‘The 20th century Church of England created new bishoprics as fast as it lost congregations,’ says Sir Simon Jenkins, a sympathetic observer of England’s religious panoply. The idea of multiplying custodians of the Gospel in sync with a decline in the numbers of Christian believers would have appealed to Lewis Carroll, clergyman and fantasist, inventor of the mad hatter’s tea-party, mathematician who had a way with words. Truly, we are never very far away from Wonderland.
This imbalance is not peculiar to the C of E, of course. We are ever ready to enlarge the House of Lords. The fewer ships, the more admirals is the rule in the Royal Navy. The fewer squaddies, the more generals is the rule in the Army. Hierarchies are not the only group congenitally prone to inflation. The same is true of experts. We may very well say that an expert is an ordinary person a long way from home or that experts know more and more about less and less. Bureaucrats along with experts will reasonably point out that a world of social media, of benefits and qualifications, must needs have people to look after the machinery and keep it maintained and lubricated.
As a media friend of mine said when his diocese set up a new archdeaconry, Satan must have trembled at this latest threat to his composure. The English Dean of Chicago cathedral, Dominic Barrington, has in the last few days expressed his misgivings about the centralising and inflationary trend in the UK branch of the Anglican Communion just as Bishop Gerald Ellison was doing back in the sixties. But then, we live in an age of centralism. That requires regulators, inspectors and managers. Country people will instantly declare that life may well be much more complicated these days but pigs don’t grow big by being weighed.
We can take lessons from supermarkets, as well as the lilies of the field. Jumbo-sized grocers are always sensitive to the butterfly habits of customers. They know that when numbers fall something has to be done. This is a matter of urgency. Customer needs must be identified. Changes must be made. The marketing strategy must be amended. But, aside from urgency, what is appropriate to a supermarket is not necessarily the best way forward for an institution conveying a message. The loss of congregations is at best disconcerting and at worst, overwhelming. It can prove to be the elephant in the room when the Church is giving thought to its responsibilities. We must, however, be true to our commission. We are not at liberty to trim the message or its vehicle to make it palatable.
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