The future of the English parish church

Above: you might have to click on the image to enlarge it to see the suffragan bishop (the lighting was subdued as their was a slideshow with the talk).

A meeting of the county’s architectural trust.

It was held in a church on the eastern side of the county. Because I was late I missed the reception in the manor house next door. I was only just in time for the talk, which began at 8pm.

The guest speaker was a suffragan bishop. Middle-aged, middle-class lefty liberal (I’m basing this analysis of his political views upon his references to Amnesty International, Palestinian rights, and frequent mentions of “diversity”). He illustrated his talk with a slideshow projected onto a screen.

The subject of the suffragan bishop’s talk was the future of the English parish church. He showed us slides of his favourite churches which all seemed to be empty multi-use urban buildings (he was particularly keen on church buildings doubling as community centres). It soon became apparent that he had a obsession with church fittings (“clutter and mess” he described the accretions of history).

“Don’t be afraid of space” he told us, “you can always improve a church building by taking things out.”

He informed us the English parish church had to prepare for even greater change (as if enough damage hadn’t been done already). In particular he told us we had to be more open to ethnic groups who saw the Anglican church as “exclusive”. He told us bluntly “we have systematically alienated people from our buildings.”

His talk was arrogant and deliberately offensive. He was also intellectually dishonest. At the time I was very angry at the things he said, but thinking about it later I feel he was actually a pathetic figure – he obviously hasn’t a clue what to do about falling attendances and thinks the answer is to rebrand the English parish church as a multi-cultural community centre.

The Anglican church is experiencing falling attendances because of a failure to communicate. This failure is one of management – in particular middle and senior management. Looking at the Anglican church purely as an organisation (a multi-million pound organisation with eleven thousand “branches”) one has to condemn the fact that none of their personnel (absolutely NONE of them) seems to have had any professional training in marketing or advertising or public relations.

Putting up a hand-made poster on the lych-gate may have worked fifty years ago, but in the twenty-first century they need to make more of an effort.

From my observation there is nothing wrong with Anglican “content” (the services, the music, the social groups, the sense of history and continuity, the community work etc) but hardly anyone in wider society knows what is going on.