Please note that this is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS A CHURCH THAT MATTERS TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Andrew Brown Producer: Chris Bowlby Editor: Nicola Meyrick BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 7279 Broadcast Date: 21.11.02 Repeat Date: 24.11.02 Tape Number: TLN246/02VT1047 Duration: Taking part in order of appearance: Dr Jane Freeman Lord Hurd Rev’d Nerissa Jones Peter Selby Bishop of Worcester Graham Cray Bishop of Maidstone Andreas Whittam Smith The Church Commissioners Dr David Hope Archbishop of York BROWN The Church of England no longer looks like something at the heart of English identity, and more like a rather futile minority interest. The news has been unremittingly bad for years. The attendance figures fall and fall; nothing seems able to stop that except changing the way that they are counted. Nor is money any better. At the beginning of the Nineties, the Church lost £800m in property speculation; at the end of the period, it lost another fortune on the stock market. The incoming Archbishop of Canterbury is denounced as a heretic. The church never seems to do anything in the newspapers except argue over attitudes to women and gays. So does the Church matter today? Will it still matter in 20 years’ time? FREEMAN I don’t think I ever took the calculation will the Church of England survive but I do recognise that the Church of England which will be there in 20/25 years when I - I’m looking at the very very end of my ministry - will be a different matter. HURD I used to, as Home Secretary and again as Foreign Secretary, used to just walk across the river to Lambeth and listen and talk to the Archbishop of Canterbury in a very informal way. BROWN Dr Jane Freeman, who was a professional historian before she changed careers, in mid-life, to become a curate in Waterloo, and Lord Hurd, who was at the heart of conservative governments for fifteen years. Now he’s retired from politics, and works as a merchant banker; but in his spare time, he also works for the Prison Reform Trust, and he chaired a Committee trying to discover whether the job description of Archbishop of Canterbury could be changed into one that anyone could possibly hope to do. This interest in the affairs of the Church is not uncommon in politics. For Lord Hurd, it’s not piety, but necessary realism, even in questions as political as war with Iraq. HURD We’re talking about decisions to send British soldiers into the Middle East to kill people and be killed. These phrases are sometimes disguised but that’s what we’re actually talking about. I don’t think you should do that or you can do that successfully now in Britain, in 2002, unless there is general support -not unanimous, of course. But unless there’s a general body which agrees that this is a just war, a reasonable thing to do to kill and be killed in that cause. And the churches are important in that. BROWN There is a paradox here. When Lord Hurd was Home secretary, he took little notice of the church's policies. Now he works for the Prison Reform Trust, today’s Home Secretary, it seems, takes little notice of him. The Church is powerful only when it reflects the general moral sense of society. and at a time when this moral sense is changing, the church's influence must also change. So will the Church of England still matter in 20 years' time when ours is a very different country? To answer that question, we have to look down on the ground, where it derives its real strength. However much church attendance has declined, this is still the biggest voluntary organisation in England. More people go to Anglican churches on a Sunday than are members of all the political parties put together. The reach of this organisation can been seen at a glance from the skyscraper where Lord Hurd works in the city of London. you can see clear down to St Botolph's, Aldgate, where the Rev’d Nerissa Jones worked with the homeless. JONES The Church of England remembering itself and recollecting itself and at its best remembers that it’s there for everybody. It does, most of the time, for instance, anybody that hasn’t got a denomination or any belief at all generally calls for a Church of England clergy person to take a funeral. The expectation of what the church ought to be like and what it ought to do I think is much clearer than one would have expected considering that hardly anybody comes to it. I’ve always been surprised by that. For instance, in one job when I was working very much with people who had been at the absolute kicking end of everything - every sort of disappointment, every sort of misery and that they were actually, by this stage living outside on the London streets, they had a very clear idea of what a church ought to be. It was astonishing because so often they had been extremely badly treated by either people who called themselves Christians or by people who officially were - like vicars. You know, turfed out of churches when they were only sheltering from the rain, told to leave - a series of quite disgraceful things had happened to them and yet it just seem to make them all the more aware of what it ought to be like. BROWN And what was that? JONES Accepting, kind, friendly - good, really BROWN The