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You are right. We live life together as the Church. We share the gospel. We serve the people of Devon with joy. You have summarised our calling.

We are able to serve the people of Devon because the people of Devon have served us. They passed the gospel on to us. We have the good news, and the worship that expresses it; we have the hymns, prayers, liturgy and we have the churches which are their gift to us, these large three-dimensional witnesses at the centre of every community. What they have given us, we hold out the present generation of Devon. In our worship we tell Devon that the Father of our Lord Jesus has been good and faithful to us for many generations, and that this long discipleship has made us a mutually-accountable, egalitarian, articulate and prosperous society. Each person is called to be responsible to his neighbours and to the next generation. We tell them that when we do not take what all previous generations have given us, we shrink back into a more authoritarian and less equal world and become a dependent, envious, resentful, timid people, afraid to speak and unable to listen to any news that does not affirm our own view of ourselves. When we do not hear the gospel our energies are directed toward ever more spurious forms of self-expression while our society becomes sectarian and totalitarian. The gospel makes us free;   Christian worship defies the powers of the present age and calls us towards a vaster view of humankind. This witness and worship is the one true thing we offer to our neighbours, in Devon or anywhere.

On Saturday evening the Knight family celebrates evensong. We do this publicly, and so it is our act of service to the people of Devon. We sit in the choir and say or sing the canticles, psalms, responses and a hymn. The children read out loud the lessons of the following Sunday morning. Beforehand we talk about the readings and so become aware of our progress though the gospel of Matthew. We pray our own intercessions antiphonally followed by the BCP collects. We say prayers in particular for all in authority, and in particular for those who overstep their authority. We intercede for those who do not pray for themselves, confess their sins as well our own and so we speak on their behalf, which is our priestly office.

There are short intervals of silence between prayers. There is none of the anxious prologues, apologies or playing with the microphone which interrupt every clergy-led service. There is no talk, no nervous attempts at ice-breaking, no embarrassment, no boredom. Since everyone gives the responses, every voice and mind is engaged. Another year or two of this and our children would be capable of saying evensong without a book and without an adult. They will probably have to.

This is our public act for the people of Devon. It takes place in church at the normal evensong time, it follows Common Worship and the Lectionary, and anyone can join. This worship service can expand or change form at different seasons to become, for example open air carol singing around a crib in Advent. We expect to be praying in church porches before long as we increasingly find doors locked.

So you are right. We share the gospel and we live together as the Church. We have two prayers: that we will not be prevented in this, and that we will not always be on our own.

What else can we do?

Here is what I said in our first conversation. You came to me, of course, in order to find out what my views were. I said three things to you.

The first was that all Christians are witnesses to God and icons of Christ. Each Christian is glad to meet another and recognise in him the image and gifts of Christ. We bear this witness together every time we pray in public in our morning and evening prayer. This service of public witness is as intrinsic to us as our breath, and it is our service to the world. The best we can do for the world is praise God, publicly, and so this is what we do.

The second was that each church needs to receive from all other churches the full packet of holy catholic and apostolic life, and we acknowledge this package when we receive the person who presides for us in the Eucharist. Our church is a faithful witness for as long as it receives what is passed to it by the whole worldwide church, not only contemporary but generations past and future. It receives as gift, not as command, whatever it can recognise from the diocese and national church as faithful. It cannot receive what does not seem to be faithful.

Thirdly I said that worship of God is the public service of our church to the people of our town, our neighbours and our nation. Our service to God is also our service to them. The service begins as we stand and sing a first hymn at the entrance of the Lord. The procession of priest, servers and congregation together form the procession of the Lord coming into the world to dwell with man. The procession comes down the side aisle, up the nave. In this shared act, priest and people represent the drama of God’s advent in this public pageant played out before heaven and earth, before our neighbours in the parish and the nation.

That procession and this service is our act of witness. It is our mission and evangelism, and it is our intercessory and priestly office. The congregation is not inert. We are at work, for our praise and thanksgiving is the ‘Work of God’. We Christians have been offering this public work of praise of God here, according to the panel of names of rectors by the south door, for eight hundred years (and probably some centuries before that).  No one has the authority to alter this.

The whole congregation sets out on this work of God at the start of the service.  When you, or any priest, halt the procession in order to address us chummily you break our dialogue with the Lord. We do not want to have our attention drawn to you, or to listen while you labour to establish some other form of rapport.  This is not vaudeville and the priest is not an entertainer. We do not want you to make our servers, stand and look foolish whilst you attempt to establish some basis other than the liturgy. Your own ad hoc remarks are no different from those we have all heard from the BBC all week long.

In this procession and service you are in persona Christi, so we greet you as the Lord coming into the world. Surely the Dean of a cathedral knows this much.  We are in a large public drama, a ‘passion play’, so all the world can see that God is with man. I pointed this out to you and asked you not to do it.  Now I ask you again not to undermine this corporate act of ours.

This is not a private matter solely between you and me. It is a concern for our public life together as a congregation. It was you who changed it from private to public, by making a report to a statutory body. In that Sunday morning conversation I suggested that the three of us should talk again so we could hear one another’s reasons, see perhaps where there has been misunderstanding, and so attempt some reconciliation. I suggested that that reconciliation must take place before the altar.

It is baffling that you should think that that pastoral care should consist in telling people what their moral failings are. And that you should tell them this so heatedly, before these witnesses, minutes after celebrating the Eucharist with them.  A second point is this: we are looking for a pastor for men who are angry as well as for those who are not, and indeed for men of every sort. A pastor must love and serve each member of the church regardless of their moral failings, despite those failings, and with some awareness that we all, and he himself, share these moral failings. That pastor will be able to cope with all people of all characters of the parish and may not decide that the character of any parishioner is deficient and that they should be sent away.

