ur attention, our deepest concern, must be directed toward a future that our bodies have not yet reached’. Their antidote, in a nutshell, is to be present and attentive to ‘the life we’re living right now’ and to those with whom we are sharing it. But to rediscover that attentive presence, they argue, there is only one route, and that is to find a humility that comes only through a kind of ‘death’: a surrender not to ‘despair, frustration, or resignation’, but to a form of ‘letting go, stopping, admitting, and waiting’, ‘moving from having to being, to dying, humbling ourselves, and confessing’ in which, in gratitude, we ‘dwell deeply’ with each other and with God. 

When Archbishop Stephen Cottrell’s June 2021 update to General Synod suggests that ‘whatever strategies we develop need to begin with and flow from a profound spiritual renewal and a greater waiting upon God’,  he is surely ‘leaning in’ to exactly what Root and Bertrand are suggesting here. And yet. When the ‘strategic work’ of the Church of England seems to be pressing on apace, is the working assumption that the ‘waiting upon God’ and the ‘profound spiritual renewal’ have been ‘done’ – or at least done enough, for the time being?

Root and Bertrand draw a distinction between the ‘mission statement’, which drives activity and initiatives, and the ‘watchword’, which helps direct and shape our attention. The latter, they suggest, might be ‘a story or slogan of how this church, this community, has encountered the living God’. It is discovered in the waiting, and then it profoundly shapes the waiting that is still to come.  My sense is that ‘Simpler, Humbler, Bolder’ functions much more as ‘mission statement’ than ‘watchword’. It can offer itself as a lens through which we can more clearly see some of the reality of the Church of England today, but it seems mostly to be about shaping strategy, activity and initiatives from here.

While Root and Bertrand might want to deepen the waiting involved in the Church of England’s ‘vision and strategy’ work, then, I am not convinced that their prescription for the Western Church is still anywhere near humbling enough. The kind of ‘death’ they describe feels nowhere near catastrophic enough, the ‘confession’ too superficial and transitory. Even the story on which they hook their argument, of the ‘cancelling’ of the comedian Aziz Ansari, refers to a period in Ansari’s life of less than four months in 2018, and barely touches on whatever his internal struggles might have been during even that brief time. Surely the ‘great humbling’ of a sojourn in the belly of the whale must take us far deeper, and for much longer, into the reality of things falling apart, both around us and within us. 

Humbler

For the Church of England specifically, this must surely involve facing much more than numerical decline. It must begin to plumb the depths of the multiple catastrophes of its safeguarding failures, of its institutional racism, as well as institutional misogyny, homophobia, ableism and classism, and its entanglement in the machinations of state power and corporate, ecocidal greed. With all of these, the call is quite rightly to move ‘from lament to action’ (as the deep wounds and tragic casualties of decades of inaction on institutional racism bear witness), but surely the danger is that the energy for action remains constrained by too much of the framework of the status quo, assumes that the whale is, on some level, still swimming.

The Carmelite scholar Constance FitzGerald, and some of those recently reading her work, have extended St John of the Cross’s reflections on ‘the dark night of the soul’ from the intrapersonal to ‘societal impasse’: experiences of human limitation, and the persistence of toxic social structures, that leave us ‘helpless, confused, and guilty before the insurmountable problems of our world’.  ‘Every normal manner of acting is brought to a standstill,’ FitzGerald observes, ‘and ironically, impasse is experienced not only in the problem itself but also in any solution rationally attempted.’  FitzGerald and colleagues invite us to ‘turn toward’ those feelings of bewilderment, ‘rather than trying to ignore them, overcome them, fix them, deny them, or justify ourselves’. Dwelling in the ‘dark night’, with a ‘constant questioning’ and a ‘restless waiting’, slowly enables – by the uncontrollable grace of God – a new ‘self-knowledge’, a ‘transfiguration of affectivity’, a ‘purification of our desire’ and further, the death of our idolatrous images of God. There is hope in this darkness which ‘speaks of life buried in its opposite: life concealed, life invisible, life unseen in death’.  The ‘way out’ of personal and societal impasse ‘requires the abandonment of one’s former consciousness with its dependence on rational analysis, oppressive institutions, and false identities. The way forward lies in the cultivation of “intuitive, symbolic, unconventional” responses that facilitate new ways of being – “new minds, new intuitions, new wills, and passionate new desires” – that lead beyond impasse.’ 

