A Cure of Souls

Is the Church of England still fit for purpose?

2020splash-wia-souls

WORLD IN ACTION ’65

The Church of England is the third largest landowner and one of the biggest investors in the country; its total assets are incalculable. It is our national church. Its task is to care for the spiritual welfare of 42 million people. In 1963, although 47 per cent of all marriages were in church, 53 per cent of all children were baptized, and 23 per cent of all young people were confirmed, only 7 per cent of the population can be counted as active adult members of the Church.

To find out how well it is doing the Church commissioned a sociologist, Leslie Paul, to write the first comprehensive report on the organization of the Church at parish level. After two years research he concluded that the Church has been “a bad steward.” The Paul Report made two fundamental observations:

That there are not enough clergy – only one for every 6,000 of population.

That because of an outdated parish system, those there are are in the wrong place – one third of the clergy are in the country whereas four-fifths of the people are in the towns.

Like the Paul Report, World in Action was not concerned with the spiritual aspects of the Church – aspects which Christians would say is the Church’s ultimate justification. Like the Paul Report we were concerned with how the Church works in its front line, the parish.

What is a parish priest for? World in Action went first to a typical English village to find out.

Francis Barrie Flint, aged 59, educated at Dulwich College and London University, has been a clergyman for 34 years. He writes books on moral education and letters to The Times newspaper. He has worked in six parishes and is now Rector of Longborough in Gloucestershire. He describes his parish thus:

“This is a Cotswold village of roughly 600 people. I am in charge of two parishes, two separate parishes, run as a single living. One is 300 or thereabouts, and the little one is a hundred. These two churches are separate in that they have their own parochial church councils, their own wardens everything is separate – and I take separate services. The parish is entirely rural. The people are nearly all farmworkers or farmers themselves.”

On a Sunday in Longborough you may well find Morris dancers. On a Sunday, too, Barrie Flint has his most clearly defined job to do – to take services. But only one in ten of his parishioners attend.

“There’s definitely a decline in church-going,” he said. “I’ve noticed a decline in the five years I’ve been here. Our numbers are very small, although proportionately to the town parishes, proportionately we do better; but that better is not very good. There are various reasons for this declension of interest in and support of the church. There is, of course, the very large number of alternative interests on a Sunday. When I go down to Evensong on a Sunday night I frequently see a group of my own people waiting for the bus to take them to the nearest town and the cinema. When there were no buses those people would most certainly have come to church.”

In cities like Sheffield the problem is even more acute. The Reverend Flint has 600 parishioners – the Reverend Frank Hone of a Sheffield parish has 12,000. Few of them have ever been near the church.

“We have an evening service, Evensong – it isn’t as well attended by a long way as the Morning Service. This seems to be the pattern in these kind of areas,” Hone said. “People tend to come in the morning and not in the evening, and we don’t particularly mind this as long as we can create a group of people who come regularly to their communion on a Sunday morning. It’s a very small number – it’s only about 60, an average of 60 out of a population of round about 12,000 in the parish. But that isn’t too bad, I suppose, in comparison with the other denominations and similar parishes of this kind.”

Whether people use it or not, most parishes are dominated by the church building itself. Barrie Flint not only has one ancient monument to look after, but two. Whatever value they have as works of art, the Church of England’s 18,000 churches are in many ways a liability. As Flint said,

“I do feel that many people would regard it much more favourably if they could see, for example, that the money raised is wisely spent; that the upkeep of our buildings is realistic; that we don’t hang on to churches which have out live their usefulness. In this Deanery practically all of our clergy are in charge of two churches. There is only one I can think of out of 15 clergymen, only one priest who is in charge of a single parish.”

Even if they want to, the clergy have enormous difficulty in discarding any of the Church’s priceless, yet obsolete, equipment. The Reverend F. S. Skelton of Bermondsey in London gave an example of this difficulty.

“Five years ago in this parochial area,” he said, “there were three churches – two proper buildings and one the remains of a bombed church that was still being used as a place of worship. This meant that within a very small area there were these three places of worship which really seems quite unnecessary. But it entails an enormous amount of fuss and bother trying to get a church pulled down and parishes united. In fact it’s taken at least five years to get this done. As a matter of fact this very week we’re getting an Act through Parliament to enable us to go ahead to unite the parishes and pull the church down. All over the country the Church is faced with this sort of business. It takes an immense amount of time and energy and money, and I feel it is quite unnecessary. There should be far simpler ways of doing this sort of thing.

“If I was starting off from scratch in a new housing estate,” he continued, “I would be very reluctant to start by building a church. I would proceed in quite different ways, I think, to try to make the Church live in people’s homes. One might have to have some sort of central building, a hall to begin with, but as soon as you start building an ecclesiastical building known as a church, this immediately seems to centralize everything on to that building and this continues the old pattern of church life which, it is being proved up and down the country, is not cutting any ice. We’ve got to be bold enough to experiment.”

