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Present in Every Place? The Church of England’s New Churches, and the Future of the Parish

Will Foulger
SCM Press, 2023, xvi + 117 pp, pbk. £25

If you are fed up with polarising twitter debates and theo-culture
wars, but you are concerned about the future of the Church and,
therefore, about the way we organise ourselves to serve the Church’s
vocation, then Will Foulger’s book is a refreshing and cheeringly
prudent contribution to the conversation about the parish.
Both ‘Fresh Expressions’ and ‘Save the Parish’, he recognises,
are victims of ‘package politics’. The terms have become overloaded
with assumptions about what they stand for and what they entail.
They both represent some nuanced and careful thinking but have
become ciphers, respectively, for ‘What We Do Not Like’ depending
on our own instincts. He acknowledges that there are both real and
imagined fears at play. But polarisation is unwise and we ought not
to fall prey to thinking that everything is about competition.
Foulger takes us behind the stale and often toxic debates to the
instincts and desires of those who defend the parish (focusing on
Alison Milbank and Andrew Davison, John Milbank and Martyn Percy). There is an Anglican vocation to be present with people in
places, to have a cure of souls. We are given places to love. This is no
idolatry of place but a faithfulness to the God who reveals himself
to people who are placed. The question he asks is whether this good
instinct necessarily entails a commitment to the parish structure
as it is? What if the current structure doesn’t actually serve our
best instincts and may even frustrate us from being present to
place in our contexts? Sometimes we are victim to relying on our
‘imagined coverage’ of the nation, leading to an imagined rather
than intentional presence. Proximity doesn’t mean presence.
He analyses what ‘place’ means and contrasts it with modern
conceptions of inert, neutral and commodifiable ‘space’. Place
is something experienced; it has an affective pull (questions of
identity and Brexit are acknowledged). Places are also always in
flux, bounded and yet connected to other places, and understood
from within. People also have a sense of belonging to places at
micro and then successively more macro levels. Place is complex.
So Foulger doesn’t see the parish system as merely instrumental
or ambivalent (he is not seeking a new ecclesiology de novo). It has
focused us on places with histories and stories. It is a tradition
of which we are a part. But that means it needs to continually
develop and be responsive and dynamic. Not least because people
and places are dynamic and God is a God of new creation. As he
notes, defenders of the parish system also defend it for different
reasons. Does it enable the Church to be responsive to the world by
ensuring it is present and local or does it stand for a new form of
sociality that is nonetheless alongside and within the local world?
Perhaps the distinction he makes is too contrastive, but the point
is that even a defence of the parish shows that there is more than a
static structure at stake.
Parish, argues Foulger, is act. It is about intentional engagement
and this relies on leadership, training and collaboration at micro
and more macro levels. On the latter, Foulger knows that new
diocesan appointments can make us feel that we’re achieving
something locally when we’re not. But he also knows that there’s
something crucial about joined-up and strategic thinking when it
comes to deploying resources locally and enabling presence. He is
keen to see what we might call deanery-level strategic thinking
and collaboration used more effectively, with some achievable and exciting ideas. He doesn’t engage here with the idea of the
diocese as the most local unit of the Church, but his analyses of
the interconnectedness of micro and macro levels of place are
productive.
Foulger sees new plants and fresh expressions not as separate
vocations or lines of approach within a mixed ecology. These are
different expressions that exist together as part of the catholicity
of the Church and, rather than being in competition, they can work
together. In fact, the new and the fresh might be, for him, what
saves the parish – and, indeed, might be expressions of what the
parish system has done well before.
Readers of Crucible will pick up on the references to how the
vocation to place can serve the Common Good and will benefit from
Foulger’s reflections on how the parish might learn from both good
and also less helpful experiences of local and regional regeneration.
There also some reflections on diversity and inclusion and where
the Church has not been present to particular communities.
The book is helpfully short. If that means Foulger sacrifices
some nuance, he does so only to present us with a prudent plea to
go beyond polarisation towards a deeper analysis of our vocation
as a Church, and offers some good reflections on how we might
develop the parish system in dynamic and creative ways.

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