By John Cole

Few churches will be completely one-eyed.

Life is not that simple!

Many more churches will be active in just two of the areas of relationship, in two of the circles instead of three. In this there is a curious tendency for churches to follow the fashion of the age. The story of what has happened in many parishes in the Church of England over the last fifty years seems to bear this out.

In the 1940s and 50s. just at the time when domestic servants were passing into history, the Church of England got hooked on the idea of being ‘the Servant Church’. it was an important vision for the church to recapture, a vision summed up in Archbishop William Temple’s famous dictum: "The Church is the only organisation which exists for the benefit of those who are not its members".

Two priorities were uppermost, therefore, at this time:

1. Learning how the Church of England, still a powerful and influential institution in the land, could develop a new serving relationship with the people of this country.

2. Developing new ways this powerful institution could share its government and decision-making more broadly among its members. This was the time when synodical government was being conceived and planned.

Priorities were therefore in the two bottom circles in the diagram, although the concern about internal relationships was at an institutional rather than a personal level.

Church services remained formal and traditional except in a few places where a re-awakening was taking place.

This re-awakening burgeoned in the 1960s into the Parish Communion movement. As this movement gained strength and the Parish Eucharist replaced Mattins as the main Sunday morning service, congregations rediscovered the meaning of corporate worship as well as gaining a new sense of being to ‘the Family of God’.

Priorities had shifted into the two left-hand circles on the diagram and, as years went by, the relationship with the wider community became less important.

The notion of ‘the family’ is at least partly responsible for this - alongside the widespread rejection by non-churchgoers of the conventional role and importance of the church during the ‘swinging sixties’.

‘The family’ is a limited concept because it carries with it no sense of a corporate task, no sense of being a part of God’s missionary purpose. (Its other danger is that it tends to un-church single people and couples without children.)

For many parish clergy the ‘family’ model of church life gave them a substitute ‘father-figure’ role to replace the increasingly obsolete function of being the ‘parson’ for the wider community. But the almost inevitable consequence is a parish life which just drifts.

And the drift in many of the parishes which were re-invigorated by the parish communion movement in the 1960s is liable to be in one of two directions:

EITHER towards being the one-eyed ‘catholic’ church, as the parish communion becomes more and more an exclusive occasion for the churchgoing elite (an ‘early service’ staged rather later on a Sunday morning);

OR towards being the one-eyed ‘suburban’ church, as the informal ‘Family Service’ takes over to provide entertainment for those who like that sort of thing.

A church majoring in the two right-hand circles in the diagram seems to be almost an impossibility, but there are many people whose priorities are their relationships with God and the wider community. They are those many individuals who take God seriously and are often very caring members of society, but who have little or no time for the corporate life of the church.

Church members tend to brand all these folk as ‘nominal Christians’ - but who is to say that, at least in some cases, the admittedly partial vision of these non-churchgoers is any less likely to be blessed by the Holy Spirit than the equally partial vision of the rest of us?

There is even a possibility that it is in this area that renewal is happening, as people find they are most helped forward on their journey of faith through being part of informal small groups rather than through the formality of the institutional church.

***

Meanwhile at the turn of the millennium there are signs that the Church of England may be moving back round the circle to where it was more than fifty years ago - majoring in those bottom two circles no longer in the guise of a government department serving the nation but much more like a public corporation serving its stakeholders...

Food for thought?

Go to next page