"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.

When 'being interrupted' is not enough

The trigger for this piece was an article by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Or, to be more accurate, a letter in the Independent by a new friend of mine, in response to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The new friend is Liz Slade, who is (among other good and interesting things) Chief Officer of the Unitarians in the UK, a denomination rooted in Christians who dissented (politically and theologically) from the Church of England in the 17th and 18th centuries. Liz and I first connected as we in Hodge Hill were getting ready for our Lent series this year, 'God in the Ruins'.

Liz's letter was responding to Justin Welby's article in the Independent on 22nd September: 'God is green, and denying climate change is anti-Christian'. In it, he quotes the American lawyer and environmentalist Guy Speth:

"The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don't know how to to do that."

Welby then goes on to give examples of Christians rising to the 'moral as well as ... practical challenge': from reforestation in El Salvador, the Solomon Islands and Kenya, to the Church of England's commitment to reducing carbon emissions to net zero by 2030. 'We must seek to persuade the powerful that it is in their interest to do good and be green,' he concludes.

In her response, Liz affirms Justin that these 'are good things to do,' but goes on to point out that 'any secular leader could encourage them. It feels like the Archbishop of Canterbury pulled his punch':

"Planting trees or insulating buildings will not address the underlying causes of the climate crisis. Our economy is rooted in a love of money, and is causing unprecedented suffering as a result. But perhaps Welby knows that his flock is not ready to hear a different message..."

In a post on social media a few days later, Liz went a bit further: 'He was doing great but somehow ended up asking his flock to get solar panels instead of rebuilding a society that is based on loving one's neighbour and the vast interconnectedness of all life. I can't work out - does he not know, can he not comprehend it, does he feel the reality cannot be heard, is he too ensconced in the power structures that have most to lose, or does he have a cunning plan that we just have to be patient for...?'

And this got me thinking.

The problem here isn't just about Christian responses to climate change (although that, in itself, is enough to bring 'the end of the world as we know it'). It's related, too, to the CofE's current resistance (in some senior quarters, at least) to the language of 'deconstructing whiteness' in our work to tackle our deeply-ingrained institutional racism (more of that another time, but soon). It's entangled too in the bankrupt and utterly disingenuous concept of 'mutual flourishing' (designed almost solely to 'protect' those who cannot accept the ordained ministry of women) and talk of a 'radical new inclusion' in relation to same-sex relationships (which so far stops well short of embracing same-sex marriage, let alone reappraising the so-called 'doctrine of marriage' itself, while allowing the loud voices of powerful, wealthy conservative evangelicals to claim they are the real victims of exclusion). And it's there, with deep and tragic irony, in the refusal of many senior people in the CofE (and the wider Church) to acknowledge that our horrific history of abuses of power is not just about the occasional 'bad apple', or even in failures of structure and process (although of course there have been), but in our dominant theologies of (and our avoidance of asking critical questions about) power and domination themselves (and yes, this is a point about the importance of examining particular theological traditions in our safeguarding conversations; theology matters; bad theology is a thing).

The central question, I think, is: how radical are we prepared to get? How deep are we prepared to dig in pursuing 'deep culture change' within the Church (and here, because it's my denomination, I'm thinking particularly about the Church of England)?

And, as it's very easy to externalise this and make it all about 'them' (those in 'central' positions of authority and decision-making power), I want to engage instead in a moment of self-critique. It's four years, almost to the day, since Ruth Harley and I published Being Interrupted: Reimagining the Church's Mission from the Outside, In (SCM Press, 2020).

It's a book I'm hugely proud of. But it would be an understatement to say that a lot has happened since then (in the world, in the Church, in our own lives and ministries), and it feels timely to begin to explore some of the 'edges' of Being Interrupted: some of the places where we might notice its limitations, some of the opportunities to critique and develop its lines (more spirals and wandering wiggles, in reality) of thinking and practice in new directions. That's definitely going to take more than one blog post (and possibly even the beginnings of a new, collaborative writing project). But here and now, I want to offer just one wondering:

I wonder if we, like Archbishop Justin, have not yet got nearly radical enough, in naming and pointing towards the 'deep culture change' that we, the Church, need to engage in.

