In my book Present in Every Place?, I argued that the parish system is a gift. However, like all good gifts, it must be intentionally received. Although the parish promises much, those promises are not automatically realised, any more than, say, a country’s constitution is realised simply by it being written on a piece of paper. It may be that the parish is self-evident, but this does not mean that it is alive and well.
To say all this is to assume that we as human beings live within time. James K A Smith in his book, How to Inhabit Time, argues that our ability to live well is, in fact, everything. We as humans are contingent – we are time-dependant and time-restricted creatures – but our problem is that we consistently push against this fact. Thus, the challenge is to become people who live wisely within time.
Technically there are three ways that we avoid our time-boundness: we avoid our future, we avoid our present, or we avoid our past. I think this is a helpful way of imagining what is going on when it comes to the parish.
So, first, when it comes to the parish we forget our present. To forget one’s present is to forget where we are – now – and to impose upon it either a vision of reality from the past, or a hoped-for vision from the future. What this does is stop us being able to handle what is there before us now as it is. And this leaves us endlessly sad or frustrated (depending on how much one cares). Put simply, the vision cannot match the reality. In the case of the parish, we may, for example, miss the stark realities in front of us (declining Sunday attendance, far fewer people engaging with local churches, increased gap between church and local institutions) and choose instead to simply hold fast to a certain vision. One manifestation of this is what I call the ‘coverage commitment’. Because we have committed to the ideal that everywhere must be covered – in a parish – we bind ourselves to having to resource this
model, at whatever cost. So, we end up with multi-multi parish
benefices and clergy running around on Sundays from parish to
parish. But the result is a situation that is a million miles away from
the original vision itself, which was about close and careful locality
and presence. We have so committed ourselves to the vision – what
once was, what could again be – that we have become blind to the
present.
But so too we may be so enamoured by present and future
that we forget our past, and its potential to bless us. This was a
significant theme of the book: that the parish as we inherent
it has the potential to be an incredible gift. I think many of the
theological defenders of the parish are right that the gift of the
parish to us is the way in which it stands as a bastion against the
excesses of our modern age. Thus, where modernity erodes place,
making everywhere the same, the parish offers local difference
and distinctiveness. Where modernity turns us into consuming
individuals whose contribution to the social fabric is measured only
in terms of our purchasing power, the parish offers the possibility
of deep social connection, and especially those who are different
from us. Where modernity is ruthless in the way it focuses our
attention on what could be (‘imagine if you just had that car, that
home, those trainers!’) the parish roots us in a history that is far
bigger than us. In contrast to hurriedness, the parish offers a
gentle rhythm of life. It is personal and not functional, local and
not global, rooted and not esoteric, humble and not arrogant. My
point is that all of these are values that we would want to treasure.
There are very good theological reasons why we might want to
see Christian formation as a counter-formation against much of
modernity with its tendencies to be dehumanising, focused on
processes over people. So, to miss all of this – to not heed the cry
of the parish – is a great loss indeed. We moderns often play this
game: assuming that the answer to our perceived problems will
lie with our own ingenuity rather than coming as a gift from the
past. We are surely smarter than our forebears, no? And so we run
conferences and plan for growth and strategise and coach and and
all the rest of it. All the while missing the fact that although the
parish may not offer the answers to the problems we are facing, it
may well be screaming at us that our we are addressing the wrong set of problems in the first place.
Third, we may forget our future. This is the danger that I realise
now I addressed least in the book. But it is vital. By forgetting our
future I mean that we might be so enamoured by our past, and
focused on our present, that we lose any sense of what could be and
what might be. This is of course an eschatological posture for us as
Christians. All of those values I listed above will one day be true –
really – of earth, as in heaven. But this vision also has a temporal
dimension; that we do hope we will see more of this, more of the
kingdom, in the coming decades. What I mean to say is that we
must not lose hope that the parish really could be reimagined and
reinitiated in our time and place. If the parish is a great success
story (I think it is: every person in a nation under the prayerful
watch of a church to which they can enter and find worship for
them: what else are we striving for?) then why don’t we long for it
again? And why don’t we work to make it happen? Why not hope
for more local churches, deeply integrated in their places? Not
longing for the parish system, but for the parish. Why not hope
for churches to be rooted in the forgotten places of our land: a
Christian presence where there is no other kind of presence?