Is such extended ‘dwelling in the dark night’ even possible at an institutional level? Chelmsford diocese’s ‘Holy Sabbatical’ in 2022, instigated by its bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani, perhaps gestures towards that possibility. But the profound descent of genuine humility suggests it can only really happen much closer to the ‘grassroots’, distanced from the forces of institutionalization, in the earthed smallness of interpersonal encounter, in spaces where frailty, risk and sadness are the everyday stuff of life.

Simpler

Radicalising the meaning of ‘humbler’ enables us to begin to reframe ‘simpler’ and ‘bolder’ too. ‘Simplicity’ has ancient roots within the Christian tradition, and among Franciscans in particular. It seeks to ground and embody the dependence on God expressed in humility, in the material realities of daily life. Sometimes named as ‘(voluntary) poverty’, it is lived out in solidarity with, and receptive openness to, those for whom poverty is an inescapably oppressive reality. As the Australian Community of Francis and Clare puts it:

For any person, be they a medieval friar or a modern day worker, poverty is an evil. It is obscene. Anyone who experiences poverty knows that it is harmful to our bodies, our minds and our soul. You cannot commit your life to a negative value.

For we Franciscans, our evangelical witness is about living a life of simplicity, where we do not grasp at things. We do not obsess over ownership of the goods at our disposal. We give up ownership in order the profess to the world that not sharing the goods of the earth—and not grasping—is the essence of the Gospel life we live and witness.

So, we hold on to what we have very lightly. We learn over our lifetime as friars to let go of things, whether that be material goods, aspirations centred on individualism, or values and ideas that run counter to the Gospel and the life of the fraternity. We live without anything of our own so that we are free to find God in the world around us, in all of creation, and in the men and women we encounter everyday. 

With honourable exceptions, the Christian church historically has largely avoided taking seriously Jesus’ clear command to the rich young man to ‘go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor… then come, follow me’ (Matthew 19:16-30). Jesus is not talking about charity here. The selling and giving away are inseparable from the following, the call to discipleship. If the rich young man were to have nothing left to call his own, then he is being invited into a new community which renounces the very ideas of ‘ownership’ and ‘private property’, for a way of intra-communal and external interdependence: disciples who are utterly dependent on what they share between them (see also Acts 2:44-45), and what they receive from others beyond the community.

What might such a call to a much more radical, humbler, gospel simplicity look like for the Church of England today? Intra-ecclesially, it surely calls out the obscene wealth and resource-hoarding of some churches, para-church networks and dioceses, while others teeter on the verge of bankruptcy. Collectively, it calls into question the retention of land, buildings and millions of pounds of assets across the country by dioceses and the Church Commissioners. And beyond primarily financial wealth, what might we hear in Thomas Merton’s warning that a ‘spirit of simplicity’ means resisting the dangers of the ‘five Ps’ of publicity, prestige, property, power and perfectibility? 

Bolder

Finally, how might we reframe ‘boldness’ within a humility that goes not just deeper and longer, but also wider, than that which the CofE’s ‘vision and strategy’ offers us? There, ‘boldness’ remains insistently about ambitious numerical growth targets, ‘growing younger’ and, most crucially, forms of action where the Church is the initiative-taker, the preacher, the agent of transformation. But what if the church’s bold humility were discovered in a patient waiting on God to speak and act beyond the church’s walls? What if boldness were embodied in a profoundly radical receptivity to the agency, wisdom and resourcefulness of those in our neighbourhoods, and in our risky adventures, as Christians, into those spaces as strangers and guests, coming with empty hands, curious hearts, and a vulnerable entrust-ment of those ‘others’ whom we cannot direct, manage or control?

Christians have, of course, been humbly, vulnerably relating to our neighbours for two millennia (see e.g. Luke 10:1-9). But our current, modernity-shaped obsessions with ‘bigness’, ‘growth’ and ‘impact’, and anxieties about institutional survival, work directly against such a bold humility. The kind of boldness I am describing here actually needs to be small – a divine ‘tenderness’, as Franciscan scholar Gillian Ahlgren puts it, in our ‘dedication to the way of encounter’, ‘[e]ngaging the other with the intention to listen, to learn, and to connect’,  honouring ‘the fragility and sacredness of our own humanity’, in ‘a mutually transformative practice that slowly changes everything.’ 

The Church of England already has tried and tested resources for such an approach.  But this is not about another ‘strategy’, ‘model’, or ‘blueprint’. It is, rather, a call to conversion – as Michael Mather puts it in his book Having Nothing, Possessing Everything: finding abundant communities in unexpected places.  Mather, a Methodist minister in Indianapolis, took the risky, vulnerable – bold! – decision to stop delivering the well-funded, church-run programme of summer provision for local young people. It was, he acknowledges, a kind of death for the church. But it was also a liberation, an opening of eyes and hearts to see all around them what they had not seen before – the abundant, God-given gifts within the neighbourhood. 