One of the 'lines' (of critique, of argument) we took in Being Interrupted had something like these three steps:

1. In the face of the crises around us, many Christians believe that Christianity already has everything it needs to address these crises - and indeed has the moral and evangelical responsibility to offer those resources to others (we might call this a 'Provision' mindset).

2. Some Christians are conscious that the Church as we know it claims to be for everyone, but in practice it isn't. And so, in the face of some of the crises around us, they call the Church to be more welcoming, to embrace more diversity within its makeup and structures (we might call this an 'Inclusion' mindset).

3. But who thinks they are doing the 'including', and on what terms? Who is the 'we' that imagines it exercises the agency of 'being the Church'? In Being Interrupted, we sought to shine the spotlight on that imagined 'we' - particularly where that 'we' is predominantly white, middle-class and male, in makeup or in culture. We examined the 'privilege' that comes with inhabiting that 'we' - including the privilege to be oblivious of the experience of people located differently to 'us'. And we called on a white-, middle-class- and male-dominated Church to open itself up to be interrupted, challenged and changed by the gifts and challenges of its 'others' (what at times we've called 'Radical Receptivity').

And this is where I find myself being stretched beyond the (hopefully reasonably expansive) horizons that Being Interrupted sought to point to.

I find myself needing to name, more clearly and more boldly, that the structures within which we are all caught up, do more than 'privilege' some and 'marginalise' others. They are more than just an unequal distribution of power. They are structures of domination and, ultimately, of death. And they are (as we acknowledged in BI) structures that are more complex than the trio of race, class and gender. We might name them, to expand the term offered by the great (African-American feminist theorist-activist) bell hooks:

[ecocidal] imperialist white supremacist capitalist [ableist hetero-]patriarchy

Or, if that is a bit of a mouthful (and it surely is, and that is intentional to make a point about complexity, and not about academic prententiousness), we might draw on the work of poet Audre Lorde and ecofeminist Val Plumwood, and call it, simply, boldly:

mastery

(As in Lorde's famous maxim: 'The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house'.)

The thing is, mindsets 1 (Provision) and 2 (Inclusion) above are still utterly captive to mastery: being in charge, in control, centre stage. And I'm beginning to realise that our proposal 3 (Radical Receptivity) hasn't always named the power of mastery strongly enough, because in some ways it was still hanging on to it. In our chapter on the cross, for example, 'being interrupted' was worked out (through the figure of the Roman Centurion who witnessed Jesus' death) in terms of 'relocation', 'repentance', 'relinquishing' and 'receptivity': a spiral journey of a kind of 'schooling'. It was only in our final chapter - on the kind of resurrection that is located in the 'compost heap' - that we began to explore the direction that I find myself going in here...

4. Sometimes, what needs to happen, is not for us to 'provide' all the answers, or 'include' more diversity, or even 'receive' in ways that challenge and change us. Sometimes, what is needed is for us - and the structures in which we are entangled - to fall apart. To die, decay, decompose. And sometimes that Decomposition is, in fact, the only appropriate response to the crises that we face.

On the one hand, it's little wonder that the Archbishop of Canterbury is unable to articulate - or perhaps even contemplate - anything more radical than preaching an inoffensive message that 'God is green', and advocate for more tree planting and solar panels. He is profoundly invested in the ongoing survival of the institution of the established Church in (and 'of') England, with all its structures and hierarchies, Canons, patronage, liturgy, theology and so on that are profoundly entangled in a historic and ongoing culture of ecocidal imperialist white supremacist capitalist ableist hetero-patriarchy - aka mastery.

On the other hand, as a prominent public disciple of the incarnate, ensoiled Jesus of Nazareth, who so profoundly challenged the cultures and structures of mastery of his day that they inflicted on him a humiliating death, we might be justified in hoping to hear something more radical from Justin.

But, to finish with a little bit more self-critique, reflecting on Being Interrupted reminds me that each of us is inescapably a 'work in progress'. When Ruth and I were finishing off writing that book in early 2020, as the first wave of the COVID pandemic was still new and strange and unsettling around us, I didn't yet imagine the ways in which I would experience - personally, professionally and more widely in my relationships, places and entanglements both local and global - the painful, messy realities of falling apart, death and decomposition (and yes, the personal and the structural are entangled, inextricable). It's fair to say I know now (in fragments of raw, embodied wisdom) things that I didn't know then. And I also know that there's no going back. 