One of the boldest experiments is actually going on in Sheffield. The Reverend Michael Jackson’s church is the shop floor at the English Steel Company.

“One of the problems of the ministry,” said Jackson, “is that it has to spend energy and money in keeping up expensive plant, whereas a functional ministry can be run in economic terms pretty cheaply. You simply need to put a man into the field and pay him and that’s that. He doesn’t need a plant. And if we’re to use our resources of men and money wisely we need to review the duties to which we send people and see whether we shouldn’t increase the number of men in functional ministries.”

Only 30 priests in the Church of England are doing work like Michael Jackson’s. 90 per cent of clergymen have at least one parish church to run and this is expensive. There is a dramatic example of this proliferation in the City of London. Within one mile of St. Paul’s Cathedral there are 30 churches, most of them of historic value.

Where does the Church’s money come from? At Longborough, the Reverend Flint gets a salary of £1,000 per year from the Church Commissioners, the Church’s paymaster. The Church Commissioners are one of the top ten property developers in the country. In fact, they own £118 million-worth of property, and £200 million-worth of stocks and shares. This brings them an income of £17 million a year, most of which goes in vicars’ wages.

To maintain his church and to contribute to charities Barrie Flint raises £900 per year by collections, fetes and appeals. In 1963 the Church as a whole collected £28 million in this way. But in 1956 it collected only £17 million. This increase of £11 million in seven years was due mainly to payments through what is called “planned giving” — regular financial contributions to the church. Planned giving has jumped from £2.6 million to £9.2 million a year.

The man who first introduced big business methods to fusing was a young American called Frank Wells.

“When we arrived in Britain,” Wells told World in Action, “we discovered that the churches in this country did not receive funds through direct giving the way they do in the States and other parts of the world. They’re dependent to a greater extent on fêtes, bazaars, and outright pants from central funds; and there’s quite a scope here for teaching the actual parishioners more responsibility and better habits of giving towards their own parish.

“Its a financial commitment which most of the fringe people understand more clearly than someone knocking on their door for a missionary appeal. They don’t understand the word to begin with and it frightens them. But if you say St. Bartholomew’s needs £30,000 over the next 3 years or 5 years; ten thousand of that is to go towards keeping the church open, another fifteen for providing a new hall, and another five for various restorations of the church, the people will understand that.”

At a fee of £700 the church at Deddington in Oxfordshire hired the Wells organization to teach it how to raise money. Apart from fund-raising the clergyman has sources of indirect income. He has a house, rent and rates free. But this can have disadvantages as the Reverend Flint explained:

“One of the things which not all parishioners realize is that a parson has, perforce, to live in his vicarage or rectory. It is a tied cottage, only an outsize one. He has no alternative – he has to live there. It may be a delightful house with extensive grounds, but a house of this size with such grounds has to be kept up and this is, of course, a costly business. Normally, unless a rector has private means, he must run the garden himself and his wife must run the house without help, and this is a very considerable chore which can very quickly become a burden. Indeed it does become a burden to many of us, especially as we grow older.”

When the Rector of Longborough is not taking services, what does he do with his time? He spends one hour a day on correspondence and administration; two hours a day reading, writing and praying; two hours a week teaching at his church schools; and several hours a week attending committees. But by far his most important and time-consuming job is visiting. He spends an hour a day being either friendly or helpful to his parishioners.

“I am on friendly relations with, I think, everyone in the parish,” he said. “I don’t feel that I am so much apart from them that I am distinct and separate, although I would very much like to feel that they would make more use of me pastorally than they do. You see, in this age in which we live, the age of affluence, apart from sickness or bereavement there aren’t a great many problems that seem to disturb people sufficiently to suggest that they should come and talk to the parish priest about them.”

With 12,000 on a bleak housing estate, the Reverend Hone in Sheffield has more people than he could ever hope to see.

“We would like to have more time for visiting because there are an awful number of people who quite clearly we’ve had no contact with at all over the period of years. When one has done the visiting attached to baptisms, marriages and funerals, and also the sick visiting and then the other kinds of visiting where there are problems in which you try to help people – all this takes a good deal of one’s time and doesn’t leave very much time for getting round the parish to visit people who have never been visited, probably for years, by a clergyman.”

What is most depressing for the clergyman is that he is often providing a service that people don’t want. The Reverend F. S. Skelton explained:

“In an area like Bermondsey in the old days there used to be quite a number of people coming to church, and the church really did do social work – provided a centre, provided much of the care and welfare which nowadays is provided by the State; and what we found in the old days was that a lot of people came into Bermondsey because it was an area of need, and they came and did a great deal of good work here. Now, I think that the younger generation still associates in its mind in some way — hearing it from its parents – the church with charity; charity which was needed in those days, but is not needed now, and there’s a sense of prosperity and independence and not wanting to go back to the old way of receiving and being on the receiving end of being done good to.”

