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 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]
[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.