'Being decomposed' is, sometimes, what we need. Or at least, the unavoidable reality we need to embrace.

[(2 days later) This blog post has already sparked some fascinating conversations, including questions and pushback. One of the things that I wanted to say, but couldn't quite work out how to do, is that each of the four mindsets/approaches have their time and place. Decomposition is not the only way. We need contextual wisdom, conscious of our own positionality and the relationships that are most immediately present to us in each moment, to discern which is to be embraced here and now. But I'm suspicious of those (especially those in positions of power and authority, and including myself) who seem to be stuck in 1 and/or 2, and to resist and avoid embracing 3 and 4. And to return to where we started, ++Justin's response to climate breakdown presents as clear example of that resistance/avoidance.]

coming out from patriarchy: beyond 'the line' and 'the box'

I was invited by a neighbouring parish to kick off their service series exploring their commitment to being an Inclusive Church, with a sermon on gender & sexuality. Here's the text and images that I used this morning.

Readings: Genesis 16; Mark 14:1-9

I vividly remember the birth of my first child. The overwhelming joy, of course, of seeing for the first time a living, breathing, new-born baby. A love deeper than anything I’d ever felt, for the tiny, fragile human being I got to hold in my arms. But also something of those hours before the birth. Of a long, at times stressful labour, where our baby’s heart-rate kept on dropping every time my wife pushed. And, among many, many things about that 24 hours or so, I remember being on the edges of the action: a ‘bit-part’ at best, irrelevant to the outcome, other than in a minor supporting role, offering encouragement from the sidelines.

And my first observation, in this sermon about gender, sexuality and inclusive church, is that for some of us, that experience of ‘being on the edges’ is not an everyday experience.

Let me identify myself. I am white, English, middle-class, (relatively) affluent, non-disabled (mostly), straight (mostly), male, and – this last one might be an unfamiliar word to some of you – cis-gendered. That means that the gender I identify with now is what I was assigned at birth. So look: I tick all the boxes.

So what I can’t do, in this sermon, is share first-hand experience of being a woman, or LGBTQI+ (because I’m not). And I’m not going to give you a detailed, biblically-rooted defence of blessing same-sex marriages, for example; nor am I here to facilitate a conversation that gives space to carefully and safely listen to each other, ensuring all voices are heard. Both of those are very possible, and worthwhile, but that’s not what this space is for right now.

What I can do, here and now, is turn the spotlight around, and shine it on some of the structures and assumptions, in the world and in the church, that do so much harm not just to those who are marginalised and excluded, but to all of us. And I can try to help us listen for God’s call to conversion, for God’s invitation – to each and every one of us – to break down the barriers which divide and exclude, and to enter more deeply into fullness of life for all.

But why me? Why is someone who ticks all these boxes kicking off this series on inclusive church for you? Well, do you know what? I did an internet search for images of a ‘shrug’, and guess what I found?

These are the first four images that came up… and what do they all have in common?! Yes…!

The world is set up to be as easy as possible for people like me. For people like me to see people like me everywhere we look. That’s my second observation. And there’s more.

We’ve all been trained to pretend that it isn’t really like that. That it’s just normal.

This is by a brilliant internet site called ‘man who has it all’. It’s brilliant because it flips our normal gender rules on their head and it says out loud the bits that normally go unsaid. And it helps us begin to see how ridiculous some of the unspoken assumptions are.

And there’s more…

What do the last four Archbishops of Canterbury have in common (and indeed all of their predecessors)…?! 

The church – our Church of England – is just as bad on this stuff, and often quite a lot worse.

So when we think about being an ‘Inclusive Church’, it’s natural to start by thinking about who we think needs ‘including’. But I want to invite you to think about some subtly different questions: where do we think God is? And who do we think God is with? And who, and where, are we?

Ben Wildflower, 'Magnificat'

Let’s let Mary’s Magnificat be our guide: ‘he has put down the mighty from their seat, and exalted the humble and meek; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty’. This is where God is: with those who are hungry for justice, with the ground-down who are longing to be lifted up. Which means we have different callings, depending on who and where we are:

“Where we are born into privilege, we are charged with dismantling any myth of supremacy. Where we were born into struggle, we are charged with claiming our dignity, joy, and liberation.” (adrienne maree brown)

So when we’re thinking about being an ‘Inclusive Church’, this isn’t about us here deciding whether we want to be lovely and kind to those poor, excluded people.

