Let's talk about 'growth' - seriously

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

Newly potted seeds in the church garden greenhouse.

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

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

·      What does ‘growth’ mean?

·      The desire for control

·      Church-related binaries

·      Doing, death, and the ‘dark night’

What does ‘growth’ mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The desire for control

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

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

Church-related binaries

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

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

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

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

An ecological perspective

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

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

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

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

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

Doing, death, and the ‘dark night’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

In the ruins: the beginnings of a conversation

 

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

Where do we start? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'The fix'

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

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

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

'Burn it down' - and other responses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Starting local: 'small circles of radical presence'

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

Resistance is often not a movement

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

'Exit' doesn't necessarily mean leaving

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

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

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

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

What if the whale is already dead?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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