To sum up

1. For most people in England the churches are marginal to their lives. If anything, the exceptions seem to prove the rule. Religion and identification with church life are still part of the culture in some villages; and Afro-Caribbean communities are often deeply committed to their Christian faith, just as Asian communities are to Islam.

But the old sense of ‘domination’, the taking for granted that the church is an institution with standing in the community, has for the most part gone.

Clearly this has had its greatest effect on the Church of England. The Anglican clergyman is no longer the ‘parson’ but merely the shopkeeper for a minority cult alongside his free-church colleagues.

Many in the Church of England find this change quite painful. It leads them to feel that their church has become more ‘marginalised’ than is in fact the case. This makes them inhibited and reluctant when facing the challenge of developing new relationships with society around them. Their response can often be to retreat into a situation where they can enjoy their church life without having to concern themselves too much with the world outside.

2. Despite the loss of ‘domination, a complex network of communication and relationship remains in place between church and society. The network functions at various levels:

a) The most public point of contact between church and society is now the Bishop. As the role of the local clergyman as ‘parson’ in his local community has diminished, so the Bishop is increasingly being called to be the public representative, the ‘parson’, for a much wider area which most people are happy to regard as ‘local’. Local media expect the Bishop to be the voice of the church and curiously this usually means the voice of all Christian denominations, not just Anglicans and Roman Catholics.

b) At the level of the individual local congregation, non-churchgoers continue to have perceptions for good or ill of what their local church is like. However exclusive a congregation is, people outside it will form some impression of it - even if it is only one of distrust and accusations of hypocrisy! As we have seen, communication happens whether we like it or not!

c) A major gap in the communication between church and society - caused largely by the failure of the churches to develop their internal network of connections - is at the level, in local government terms, of the borough. The natural locality can sometimes be rather smaller than this, but it is invariably a great deal larger than that covered by individual local churches (except perhaps Roman Catholic parishes). At this level, if Anglican Deaneries, Methodist Circuits or Churches Together groups could discover a true corporate identity and common purpose, they could ‘be the local church’ in a host of new and creative ways - because it is at this level that so many of the networks of community now function.

d) By far the most valuable communication, however, is that which is going on all the time between individual Christians and those with whom they have to deal in all sorts of contexts. The bulk of what enables a local church to fulfil God’s will locally is done by its individual members. The role of the corporate institution is constantly over-estimated, especially by clergy - or rather we misunderstand the way in which God’s Church enables God’s people to be incorporated into God’s work in God’s world.

3. Bad or broken communication is the natural state in human relationships. Tensions between individuals and groups are connections waiting to be made; boundaries should meeting-places, not barriers; and, as diverse groups and individuals interact, so the Holy Spirit can enable us to live with the tensions in a way that creates new and richer connections. No use trying to overcome tensions by eliminating diversity!

Yet so often this is the objective of ministry in the local church - because a cheap man-made ‘harmony’ is part of the illusion of success. But its logical consequence is sectarianism and the division of Christendom into denominations. (It is also an appalling role-model for a divided world!)

4. The primary role of the local church is to strengthen church people in their task of finding God in the life of the locality (however broadly that locality may be defined) - to see him and to feel themselves caught up in his work.

God is already at work, through his Holy Spirit, in every situation where individuals discover healing, where people become reconciled or where hope and fulfilment overcome frustration and despair.

Where God is at work, people discover that they are loved and can therefore run the risk of loving others in a genuinely selfless and Christlike way. By definition we who are Christians are those who are constantly rediscovering God’s love in Jesus Christ; but even for us, learning to share that love can be a long, slow and painful business, with many nets to be mended and many barriers to be dismantled.

The image of the Christian disciple as ‘netmender’ is something to be explored in the next chapter - as are the many barriers to any effective sharing of the love of God.

5. Despite our ‘secularised’ society, many people still retain a deep, if suppressed. longing to ‘see Jesus’ - just like the Greeks in St John’s Gospel. We do Jesus a disservice if instead of pointing people towards him we spend our energies trying to point them towards those fallible and fragmented institutions which we call ‘churches.

6. At the end of chapter two the problem of ‘How to be a local church’ was expressed as a dilemma: it could seem that, in order to be local, a local church had to cease to be church. Conversely, in trying to understand the nature and purpose of the church - God’s church - we were in danger of overlooking its continuing connections with the local.

At the end of this chapter we are at risk of jumping to the conclusion that an individual person’s relationship with others in God’s world is all that matters. Certainly this is crucial and deserves a chapter to itself (chapter four). But, as we will discover in the final chapter, we cannot just close down the local church as redundant!

Go to Chapter Four