It means believing that God is there: with the oppressed, the excluded and those who have been rejected by society, and, often, by the church ourselves. Because as Jesus himself told us, the stone that the builders rejected, becomes the cornerstone of God’s kin-dom.

Which brings us, by a roundabout route, back to gender and sexuality. Because underneath the church’s rejections, of women and LGBTQI+ folks, is a way of seeing the world, a way of structuring the world. I want us to think today about two kinds of structure: one is a line, the other is a box.

The line is a way of seeing the world that’s powerful, and has deep roots. It splits the world in two, separating it into binaries: body/mind, earth/spirit, chaos/order, dark/light, soft/hard, weak/strong, passive/active, silence/word… female/male…

And the line hasn’t just divided the world into two equal halves. It’s told us that the things on the right are more important, more powerful, more God-like… than the things on the left. The line has made a world of hierarchies, domination, control: a world of property and owners.

And that has, ultimately, been very bad news for all of us.

So how might we see the world differently?

Charlotte Gibson, 'Hagar'

The story of Hagar, that we’ve heard this morning, isn’t a simple answer to that question. For those who imagine there’s such a thing as ‘biblical marriage’, here we have Abraham the patriarch, and in the ‘big story’, the main purpose of Abraham’s women (yes, women plural) is to produce him a son. That sets up competition and conflict between the women – Sarah and Hagar – because Hagar (the enslaved foreigner) is fertile, and Sarah (the wife) apparently isn’t. Sarah has a choice here: use the little privilege she has as power over Hagar, or opt for a radical, rebellious solidarity in sisterhood. Tragically, she chooses power and abuse – and Hagar runs away. Even more tragically, God in this story tells Hagar to go back to the place of enslavement and abuse – a distant echo of a tragic story repeated in many Christian communities even today. We should be profoundly troubled by this story, and the violence and harm it has wreaked over the centuries.

We’ve seen ‘the line’ in action, in this story: centering the man’s needs, treating women as property, stoking competition, legitimising abuse. But it’s not the only story that this passage tells. There’s another story, where Hagar is centre-stage, and Abraham is nowhere to be seen…

While Hagar is on the run, God meets her. God sees her. God speaks to her. And Hagar becomes the only person in the whole of the bible to give God a name: ‘the God who sees’. ‘Have I seen the One who sees me and lived to tell of it?’ she says. And this is not the end of the story. Some time later, Hagar will be truly free from her slave-holders and abusers, and God will meet her again, and journey with her into her freedom.

I wonder what it feels like to be seen – truly seen, by the God who sees. And to be seen in a way that leads towards liberation… Here’s a God who crosses the line, who breaks down the dividing-walls, who journeys with the rejected and makes her home with them…

Ally Barrett, 'The anointing woman'

And here’s that line-crossing God at work again in our gospel story. Jesus in Mark’s gospel is always on the move, always active: preaching, teaching, healing, casting out demons, and so on. That’s the ‘big story’. But there’s another story in the gospel too. Of a Jesus who, at least occasionally, is interrupted, stopped in his tracks, challenged and changed – and interestingly, usually by a woman.

And one of them is in today’s gospel reading. She’s not named. She doesn’t speak. (So far, so typical, patriarchal world.) But what she does is profoundly subversive. She breaks open a container of expensive perfume, and pours it over Jesus’ head. And the men in the room are outraged: ‘why this waste?!’ they exclaim. In Luke’s version, they label her a ‘sinner’ – an easy, powerful way of excluding someone, rejecting their contribution. But Jesus receives her costly gift. He defends her: ‘leave her alone!’ In Luke’s version, he asks the men, ‘do you see this woman?’ – Do you see her? Is this Hagar’s God speaking here?! – And then, in Mark, this remarkable statement: ‘wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her’! Named or not, she is to be remembered, for her prophetic, priestly action: she has literally made Jesus the anointed one, the Christ. Like Hagar, in fact, she has named God! And her anointing here will be ‘sticky’ – it will stick with Jesus all the way to the cross… and beyond…

Ally Barrett, 'At the cross'

The Bible isn’t just black and white. It doesn’t draw one clear line. It isn’t just one big story. There are multiple, interwoven, entangled stories, some of which are in tension with each other, even contradictory. And in the body of Jesus, and at the cross, those contradictions are laid bare: for faithful women followers, and puzzled male officers of the Roman Empire, alike.

