Up at eight this morning to upload to WhatsApp the audio and text reflections prepared for this first day of Christian Aid week. After breakfast and prayers, I read a chapter of Akala's remarkable book 'Natives' about the persistence class divisions and racism in British Society over centuries. It's hard hitting, honest and accurate in its perceptions. It's also very well written. Clare made rye sourdough pizzas for lunch and we ate very early, as she had to leave early to take the bus across to Rumney to have her hair done, as I'd arranged to meet Rufus at the time when she needed a lift across town. She hadn't mentioned this to me in advance unfortunately.
Rufus came to visit from Leominster after lunch for our first face to face chat since last autumn. We drank coffee outside Cafe Castan and then walked around Llandaff and Pontcanna Fields. It was good to see him looking fit and well, to hear how his ministry is working out there and what future plans he's working on for early retirement and an experiment in self-supporting future ministry. The best thing is that he'll be returning to live in Wales. The number of people looking for pastoral care and support doesn't decrease. New ways to look after the 'sheep without a shepherd' badly need exploring, by those of us on the edge of the institutional church rather than at the centre fighting to preserve itself.
Due to the catastrophic decline of support, reduction in full-time ministerial posts, leaves more people than ever without pastoral help and support at critical moments in their lives. In retirement I've worked with scores with people on the fringes or beyond the reach of conventional pastoral ministry, during times of bereavement on top of my locum ministry in parishes. The need was there already and slowly growing over the past decade. It will continue to increase with fewer full time clergy. The economic impact of the pandemic on church adherence and support will exacerbate the trend. It must be a nightmare managing church resources to ensure remaining full time clergy (and pensioners like me) get paid.
It's really too early to say what is going to happen to church attendance and committed membership post pandemic. Reforms in the institutional church are necessary for economic reasons, but deeper reform and renewal to address pastoral concerns is needed way above and beyond finances. On-line worship was a stop-gap of sorts, born out of pastoral concern, addressing the crisis, but how does it figure in the long term picture? Streaming services might be a good idea for showcasing what different kinds of Christian worship is all about but does every parish need to do it, or just key centres of excellence? Who does it serve, once people are free to assemble for prayer again?
What if people lose the habit of regular churchgoing altogether and find they don't miss it? What if people find that they can find fellowship, encouragement and solace from purely secular associations, and no longer find the habitual teaching and mind-set of church community relates to their altered life experience? What are the chances of a mass religious revival of the kind that marked the evolution of church life from the seventeenth to twentieth century? We cannot tell. The Spirit works in unpredictable ways, not subject to analysis or calculation. All we can do is wait patiently through a time of uncertainty, and be ready to respond in trust and love to whatever happens - and maybe experiment a little as well.
I had a phone call this evening from my old friend Chris who is also destined to retire early from full time ministry later in the year. He's wondering how he'll be able to carry on pastoring in the community where he will still be living in retirement, as his wife is still a serving cleric in a neighbouring parish. It's an interesting conundrum which couldn't have existed in the church before the 1980s when women began to be ordained priest in Anglican churches. With all that's going on at the moment, my concern is that all the energy of our leadership hierarchy is invested in managing our way out of crisis, back to some new kind of ecclesiastical normal, rather than focusing on the practicalities of pastoral care and mutual support, on which authentic ecclesial community thrives.
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