The clergyman’s problems are not confined to churchgoing in his parish. He is a human being. Barrie Flint’s first reaction to the Paul Report was that it may remedy his personal feeling of isolation.

“We are moving towards a grouping of parishes,” he said, “although not exactly on the lines of the Paul Report, because there – and this is the strength of the suggestion of the Paul Report – it says that parishes should be so grouped that the individual clergyman should not be left alone. It’s this aloneness of the priest that can be so devastating during the passing of the years. The loneliness of his reading, his prayer life, every side of his life; if there is one other priest who can be his colleague, he will probably administer five or six churches more effectively than administering two by himself. He doesn’t mind how hard he works, provided he’s got spiritual and intellectual stimulus and that is one of the weaknesses of the present system.

“The parson is in a peculiar position. He is a member of a group of people who have been trained along certain lines and his interests are in a measure, could one say ‘technical’ rather like the medical fraternity – I think he needs to have the impact of other clerical minds to stimulate his own thinking.”

In Bermondsey, F. S. Skelton is luckier. “I’m fortunate – I have three colleagues here, and in fact I wouldn’t work in a place like this if I was working alone. I think I just couldn’t take it – I wouldn’t cope at all, I know. Many of the clergy, like myself, come from a different background to those amongst whom we live and work here in Bermondsey, and this can lead to the danger of patronizing people unless we’re very careful. And if you do patronize a person – well, you isolate yourself from them.”

The same can be just as true of a country parish.

The Church of England is concerned with the need for change. In London at Church House, the centre of its administration, calculations are made on modern machines, and commissions and committees sit discussing everything from divorce to the appointment of bishops. But for an organization set up 1,500 years ago change is not easy. What makes change even more difficult is the fact that the Church is “by law established” – in many ways the servant of the State, as Sir John Scott, the Secretary of the Church Assembly, the Church’s Parliament, explained:

“At the Reformation the picture was this – every man, woman and child in England had, by law, to be a member of the Church of England, and therefore the conception which Hooker and others had at the time of the Elizabethan Settlement, that the Crown and Parliament could represent not only the English people but also the Church of England was a perfectly reasonable conception. Since that time there’s been the Toleration Act which has resulted in membership of the House of Commons being opened to members of all faiths or no faith, with the result that many members of the Church of England now feel there is a very good case for a modification of the establishment to meet these altered circumstances, and a modification of the establishment which would result in the Church having greater freedom than it has now to order its worship, and certainly its doctrine, without reference to the House of Commons which they would regard as being basically unsympathetic.”

In July 1964, the Church’s Parliament under the presidency of the Archbishop of Canterbury met, as it does three times a year, to discuss among other things, the Paul Report. But no action can be taken on the decisions it reached without the consent of both Houses of Parliament.

Just as the Queen, the head of State, chooses the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Church, so many of her Ministers of the Crown still have their traditional responsibility of choosing parish priests. The Lord Chancellor chooses 600; the Prime Minister – 160: the Home Secretary – 40; and the Admiralty too has some. This is State patronage. In addition there are 2,780 private patrons. Barrie Flint at Longborough has a private patron who not only chose him for the job, but also pays him his traditional wages of £120 a year.

“I am not particularly happy about private patronage,” he confessed, “I think it would be better if patronage were concentrated in the hands of either the Bishop or Diocesan boards who are in a much better position to know the needs of the parishes and the qualifications of individual priests, rather than patrons, some of whom may live in their village and others of whom may be absentee patrons or patrons who have no religious convictions at all.”

The desire for reform in the Church of England is stronger now than it has been for over 100 years. One of its mos outspoken reformers is the Right Reverend Mervyn Stockwood, the Bishop of Southwark. He told World in Action:

“We need greater freedom than we’ve got now to implement our ideas of reform and to run the Church m a more business-like way. Let’s face it, if a business concern tried to run itself as the Church does, it would probably bankrupt and have to pack up. I want the freedom to close churches which aren’t wanted, to use our resources in best possible way, to meet the needs of the people, organize ourselves along new lines of development in new housing areas. Time and time again we are prevented from doing these things either because some law of Parliament stops us or because of the Charity Commissioners or the Church Commissioners. Well, so much of that needs to be scrapped. Give us the freedom and let us get on with the job.”

The final word was with Barrie Flint’s own Bishop speaking at a Diocesan Conference: the Right Reverend Basil Guy, Bishop of Gloucester.

“We cannot go on much longer in our own way of thinking about these matters without doing enormous damage to our witness in the world. We cannot, I believe, claim to be the Body of Christ talking about the ideal of service in the world, bringing to people the gospel, the good news of salvation, inviting them to join with us in the joyful discipleship of our heady religion, and on the other hand, and at the same time, go on begging people for their support, taking our money from under their noses, begging them for subscriptions, selling them raffle tickets, talking about the burdens of church maintenance and generally giving the impression too often that our chief concern is not in the Church but in the preservation of our own class.”

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