This is what is needed therefore, and what I believe is lacking
from the debates about the parish: a hopeful and imaginative
vision for its place in the life of the nation. We seem caught
between nostalgia and iconoclasm. But both are escapes from time,
from our creatureliness. We are neither starting from scratch, but
nor are bound to what we have inherited. The path of wisdom is to
listen and receive well: both from our past, and from the present.
The parish is a beautiful vision, tied to an inheritance. The question
is what will we do with it: in our time?
Since writing the book I have moved back into parish ministry,
and so I wanted to end this piece with a few thoughts about what I
have learnt since then. Do I think what I wrote in the book holds,
given what I have found back in the parish?
Basically – I say with humility - yes. I think so. That is, I think
from what I have seen in the past six months, it remains the case that
the parish must be enacted rather than assumed. In the case of my
own context, the relationship between church and the surrounding
locale has somewhat waxed and waned. What I have found is that it
is very easy to be a church that is in its place but in no way present to it. And thus, the decision to be present takes intentionality and
hard work. We now have a very good relationship with the sixth
form centre in our parish for example. But this has happened over
a long period of prayer and visiting and waiting.
Which leads me on to the second point I wish to make, which
is that I stand by some of the conclusions of the book that our
current context is one that makes doing parish ministry especially
hard. Call it secularisation, or something else: I have found
significant resistance to church engagement in the months I have
been here. By this I don’t mean engagement with individuals. My
reading of the history is that the human heart is a strange thing;
that there has always been those who love the church and those
who loathe it, with the overwhelming majority somewhere in the
middle. By ‘engagement’ I mean more the contact point between
church and structures or institutions, from schools to shopping
centres. Sometimes this is outright hostility, but often is marked
by a suspicion and wariness. My experience has been that a lot of
relational work must happen before we are given ‘access’ (earning
trust) to places and people who gather outside of the church. This
is not a universal or unqualified truth – there are many places still
where the church-society connection is still very close – but my
experience here has not been that.
Third, I do think that embracing a new vision for the parish
will require greater risk (and cost) than I perhaps assumed when
I wrote the book. Again, I may well be wrong on this. But it does
seem to me that if dioceses (and it will be dioceses) want to see
churches engaged locally in their communities in such a way that
they become vital parts of those communities, then they will need
to radically rethink how they resource and plan for ministry, and at
almost every level. My experiences since entering back into parish
ministry - but also from research I carried out with 12 dioceses
in the Church of England - suggests that we still basically think
in terms of coverage. And this shapes our vocations process, our
resourcing, and our deployment. What often underpins this, I
suggest, is an extremely thin theology of place: we talk still about
‘presence ministry’ as though this meant simply ‘being there’. But
if place is a dynamic category, and if places change (for example
if more people live in urban areas than anywhere else), then we
need to make significant changes to how we do ministry on the ground, from who we select, through to deployment, and this will
entail structural change too. To save the parish we will need to be
far braver in moving outside of inherited parochial structures. Put
simply, we need to move away from trying to prop up a system of
coverage that is so obviously not sustainable in many places.
Finally, I have found that the longing for place – which the
theological defenders of the parish so embody – is a hunger that
needs to be named and reawakened in our congregants. Our
culture has been so good at forming us, and shaping the way we
see the world (it is just the water we swim in) that the categories of
place, rootedness, local commitment, unity in diversity etc., must
be taught and modelled afresh. ‘The parish’ simply cannot do this
by itself. A modern person today will not walk into a parish church,
spend time there, and simply be formed by osmosis. Modernity
has had too strong an affect for that. And so doing parish today
must be seen as an intentional act of counter-formation – which
means teaching and preaching and modelling a different vision of
life. People must be shown what the parish could look like, and see
it enacted well – their hearts captured by the vision – if it is to find
new life. We have very few examples of places doing this well, but
I want to try. This is to form a people whose love for Christ leads
them to love their place, by committing to it, rooting themselves
within it, and responding in loving service to whatever they
encounter there.