‘The issues our organizations and people face cannot be cured by technique… But we do have the tools we need in our own hands. … Our primary tool is trusting in the present abundance, the tool that so many of us have abandoned as we have grown afraid to die – and afraid to live’. 

‘Small circles of radical presence’

In the face of what might reasonably called the collapsing of our global ecosystem and socio-political structures, and building on the work of MIT academic Otto Scharmer, I suggest we might notice (both within us and around us) a number of common responses (individual and collective) to collapse that are shaped by anxiety:

1. Denial (“it’s not happening”)

2. Distancing (“it’s their problem” and/or “it’s their fault”)

3. Depression (“it’s too late”)

4. Debating (“we need to talk about this”)

5. Desperate doing (“we need to do something!”)

Beyond these anxious responses, Scharmer points us towards the possibility of:

6. ‘Deep sensing and co-creativity: managing to stay in the moment, holding your gaze steady, and then letting go (of the old) to allow new possibilities to emerge’.

‘We know that the solution to our problems,’ he argues, ‘is not Big Government. It’s not Big Money. And it’s not Big Tech either. … [W]hat we need most of all is a profound shift in our qualities of relationship.’ ‘Small circles of radical presence,’ are Scharmer’s proposal for an ‘enabling infrastructure for sensing and actualizing the emerging future’.  They sound more than a little like local churches to me – or at least what local churches could be, and sometimes have been. The whale is dead, and falling to the ocean floor. But there might still be ‘a multitude of new species and ecological communities’ emerging amid the decomposing carcass. You might even be part of one.

If this piece resonates for you, and you'd like to contribute your own reflections, experience, wonderings, invitations and more, then get in touch with me at hodgehillvicar@hotmail.co.uk. We want to nurture a conversation with depth, breadth and a real diversity of voices. We'd love to hear from you!

Notes:

i For more detail, see e.g. https://amazingzoology.com/whale-falls-whale-fall-communities/. I am grateful to Revd Simon Sutcliffe for the conversations we have had around the biology and metaphorical potential of this process.

ii  Ed Gillespie & Dougald Hine, The Great Humbling S3E6: ‘Small yourself up!’

iii  Graham Adams, God the Child: small, weak and curious subversions (London: SCM Press, 2024).

iv  https://www.churchofengland.org/about/vision-strategy/jesus-christ-centred-and-shaped 

v  https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2021-06/a-vision-for-the-church-of-england-in-the-2020s-commentary-by-stephen_cottrell.pdf; https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2021-06/gs-2223-vision-and-strategy.pdf 

vi  When Church Stops Working, 40-1, 45-6, 49-50

vii  GS 2223, p.11

viii  101-6

ix  Laurie Cassidy, ‘Contemplative Prayer and the Impasse of White Supremacy’, in Laurie Cassidy & M. Shawn Copeland, Desire, Darkness, and Hope: Theology in a Time of Impasse (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2021), p.113.

x  Susie Paulik Babka, ‘Impasse and Catastrophe: What the Virus Teaches’, in Cassidy & Copeland, Desire, Darkness, and Hope, p.178.

xi  Cassidy, ‘Contemplative Prayer’, p.113-5, 123, 126-7.

xii  Bryan Massingale, ‘Toward a Spirituality for Racial Justice’, in Cassidy & Copeland, Desire, Darkness, and Hope, p.339. Womanist theologian Selina Stone points to something similar, in her description of the practice of ‘tarrying’ in many Black-majority churches: Selina Stone, Tarry Awhile: Wisdom from Black Spirituality for People of Faith (London: SPCK, 2023).

xiii  https://www.franciscans.org.au/becoming-a-franciscan/the-vows-we-profess/ 

xiv  Paul R. Dekar, ‘The Spirit of Simplicity: Thomas Merton on Simplification of Life’, The Merton Annual 19 (2006), 267-282, https://merton.org/ITMS/Annual/19/Dekar267-282.pdf [accessed 1/2/24]

xv  Gillian Ahlgren, The Tenderness of God: Reclaiming our Humanity

xvi  e.g. https://togethernetwork.org.uk/know-your-church-know-your-neighbourhood, https://churchmissionsociety.org/churches/partnership-missional-church/

xvii  (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018). Reviewed by me in The Politics and Theology of Place (Crucible October 2019), pp.61-63.

xviii  Mather, p.133

xix  https://medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/protect-the-flame-49f1ac2480ac. Responses 4 & 5 are my additions to Scharmer’s observations.