Thank you for being our Church Wardens.
A Church Warden, as you know, safeguards our place of public prayer, so that anyone and everyone may come to Church to pray and worship God. The true worship of God is our refuge from all the insanities of our contemporary world that are broadcast at us all week.
Yet from what he has said and written in the parish bulletin, it is clear that the interim priest believes he represents the mandate of the diocese to bring changes to us, even though we have not sought them. But if such changes do not come from us, through consent, gathered over a long period, they are imposed. Then we simply have another unilateral ideological decision, pushed through by a central authority that wants to take decision-making away from us. You will be aware that every significant national institution is attempting to streamline, centralise and take decision-making away from us.
Over a period of many centuries, the Christian faith has enabled us to become mature, responsible, mutually-accountable persons. We are fully able to take decisions, for ourselves, for the long-term common good of our church and parish, as we are for national and local communities. We are not children, and any central institution that insists that decisions have already been taken, remotely, would seem to love control more than it loves us. We do not welcome totalitarians. We certainly do not set out to impose decisions on one another, do we?
Our church, like every other church, is fully sufficient as it stands before God. It is not the local branch of a national chain store. We do not take our orders from the centre. We take them from the Scriptures we hear each Sunday, and we take advice and discipleship from all the generations of the saints of the English Church from the beginning up until now. They formed us to withstand the destructive pressures of the world, for the world’s sake.
As we are all most painfully aware, for many decades the Church of England has not convinced anyone. We Christians are becoming fewer, our congregations smaller and more elderly, with the prospect that we will be one of the last Christian generations. This is so, despite the attempts of many in the hierarchy to make the gospel more attractive and accessible by reducing its demands. These attempts have been counter-productive, perhaps because everybody outside the Church can see that they are dishonest. The gospel is demanding – it ‘demands my life, my soul, my all,’ as Isaac Watts taught us to sing. As St Paul emphatically reminds us every time we read the letters to the Corinthians, the gospel has a cross in it, and therefore pain and confrontation are unavoidably part of the passion that the Lord takes us through. It is paradoxical that some elderly parishioners call for yet more infantilising ‘family services’, while we reply that the whole gospel, and the full package of Christian discipleship, is what our children are due, now and always. What is easy and uncontroversial is hardly worth having: what is hard, and represents adventure, with real risks – that is what young people want.
The views that we have to contribute are entirely the views shared by all previous generations of Christians. These views created a confident society with confident individuals capable of making reasonable judgements about how to serve the future. We do not believe that the present generation had a burst of insight not known before, or that some special revelation about the relationships of men and women has come to some particular elite in the last twenty years. Our worship together surely protects us from such gullibility.
Without Christian discipleship, this generation can only serve itself. The country now finds it difficult to sustain the marriages that protect families and bring into being the children that will be our next generation of mature decision-making adults. Only Christian discipline makes it possible for us to serve the next generation, as our parents’ generation served us, by passing on the whole Christian way of life that will allow them to take our place.
So I say the following with gentleness, gratitude to you and love. I wish there were many more young families. Elderly members of the PCC have no mandate from us to make decisions for us, or without us. To do so, would just be a coup by the elderly against the young. You do not intend to do this, do you?
One way of avoiding this, would be to coopt one of us onto the PCC. You may not look forward to hearing views different from your own, but you are surely all professional enough to cope. To do this would be to be a good warden of the Church, helping to secure for another generation our access to the worship of God
The Lord be with you