You replied by saying that you want your legal representative to be present at our next conversation. It is again astonishing that you think that recourse to lawyers is any way to offer pastoral care. One of us then reminded you of the command in Matthew to sort out issues before two witnesses, and then before the Church, and quoted 1 Corinthians 6.1 about not taking disputes outside the Church for judgement.

The way you have exercised power and taken decisions without consultation has been a shock to us. It seems to reveal such a low view of us and of our shared life and worship. It lacks the patience and self-control listed among the spiritual gifts. Our church is looking for pastoral, that is to say, spiritual oversight.  For you to resort to social workers and talk about using lawyers against parishioners within one month of your arrival is a colossal failure.  This has all taken place before our priest left the office of Rector, surely a breach of procedure and even of legality.

You came to visit me in order to find out what I thought. I told you.  At the end of our first conversation you told me that if I did not entirely share your views of Christian ministry you would not be able to work with me. I agree. It does not seem possible for you to work with us. And you do not want to work against us, do you?

The Church follows the Lord on a public year-long pilgrimage through the fasts and feasts of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost and Trinity.

The Church is the body of Christ passing through the world. When people see us processing through our town centres they are able to acknowledge that it is our Christian witness that we are bringing them. Christian worship is a public demonstration that God brings all contraries together, and puts them face-to-face in reconciliation, and side-by-side in fellowship. The world that looks on can see this meeting and, if it wishes, recognise this reconciliation and decide that it wants to become part of it.

In some seasons the church is a large and noisy demonstration passing through a crowded town centre. During the feasts of the Church year we are celebrating and on carnival. The world will part on each side to let us through and some will join us as we go.  We bless the world by greeting everyone as Christ’s future people. We greet them as examples of Christ’s body rejected, lost and forlorn, and we greet them as future members of his body redeemed, restored and made joyful.

At other times, during the fasts, we are on a demonstration of our public repentance and remorse. We are going out into neighbourhood and nation to bring them comfort and to repent for not having brought that comfort to them sooner. In our public processions we sing and bless. We sing psalms and hymns in alternation. We pray and intercede, kneeling together and keeping silence for long moments. So the form of our progress is simultaneously the way of the resurrection and glory, and the way of the cross and shame. As we go, the cross alternates with the glory, so at any one moment we are either repentant or joyful.

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Let us start by saying what you see first.

Continue reading “Our Parish Church”

In this covenant, God undertakes to maintain creation for us. Everything needs maintenance. Every machine works as long as it receives its occasional oil change. If its filter is not taken out, and cleaned or replaced, any mechanism will clog and stop working. Everything needs to be exposed to daylight or to receive the caustic of public truth. But the poor old British – no home truths have been told them for such a long time. Everything needs a service. And every church service is that service. Christian worship tells us what is missing, and supplies it to us, so that the Church can provide the maintenance that the nation requires.

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In the first two talks we said that the Gospel brings the reconciliation that allows a national communion to develop. Without Christianity, there is no covenant between rich and poor, or between one tribe and another, and so there is no nation, and no basis for an international community of nations. The law makes us secular: secularity is the achievement of Christianity, not an escape from it.  The Ten Commandments are our call to liberty and to communion. They call out of the savage all-against-all isolation of pagan society, and into civil life together. They give us such confidence that we are able to live with those who we do not know or do not like, so this confidence gives us this civility and this civilisation. Only Christian discipleship enables us to grow up towards the vast definition of humanity set out by the Gospel, towards maturity and holiness, made fit by God for life with him and with each other.

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We are under the covenant and so we settled. We are members of a robust and confident society, culture and nation. And we are on the move, following Abraham, who is following Christ. We alternate between being settled, and being nomads. In Lent and Passion week we are on the move, in file behind our Lord, and he is taking us with him through the very darkest places. Noah and Abraham, obedient to God’s call, stood up, left their communities and cultures and walked out into unknown, and so became the founders of a new society,  Israel. We are amongst their heirs; we worship their God. 

But why should we worship God? Or rather, why should we worship this God rather than some other?

 

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Out of the house of slavery I called you. This commandment, to worship this and not some other God, is the basis of all British history. The British were once in the house of slavery, of war and revenge. The gospel came to British tribes, and was nearly lost again as they were driven out by pagan Anglo-Saxon invaders, who then made their home here and were converted by British missionaries; and were later nearly overcome by further pagan Viking invaders, who settled were also converted by Anglo-Saxon missionaries. The arrival of Christianity reconciles warring tribes and creates a single unified nation; it teaches us not to idolise our kings or state power, and so no totalitarian state has taken hold here. This process is never over. The gospel is not Britain’s in perpetuity. The justice and peace that make possible the existence of a nation are the gift of God, not the achievement of this nation or its permanent possession.

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Buried in their deep valleys, in undated cob-walled farms hidden not only from the rest of England but even from each other, connected only by the inexplicable, Devonshire, high-banked, deep-cut lanes that are more like a maze of defensive burrows, these old Devonians lived in a time of their own… The breed was so distinct, so individualised and so all of a piece that they seemed to me also a separate race.
How rapidly that changed within the next decade, how completely that ancient world and its spirit vanished, as the older generation died off and gave way to sons who were plunged into the finance nightmares, the technological revolutions and international market madness that have since devastated farmers, farms, and farming ever since, intensifying right up to this moment…..
That seismic upheaval which has been, probably, one of the biggest extinctions so far in the evolution of the English countryside and farming tradition. … this deeply satisfying self-reliant if occasionally gruelling way of life had mutated – into a jittery, demoralised, industrial servitude, in effect farming not stock and land but grants and subsidies, at the mercy of foreign politicians, big business conglomerates, banks managers and accountants.

Ted Hughes Moortown Diaries