ideal of the parish system is that everyone in England has a priest to whom they can turn. Everyone lives in a parish; there is not one inch of the country for which the Church of England is not in some sense responsible. It’s not just an organisation for believers. It’s an organisation for everyone. If you believe -- as priests tend to -- that God has a plan for the Church of England, then even when it seems quite ignored and despised, the parish church is still working, as Peter Selby, the Bishop of Worcester, makes clear. SELBY One of the things I often ask when I’m actually doing a very standard thing like presiding at a Eucharist, you know, church or a midnight Eucharist or something, is to say, it is essential to the value of what we’re doing that we should believe that the whole community is a better place for the fact that we, who most people have nothing to do with and don’t know anything about, are doing this. That we are making assertions here by what we do that need to be made. BROWN These inaudible assertions, though, are, subtle ones. The community around does not respond well to preaching. For Nerissa Jones it is almost an impertinence, to suggest that people should come to the Church of England because they are, or want to be Christians. JONES I think the Church loses an immense amount of respect if it mentions to parents of a baby that they’re not married - why should they be married? A parish priest who refuses for some mingy reason to baptise a baby, and I know that a lot of people would immediately rush in to say, your theology, where is it Nerissa? I would call it a mingy reason for refusing to baptise this poor infant. Within a week, probably at least 500 people will know how beastly Saint so and so is down the road is because the person will have been very deeply hurt and will let all that out at the bus stop, at work and people will say, well what else can you expect? CRAY Are we to be the nation’s insurance policy and occasionally the nation’s fire brigade? No. If it’s true, our job is to tell everybody we believe it’s true and why we think it is and to tell them rather than wait ‘til the house burns down and they phone up. BROWN Graham Cray, the Bishop of Maidstone, and one of the church’s leading evangelical thinkers. Evangelicals have no desire for their church to serve as a bus- shelter for agnostics. No one, he thinks, would stop at a place like that. He believes that the Church really must move into a world where even the fundamental elements of the Christian story have already been largely forgotten. CRAY In the years of things like the Billy Graham crusades - he called back to faith people who knew the story. He didn’t have to tell the story, he re-awoke people to the significance of it. If that is not locked away in the beginning, there is absolutely no reason to expect that people will get to a style of life and suddenly flip back an era that does not relate to their upbringing. Therefore, if the church is not missionary and I believe its fundamental DNA is to be missionary, it can expect to become more and more marginalised. BROWN But for many people, there is still something cringe-making about the church's attempts to be missionary, or to reach out to a younger generation. Practically no one between the ages of fifteen and thirty ever goes near a church, but why should they? Surely, these people will just grow up and return to Christianity once they have children of their own, and, perhaps, need a place in a church-run school. In Kent alone, where Graham Cray is a bishop, the Church owns a quarter of all the primary schools. Andreas Whittam Smith, himself the son of a vicar, now runs the Church Commissioners, who control the Church’s still considerable fortune. He’s not too worried about youth. WHITTAM SMITH The view that they’re going to grow up into it is quite good. When I worked on the Telegraph many aeons ago, they were always worrying about this problem. And I said, you know, don’t worry people do get to 40 or 45 in due course and they’ll come back - and they did. So, what I think we can see is that discussions of spiritual matters are a little bit more out in the open now in British discourse. We have been extremely reserved and I belong to a very, very reserved generation. I don’t speak about my beliefs publicly or even much privately, not even much inside my family - very brief interchanges about these matters. BROWN This is almost anti-missionary - it’s certainly close to the traditional attitude of the Church of England. But many people nowadays, even in the middle classes, are second or third-generation non-Christians. They’ve grown up without ever acquiring any Christian background to return to. Increasingly it looks as if these disputes about where boundaries must be set are being settled, along with other arguments, by hard cash. The facts of life are evangelical, the kind of ministry to the agnostic or unbeliever that Nerissa Jones believes in has to be subsidised by more committed Christians; and without fresh churchgoers somewhere in the country, this just won’t happen. Local congregations must increasingly find the money for everything their church does, because there is nothing left at the centre, as the Archbishop of York, Dr David Hope, points