History affirms the truth in the saying that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Just as the Royal Navy was slow to realise the advantage of replacing reciprocating engines by turbines, so schools were unaware of the benefits accruing from adding other subjects to the Greek and Latin that were the mainstay of schools in the early 19th century. We learn to be comfortable with a received way of doing things.
The lockdown has accelerated existing trends. WFH is now an acceptable practice. Drinking at home is not only cheaper than drinking in a pub. It is safer. Pubs are closing. On-line shopping is resulting in the closure of high street shops. All this seems to show that we can very readily learn new tricks. Women’s football is blossoming. So is women’s boxing. Old dogs regard new tricks with some scepticism.
So if new tricks are half a dozen of one and half a dozen of the other, where do we stand in matters of national religion? Is the Church of England an old dog that cannot learn new tricks? On the face of it new tricks have come in the form of the ordination of women and the arrival of female bishops. New patterns of worship (and not just the authorised ones in Common Worship but the patterns introduced by worship-songsters) took time in the gestation but are now common place. Not even bishops are immune from the pressures of dissatisfied elements in their dioceses.
And so we look at trends. A dominating trend is centralising managerialism. This is being toyed with at present as a thoroughgoing way of reforming English Christianity. Over the horizon is the glimmer of a modest English Episcopalianism, USA style. English Christianity has always been an untidy thing and the received understanding of the Church of England as a national faith is now proving to be not a mile away from losing credibility. Whether a tidied up and centralised Church will serve us well must be a matter of some doubt.
KENYA FOOTSTEPS
‘The Key’, the monthly magazine of Bromley parish church, south London, has a piece in its current issue by Mary Print, a retired Bromley GP, about work amongst street boys and abandoned children in Kenya. Dr Print regularly visits Kenya to supervise the staff working on projects at present going forward. Bromley parish church was demolished by a WW2 bomb but has since been rebuilt. Bromley has been the birthplace and home of a number of well-known writers, among them H.G. Wells and the church historian Owen Chadwick.
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