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'.
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!
Such a good article. Thanks Al
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