out. HOPE Basically, the Commissioners’ funds are pension funds and we have more people being paid now, in that sense as pensioners, clergy and their spouses than we have actually ordained stipendiary clergy. And that number, of course, is diminishing and this is one of the difficulties - the age range of clergy is such that the numbers of those retiring - and they are tending to retire at 65 rather than 70 because they’re so fed up of all the bureaucracy and the paper and all the rest of it and the numbers coming in are not sufficient, as it were, we can measure it with the numbers of those retiring simply to hold the numbers steady. BROWN This has huge practical implications. It threatens the whole idea of a national church, which might be forced to retreat into disconnected patches of middle class life. HOPE The parish system itself, I think, is in very great danger of breaking down almost altogether and one of my concerns of the present time is the fact that, certainly in our own diocese of York, we’re looking at adding on. Will a vicar, who’s already got 3 parishes, take on another and then another and another. And I think that we really cannot go on like that. BROWN Under the headlines about sex and schism, this financial crisis has been the story of the last ten years: what was meant as the decade of evangelism will be remembered as the decade of the pension fund crisis. Andreas Whittam Smith was brought in to give the church fresh, radical approaches to the problem. Like Lord Hurd, he is an example of the successful and powerful layman through whom the Church of England has traditionally exercised a lot of its influence. WHITTAM SMITH I think my experience as 26 years as a financial journalist, becoming City Editor of the Daily Telegraph, my experience of starting a newspaper, The Independent, and so on, my experience as a film censor, I’m also chairman of the body which handles all the complaints in the financial markets. I think all these experiences, I find each one of them is of pretty high value to me in doing this new job. And I should also say perhaps, that this is the most difficult job that I’ve ever tried to do - that is clear to me. BROWN What makes his job so hard to do is really the fact that local loyalties seem to have no connection to the national institutions of the Church. WHITTAM SMITH What I have learned about central institutions is that to some extent you’re in the driving seat of a car with apparently a steering wheel and apparently an acceleration and apparently a brake but when you turn the wheel or press the pedals nothing much happens. That’s the nature of it. It is highly decentralised. These things, if not done locally, won’t be done at all. BROWN So what is being done locally? This financial crisis has given an entirely new sharpness to doctrinal disputes. They are no longer just about ideas, on which people can agree to disagree; that’s how Anglicans have traditionally felt themselves far more agreeable than other churches. But that was a much more comfortable assumption when parishes thought themselves economically independent. The disagreements now involve congregations being asked to pay for ideas and people they disapprove of violently. Conservative evangelical parishes are asked to subsidise gay priests who keep their boyfriends in the vicarage. Parishes with women priests are expected to fund bishops appointed solely to minister to their opponents, who believe that women aren’t real priests at all. The Church of England can only raise money from its living members now; it has used up the generosity of its dead ones. One consequence of this is that the dead have been very visibly disenfranchised. Much of what goes on in churches now — not least the presence of 2000 women priests — would have completely scandalised the Christians of fifty years ago, let alone the founders of the Church. But when you disenfranchise the dead, you give a vote to living congregations, and the more money they raise, the more of a say they will want in its spending. The Archbishop of York. ARCHBISHOP OF YORK We need to be aware of the fact that parishes will say, well, you know, if we get this vicar, you’re going to sing our particular tune and if you don’t sing our tune or we don’t like your preaching, or we don’t do this, that, we’re not going to give the money. I think that would be very unfortunate. BROWN Do you think it might happen? ARCHBISHOP OF YORK There’s an element of that already about. SELBY I mean, frankly, some of the threats to walk out and all the rest of it are power plays and they are financial power plays at that. BROWN Bishop Peter Selby, who has faced in his own diocese of Worcester a revolt from a conservative evangelical parish which regards him as a heretic. SELBY I think that I want to ask people who engage in those, suppose you won - where would that leave you? What kind of a church would you be if you ended up being a church that had survived and grown by withdrawing from relationships to difficult places? That would be my question. BROWN Even without theological disputes, many parishioners are simply resentful at being asked to raise tens of thousands of pounds every year, not for the support of their own church, but to fulfil a diocesan