A message from the Dean - 24 July 2020
Dear Friends,
As we all emerge from lockdown, people are making ‘before’ and ‘after’ comparisons. There’s no mistaking the changes that have taken place and it’s going to be some time before we can assess the whole impact of the pandemic. Nonetheless, Christian broadcasters and communicators who regularly survey their audiences and the social trends that influence them, produced some critically important evidence last week at a webinar hosted by Premier Radio about faith, religious observance, and spiritual practice. Here are the main points:
- Since lockdown Google have noticed a massive surge in searched for terms such as ‘God’, ‘Jesus’, ‘Prayer’
- Regular churchgoers account for 7% of the UK population; since March, with all worship going online, that figure has surged to 27%, and 34% in the West Midlands!
- 32%of those surveyed said they wanted to continue online engagement with the Church
- Premier Radio has coined the phrase ‘Hybrid Church’ as one that mixes and deliberately combines online and offline activities.
- A recent survey measured the spiritual activity of different age groups (e.g. prayer, worship, meditation, yoga, nature walks) in terms of frequency or regularity.
o The most spiritually active age group were the 18-24 year olds. 50% were regularly practising in some form.
o The least spiritually active group were the 55-64 year olds
o Generation Z (the generation reaching adulthood in the second decade of the 21st century) and millennials (people born between 1981-1996) are more open to spirituality and religion than their parents and grandparents
o Of those surveyed, 61% of Church attenders have said they felt closer to God in the months of lockdown.
Some very big questions and possibilities emerge.
People are hungry for experience and knowledge; the practices of faith are as important, if not more important, than understanding. Should the Churches, therefore, be doing much more to introduce people to meditation, reflection, prayer, worship, liturgical practice? A further major question is: what God are we introducing them to? Many of the presumptions about God that are strenuously contested by modern atheists are not conceptions espoused by believers! Nor do these atheistic objections to God look in the least relevant to searchers.
The World’s religions display an enormous search for what is ultimate and whole. The presence of this great, powerful wholeness has the character of something mysterious, tremendous, and fascinating. It is intangible but real, like light shining from a cloud. People have perceived this sacred presence disclosing itself in an amazing diversity of ways: in nature; in historical events; in art, music and dance; in interior peacefulness and exterior healing; in the whole range of human experiences both good and bad, particularly in love and loss. They have sensed it when they meet limits, or the uncanny, or the surprising, in an unusual sense of joy or, conversely, emptiness of life. They have sought union with the transcendent through a vast variety of practices.
But to be a Christian? What’s distinctive and life-giving about that? All sorts of possibilities can emerge, but I want to reflect on two. The Christian is a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth, and a living and acting member of the Church of Christ. Each of us in one way or another has nurtured the call, ‘come, follow me’. So Jesus himself, in the words of St. Ignatius Loyola, ’is our model and our rule’; the company of those who follow him with us, is the twin corollary. We cannot claim to love God whom we do not see unless we love one another, the people whom we do see. Looking at the Christian life will mean looking as Jesus of Nazareth in his historical existences and at Jesus in his existence as Church, the whole Christ, head and members together.
To enter into contact with the historical Jesus means knowing his story, having it interpreted to us, and sharing in the quest for what that story means for us today. We want to know the story because of the significance it had for the first people involved in the story. The meaning and power of it emerges from Jesus’ inter-action with them, some were desperate people, some disdainful or scornful, but when we hear and enter into the story we realise it is our existence that is under discussion here just as much as the characters in the Gospels. Jesus speaks to our condition and our need. The Christian church is the gathering of people that happens when someone starts to tell the story of Jesus as a person from the past, but who still comes and makes the ultimate demands on those who hear the story. The Church is what happens when the story of Jesus is told, but for this to happen it must be told dramatically with gestures, signs, symbol, and ritual. We use water, oil and light in Baptism, bread and wine in the Eucharist, the laying on of hands and anointing for healing and setting people aside for ministry, the sign of the Cross for the forgiveness of sins, rings and solemn promises at weddings. ‘All that was visible in Christ our Redeemer has passed into the sacraments of the Church’ (St Leo the Great). In many ways, learning to follow Jesus and becoming part of his body is learning a new language and a new way of behaving (not Church speak or club rules). It’s a response of loving trust that Jesus can make something beautiful out of what we bring to him, surprising us with his unexpected mercy and the totality of his longing for us and his demands on us.
Even though we will emerge from the current crisis re-shaped, our economy re-engineered, our national and international priorities more sharply focussed and perhaps more dangerously polarised, the Church of God has some new opportunities. The spiritual hunger of our time, so eloquently revealed in the statistics I began with, point us inexorably to a new engagement with those age groups who are hungriest. It means putting our best effort, imagination and resource into answering that need.
Of course, this is high stakes stuff. Like millions of plant and animal species many religions have gone extinct in the course of time. Wolfhart Pannenberg, the great German Theologian, observed shrewdly ‘Religions die when their lights fail’, that is when their teachings no longer illuminate life as it is actually lived by their adherents. In such cases the encounter with the Holy becomes dim, it fails to penetrate human experience. The lights of the old religion fade. God becomes irrelevant. This phenomenon is not humanity dictating what it wants from God, rather it is the test of the true God, the living God, ever old and ever new, who spans all time and can relate to what is emerging as the future continuously dawns. A tradition that cannot change cannot live alternatively as a preservation society. When people experience God as wisdom and compelling presence, the lights stay on. Light is experienced, it is not a memory. The truth is always cotemporary.
What is to be done? Cathedral Chapter is taking a careful look at our priorities. During the Covid-19 crisis we have heard it said ‘we are all in it together’. That sense of solidarity unravelled a bit when powerful people claimed exceptional needs or a sophisticated interpretation of the rules. However, for us to be serious about bringing more people to Christian faith means having hearts that love people. George Fox the great Quaker used to pray ‘to be baptised into a sense of all conditions, that I might know the needs and feel the sorrows of all’. (One might add know the ‘joys and searchings of all’.) We can never avoid or run away from the mature reality of practising faith with others and in the way of Jesus, God’s way of being fully human. His way is one of solidarity, drawing us personally into company with him and one another. That sense of all being in it together, solidarity, is the genius of our faith.
Join me if you will in praying a prayer which comes deep from our tradition and history but asks for the grace of everything to be made new.
O God of unchangeable power and eternal light,
look favourably upon your whole Church,
that wonderful and sacred mystery,
and by the tranquil operation of your perpetual providence,
carry out the work of our salvation:
and let the whole world feel and see
that things which were cast down are being raised up,
and things which had grown old are being made new,
and that all things are returning to perfection
through him from whom they took their origin,
even Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
With my love, prayers, and blessing
Adrian