The scene is a very busy bookshop. A bepigtailed elderwoman protagonist approaches the information desk. She pauses for a moment and then asks…
“Excuse me, Religion is…?”
Her bearded interlocutor pauses for a moment and then replies….
“Religion is in the gold room, just up the stairs.”
He pauses once again, and then asks, “Or were you looking for a more esoteric answer?”
I fight this every stinkin’ time I’m in church. The average age of our Vestry is 47, the eldest is 69 and the youngest is 28 (*waves*).
However, all I hear about is how we are a ‘grey’ church in fear of dying.
I think it’s too much trust in statistics and not enough in the power of the Holy Spirit. And I will beat that through their heads if it KILLS ME.
Conversations about mission that assume the Church is dying are bad enough, but at least the subject is being talked about. It’s worse when the mere idea of having a conversation about mission causes consternation and retreat behind the brocaded curtains.
If such a conversation is to get going at all, however, we need to be prepared to rethink radically our ecclesiology. It may not be strictly inevitable that decline will continue, but we need to be realistic about the prospects (such as they are) for future provision of ordained ministers and stipends to sustain them. All churches are facing a decline in these areas.
P.S. – I’m not leaving the Holy Spirit out of the reckoning, simply saying that sober and realistic thinking is one of the less trumpeted gifts of the Spirit.
I was feeling much the same Kelvin, I was starting to believe all the doom and gloom merchants and wasn’t looking forward to another 3 days of it. I didn’t really think it was the case but when the dripping tap just keeps on going eventually you start to wonder. LYCIG gave me the kick up the backside I was needing to stop listening to the negative and concentrate on the positive and there is lots of that about. If we keep talking about decline we will talk ourselves into it, we need to stop it now!
Mary Sue,
Perhaps some parts of our church are glad to be grey.
But seriously, while I applaud the resistance to ‘sociological determinism’ (i.e. decline is inevitable), I think we can also think creatively about our demographics before we chuck out the baby, or the bathwater. It’s time to recycle the grey water.
Some recent thoughts I had are here:
http://www.dunc.info/?p=94
(I don’t know how to do that clever trackback thing…)
A colleague in the diocese has died. He was a young priest. I knew him as someone who was generous and kind. He was a year older than me and died very suddenly on Friday. Another funeral I suppose.
As we gather to read the word this morning, there is one thing that is inescapable ? it is all about sheep. Sheep and shepherds everywhere.
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The horror in Iraq grows ever deeper. The photographs of Americans torturing Iraqis have sickened me to the core. That they were doing this in one of Saddam Hussain's old torture palaces has managed to lower the moral status of the continued conflict even further.Not only that, but each horror like this makes it harder…
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