quota. Nerissa Jones has to raise some of this money. JONES They do feel taxed and the sums of money which are going to be asked for, for instance, for the Parish I’m in now, are considerably in advance of what they’ve paid before. It’s a tremendous amount of actually teaching people, I think, helping people to understand that where you are richer what you’re helping to pay for is for the Parish priest in that parish x where they’ve got 2 or 3 people only in the congregation who are employed. Maybe parishes will almost have to be twinned with other parishes so that people can see where their money’s gone, in effect - even if it’s only on paper that you could have the knowledge that your parish share is, you know, over and above your own share is actually helping out these very nice people here. BROWN This will work, but only if all Christians think each other nice. That’s not been my experience in fifteen years of writing about them. And what happens when nice Christians find they have to give to nasty ones? This is a question that really threatens to disrupt the Church of England. We’ve seen how the — perhaps ridiculous — structures of formal establishment are sustained by the respect and affection in which the Church of England is held. It can, it appears, survive perfectly well in a country where people don’t believe in God. Historically, it has always been threatened far more by people who believe too fervently. But can it survive when its own members no longer believe in the Church of England? The financial crisis, where the Church can no longer depend on its inherited wealth goes hand in hand with a crisis of legitimacy, where the church can no longer depend on authority inherited from a vanished Christian past. Instead, it relies on the consent of the taxed. It even has a sort of parliament, the General Synod, where elected representatives discuss, and occasionally decide, the Church’s future. But Democracy, even the limited and filtered democracy of church government, is powerful, dangerous stuff. It’s difficult to find the dose which will invigorate the patient without exciting him to death. The really disruptive thing about decision-making is that churches they have to believe that God is speaking through the election results. Peter Selby. SELBY The process of appointing or choosing an Archbishop is itself a representative process. There was a huge input of stuff that gets funnelled gradually like an egg timer into a room full of people and prime ministers and all that and out of that comes an Archbishop. And then, the call that’s gone to the Archbishop and that Archbishop becomes a call to the rest of us. Because having got that Archbishop, that then constitutes a question to me, a question to all of us what that says that it was that Archbishop, that kind of person at this kind of time, what that says about what I’m suppose to be doing and who I’m suppose to be being. BROWN But there are quite clearly groups in the church to whom what the choice of what this Archbishop says is, hang on lads, we’re out of here. SELBY Well that is a response. BROWN Democracy seems to me inherently fissiparous. Churches governed by their congregations are notorious for splitting all the time and sitting loosely to any form of central authority. If you don't like things, you discern that God doesn't like them either, and go off and found a new denomination. That is certainly the model of market-driven Christianity in America. It’s something the Church of England has avoided up till now, and some people, like the historian and priest Dr Jane Freeman feel confident that it will still be avoidable. FREEMAN The Christian church has played the game of who’s got the clearest doctrine since it first began. That’s a very, very old game that Christians get engaged with. The Church of England has, from its very beginning, struggled with those who wanted it to be slightly different or very different and it’s gone on with that down the centuries. From the 16th and 17th Century Puritans to the 19th Century debates over biblical criticism and evolution, the hostility to the Oxford Movement - you have always had people who felt the church should be different. And it has weathered those storms and remained, for the most part, inclusive rather than exclusive. BROWN Perhaps the church can still overcome theological difficulties, even those as deep as divide Jane Freeman and the Archbishop of York, an unyielding opponent of women priests. After all, however the clergy may differ from one another, they all share the same pension fund, and that is a powerful force for unity. But the past no longer seems a wholly reliable guide to the future. The Church of England today, like the country that surrounds it, is deeply uneasy about its inheritance, both of privilege and of buildings. Yes, the buildings. They are an extraordinary glory. They seem to define our heritage as a nation. Whatever happens in the doctrinal or sexual struggles, the deadliest threat to the future of the Church of England may come from the most greatly loved and inspiring things it owns: the almost empty churches. The sums involved are terrifying. An international tourist attraction like St Paul’s Cathedral can raise £2m a year from visitors; but there are thousands