At the cross, we see the patriarchal binaries exposed for the lie they are: here is God in earthed body, in the chaos and darkness, soft and weak, passive and silent. Here is a God who empties himself of any of the dominance and control of patriarchy. Here is a God in whom, as the apostle Paul would later realise, there is no longer male or female.

Michael Cook, 'An Idle Tale'

Here is a God whose resurrection is first witnessed by women, who the male disciples then disbelieve. Who’s in the centre now, and who on the edges? Who is including whom, into the resurrection community?!

John Augustus Swanson, 'The Raising of Lazarus'

And here is a God who calls in a loud voice to those who are bound up, entombed in the prisons of death: ‘come out! Be free…’

I was given the task of talking about gender and sexuality today, I’ve talked a lot about men and women, and I don’t have much time left. I said earlier that we’d think about two kinds of structure that exclude and marginalise: one was the line, the other is a box.

The box is my shorthand for heterosexual marriage. It’s not a bad box. It’s a box that lots of good things can happen in. But we Christians have got a little bit lazy in using the box as the answer to all kinds of questions. Particularly the question ‘what is sex?’. Sex, the lazy answer goes, is what happens inside the box. It’s good if it’s in the box, it’s bad if it’s outside the box.

Except we know that’s not true. From Hagar to today, we know that heterosexual marriages can be places of resentment, lovelessness, manipulation and abuse, as well as places of love, joy, kindness and faithfulness. And that goes for the sex as much as any other aspect of the relationship. Talking about the box focuses on the container, and takes the focus of the contents.

And looking outside the box, I can witness to faithful, mutual, sacrificial, joyful, holy, love-filled relationships between two people of the same sex, through which I have seen clearly the grace of Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. And when I have seen LGBTQI+ friends respond to God’s call to ‘come out’ of the box, come out of the closet, come out of hiding, come out to be seen in the warm light of day and openness, honesty and integrity about who they are and who they love, I have seen liberation, and flourishing, and the fullness of life that Jesus said he came to bring.

For the last few years, my daughter and I have gone, with other members of our church community, to be part of Birmingham’s Pride celebrations. As an introvert, middle-aged, white, English, straight(ish) man, I have to confess it’s way out of my comfort zone. It’s a place where people like me are definitely not centre stage. But I have always felt utterly welcome, just as I am. I love dancing, but I’m physically and socially a bit awkward, and Pride has been a place where I’ve felt a warm invitation to dance my heart out, without judgment or competition, in a rainbow crowd of dancing people being joyfully, fully themselves, without hiding, fear or apology.

What if church were a bit more like that?!

What if God is inviting all of us to break down the dividing lines, to ‘come out’ of the boxes, to discover love, and joy, and life in the glorious, complex, embodied, interdependent, messily real world beyond the lines and boxes?

It is time, well and truly time, for some of us to stop talking, and do more listening. Sermons like today’s, from people like me, need to be at best a passing moment, before people like me step out of the way so that a multitude of less-heard voices can be more fully heard. I long for that day. When my female and LGBTQI+ siblings can shout and sing of God’s goodness within a church that has left the lines and boxes behind. I long for a church where I can, without condition, speak words of blessing over their lives and loves, and alongside them as fellow ministers of Christ.

And that’s where I’ll end: for those of you who have experienced rejection by the church, and need to hear God’s blessing spoken to you…

Trust your belovedness.

Let it be a protest, an act of resistance, a song of celebration.

Trust your belovedness in a world that is rarely satisfied.

Wear it like a badge of honor.

Speak it as confidently as your last name. Tattoo it to your heart.

When outside forces chip away at your sense of self,

when life asks you to hand over the keys,

remember the water.
Remember creation. Remember how it was good, so very good.

Let that truth hum through your veins.

Sing it so loud that it drowns out the weariness of the world,

for the bravest thing we can ever do

is trust that we belong here.

Rev. Sarah A. Speed