“This winter — perhaps more so than for a long time — people right across the country, some in desperate need, will be turning to the local church, not for spiritual hope, but practical help. We will be there for them, in many cases, providing food and warmth”
Archbishop of York
It's ironic that right at the start of Advent, the beginning of the Christian year, an ONS Census announcement should tell us that the population of those in England and Wales who identify as Christians has fallen below 50% for the first time in 1,500 years. By far the greatest growth is among those who ‘do not belong to a religion’: that percentage has risen from 15% in 2001, through 25.2% in 2011, and to 37.2% in 2021.
Having been a Lay member of the Church of England’s General Synod throughout this period, part of me feels a sense of shame that this massive decline has occurred ‘on my watch’. While the Church itself is not the faith (it is the vehicle that should be carrying the faith forward from generation to generation) I have to say that we’re not doing that job well.
But when you look at the secular culture which surrounds us now, it is more embedded than ever with the values that Jesus taught — arguably more so than the Church itself. So, people may not identify as Christians, but they do understand the core teaching — to love our neighbours as ourselves — just as much. or perhaps even more, than those who do identify as Christian.
The heart of Christian teaching is so incredibly simple, although over the centuries we have made it look incredibly complicated.
It starts with the second ‘great commandment (Mark 12: 30-31), to love our neighbours as ourselves. My view is that this is an integral part of being human, and modern secular civilisation seems to bear this out. However, as we commented last week, we are certainly not free of senseless violence, which might cause many to question this.
Next, there's the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10: 29-37), in answer to the question, ‘Who is my neighbour?’. The answer is, the person least likely to meet that dictionary definition: the stranger, those most in need, those most likely to be ignored by ‘the good and the great’.
Finally, turn to the story of the sheep and goats, where someone is welcomed into heaven for the reason ‘whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me’ (Matthew 25:40). In other words, those who share that love for their neighbour as themselves are at the same time loving God — so the first commandment is fulfilled by doing the second; which is not surprising because, as John tells us, the nature of our conscious creator is love (1 John 4:8 and 16).
And the joy is — that's what most of our population is doing!
Meanwhile the Church just appears to tie itself in knots over second-order issues: possibly the greatest of these being same-sex partnerships. The Bishop of Oxford, Steven Croft, who has witnessed the hand-wringing over this within the Church for decades, has reached a conclusion which seeks to converge with society: but still the issue occupies far too much time and attention within the Church. In a faith which states ‘judge not, that you be not judged’ (Luke 6: 37), these are issues which should be left to individual conscience, as Bishop Steven proposes.
As he writes, ‘There are many other issues rightly seeking to claim the attention of the Church, not least the call to support the communities we serve and the wider world in the work of recovery and rebuilding from the Covid-19 crisis’.
But that's not the only divergence from understanding what ‘sharing love’ is all about. One of the other challenges is that society has moved too fast for the Church to keep up. Nineteenth-century theologian Richard Hooker spoke of the Anglican Church being like a three-legged stool, comprising Tradition, Scripture and Reason, but the Tradition leg has grown to be far too big, and the Reason leg far too small.
An example of this is the priority given to the Eucharist, or Holy Communion, in Church services. This service is built around the most complex part of Christian witness: the self-sacrifice of Jesus on the cross and his subsequent resurrection. In a world with limited understanding of the word ‘sacrifice’, this is not a helpful entry point for those curious to learn more about the Christian faith. By focusing on sin rather than love, it excludes rather than welcomes: novelist Kathleen Norris recalled the response to her suggestion to a deeply challenged person to try going to church as ‘Why should I do that? It would make me feel worse than I did before’.
In my view, there are three core reasons for Jesus’s life on earth: to show us the nature of God (‘Emmanuel’, or ‘God with us’); to teach us how to relate to each other (sharing love - as discussed above), and the complex story of self-sacrifice to redeem humanity.
We celebrate the first of these each year at Christmas. I regret to say that the teaching is almost conspicuous by its absence, for those who have no connection with the Church. Meanwhile the principal route to understanding the third, which we celebrate each year on Good Friday and Easter Day, is in preparation for confirmation. This is very thin on the ground.
So, the Church needs to understand why it is doing such a bad job in being the vehicle to carry the faith forward from generation to generation. We are not supposed to be an organisation of 16,000 clubs, dressed up in finery and wrapped up in ceremony: as Archbishop William Temple said ‘The Church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members’. We are supposed to help people in all walks of life to understand why this simple process of sharing love, helping those most in need and most different to us, is bringing us closer to God.
As Bishop Stephen says in response to the Census announcement, ‘Local churches are centres of service and support to their local communities because we want to love our neighbours as ourselves and this is the beginning of our witness to Jesus’.
In other words, community action is the cutting edge of the Christian faith.
In Jesus’s day, the religious people of that time had become similarly ‘holier than thou’, and Jesus lost no time in challenging them for their hypocrisy. The Church of today must get itself out of that trap, and there's no better time to start than this Christmas.
Gavin Oldham OBE
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