of churches you’ll never visit or even hear of that could each use all that money. The members of the Church of England raise locally more on the upkeep of heritage buildings than any other institution, including English Heritage itself. To Graham Cray, the Bishop of Maidstone, this is almost a scandal. CRAY I can give you a very stark example. If you go to the Church of St. Nicholas, New Romney, you know, a significant Grade 1 building, the vicar there who’s due to retire in a couple of years, through English heritage and other groups, by the time he has left, will have raised a million pounds for that building to make it just less than tolerable. Which basically means to keep it dry. He has a lovely bitter sweet line to me he says, in winter you can see every word. We have the legal responsibility for these buildings and have to do it by the giving of volunteers who don’t have to come and don’t have to give. And I’m quite convinced that at some time in the next decade a very serious re-negotiation with the nation has to take place. BROWN So if the nation wants these churches for heritage, the nation can pay for them for heritage - is that what you’re saying? CRAY Basically yes. Which is precisely the situation in France which is considerably more secular than we are. BROWN But it is not just the state, not just the taxpayer, who might object to this. Any simple policy of getting rid of church buildings that no one needs, and which may in fact be actively demoralising because they are always three-quarters empty, will run into fierce resistance from the local loyalties of the Church of England. Andreas Whittam Smith. WHITTAM SMITH The test is if nobody’s very fond of it or not very greatly attracted to it - try making it redundant or close it down which, in a way, should happen because there’s been two periods of competitive church building in this country. One was toward the end of the medieval period when people competed to put up churches purely to pray for the souls of their family and so on. You go to Ipswich, you’ll see them all about 50 yards apart and in the Victorian period there was competitive church building by people who wanted to make sure that their particular branch of Anglicanism was well represented and so on. So, me, I’d be a little unsentimental about this - there were never worshippers or parishioners for these churches from the beginning - not since the day they were consecrated. But you try making one of them redundant and you’ll find that people will always, always defend them to the last. BROWN A church that gives up on its beautiful buildings is also giving up a great deal of what makes it attractive to outsiders. For the Archbishop of York, the church needs all the resources it can use to make religion as compelling to the modern imagination as art is. But in the Millennium year, the most compelling displays of Christian art were found outside the churches. ARCHBISHOP OF YORK In my view, it wasn’t anything that the churches did in the Millennial year. One of the most telling things was the exhibition at the National Gallery - Mystery of Salvation. People went and they looked and they gazed, beholding salvation. And they came to the mystery plays in York which were put on the whole of the month of June, a thousand people a night and there they beheld the mystery of salvation and there was no pulling of punches at the end. As you know in the mystery plays they said now you lot, basically, you’ve been watching this, you’ve got a choice. You can either go that way to join the eternal in Heaven or you can go that way to join the damned in Hell - watch it! And people went out of these mysteries saying, you know, it had changed their lives. Now, when they go into worship, is that a kind of reaction? Do they come out of church as they came out of that exhibition - beholding … beholding salvation? BROWN The policy that seems to be emerging from what you’re saying is the church must get rid of all the ugly buildings. ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY There’s a good deal of ugliness about in certain parts, I have to say. But we must find ways of ensuring that our buildings are not just heritage centres - they are places of devotion, of prayer, of pilgrimage. BROWN The Church of England still has those great cultural treasures, reserves of affection, and influence on a local level. But when you look more closely at these assets they can all be sorted into two categories. They’re all either things it can’t afford to keep, or things it can’t afford to lose and distinguishing the two will not be simple. You can’t just say ‘get rid of all the buildings’, or ‘get rid of all the old building’ or even, in practice, ‘all the ugly ones’. The Church of England can’t realistically hope to be everywhere for everyone all the time any longer. But if it retreats into being a club, or even a network of clubs, that’s run for the benefit of its active members, it will shrivel completely. It has to maintain the ideal of parish life while the reality changes. Whatever happens, there’ll always be something called the Church of England. But if it gets the choices wrong, of what to keep and what to leave behind, it won’t be much of a church, and it won’t matter much to England.