growth Archives - Page 3 of 4 - What is in Kelvin's Head?

Cathedrals are doing quite well.

Now, as with all generalisations and stereotypes, this is both sometimes true and sometimes not. However, it is something that quite a lot of people are talking about.

The recent Grubb Institute report had some astonishing statistics suggesting that large portions of the adult population in England had entered a cathedral within the last year. Futhermore, people seemed to think of cathedrals as places which projected spiritual values and were places where the life of the spirit could be nourished and blessed.

I’m always interested in reports like this. The danger of them is that they make cathedral people smug and non-cathedral folk cross and jealous. However, it is important to try to listen to what is behind these reports of success in order to see whether there is something in the life of cathedral congregations that can be shared in other contexts. I happen to think that there is.

I was very struck recently by a conversation with someone in St Mary’s. We were talking about the emergent/emerging church phenomenon. There’s lots more to be said about that, but for now, we’ll just live with the idea that it means new, non-traditional ways of being a Christian community – pub church, late night church, fresh expressions of church and all the ballyhoo.

(I was entertained recently by the idea that I might get a grant for something to do with our regular Sunday morning liturgy by branding it as Mass Church – a Fresh Expressions Experience).

Anyway, back to the conversation. I was saying to someone that I sometimes wonder whether there might be space for an emergent expression of faith within St Mary’s. Some places have done this quite well, maintaining a fairly trad service in the morning, for example alongside an alternative community late on a Sunday evening. Maybe we are doing this already a bit with the Open Silence (an hour of shared silence on a Sunday evening) that takes place once a month.

I was musing that I was surprised that we had not got a more confident, weekly Fresh Expression going in St Mary’s and also noting that Scotland does not seem to be particularly fertile ground for it. As with Alpha, Fresh Expressions sometimes seem to be more of a thing south of the border than north of it.

The person I was talking to said, “Hmm, yes, but you’ve got to remember that you’re allowing the cathedral congregation to be a fresh expression…”

It was one of the moments where all the lights seem to turn on at once.

“Yes,” he said, “you’re allowing the congregation to grow using the themes that the fresh expressions people use. Remember that many of us here never expected to find that our faith could be sustained in a traditional church. Many of us thought that we had moved beyond all that. We’re all surprised to find ourselves here.”

What an interesting thing to think about.

Here are some of the themes that I think are sometimes floating around the emerging/emergent experience which I think we are playfully engaging with in and around St Mary’s:

art mattering
visual stuff being important
online being integral
networks of smaller groups making up something bigger
ability to live with apparent contradictions
freedom to experiment
radical hospitality and welcome
LGBT/Straight inclusive
embracing tradition without being hidebound
influence of monastic patterns, rhythms and themes
not being embarrassed by joy

Ring any bells with you?

Never mind the quality, feel the width

Might it be that if we managed to do things just a little better in church, more people might turn up?

Last week there was a significant report published for the Church in Wales as it considers the way forward. The picture is familiar – lots of buildings, aging congregations, clergy deployment issues etc. (Note that one of the authors of the report is our own Prof Peattie).

I was struck by the section on Cathedrals which says this:

We believe that cathedrals will have an increasingly important role in the church of the future. Experience from elsewhere shows that although church attendance generally is declining, cathedral congregations continue to grow. This is because they can be centres of excellence for preaching, education and music. People today are prepared to travel to find such excellence. This means that cathedrals need to be fully part of the mission and ministry strategy of each Diocese and, within the overall principle of collaborative ministry, their distinctive role needs to be taken into account for this, as well as for the Ministry Area in which they are situated.
Recommendation VIII
The distinctive role of each cathedral as a centre of excellence should be fully integrated into the mission and ministry strategy of its Diocese.

Now, I think that there is a lot of truth behind that comment about why cathedrals (and it is some cathedrals really, not all of them) are feeling rather buoyant at the moment. People are indeed prepared to travel to find good quality worship. Cathedrals often are centres of excellence.

However I have to admit to getting a little frustrated when people don’t seem to take on board what seems rather obvious to me. Namely that you don’t need to be a cathedral in order to do things well. It seems to me to be stating the obvious to suggest that if churches raised their game a bit (and everyone can improve – that’s the culture we are looking for, not a culture of perfection for there is no such thing) then just perhaps more people would show up. Also, perhaps more people would show up more often (one of the real problems now is that people believe they come to church just about every week when often they actually come just about every third week).

This isn’t about styles of worship either. A good deal of the attraction that many people have felt to the larger Evangelical churches in the last couple of decades has been about the quality of their worship. There too, people are prepared to travel and are often delighted to find what they are looking for.

We are often exhorted to do new things in church in order to bring people in. I’ve very, very seldom been exhorted to do old things well.

However, I’d suggest it is at least as likely to be successful as launching out in new directions for fresh expressions of being church.

Never mind the breadth – feel the quality. It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money either. You don’t need to be loaded as a congregation to seek to up your game.

You might need to be brave enough to ask the organist who has been murdering hymns for 82 years to retire with grace and honour. You might need to be wise enough to agree shoe tactics with everyone who appears at the front. It might mean changing the way the hymns are chosen and asking regularly what the best ways of getting new material in the list actually are in your circumstances. It might mean working that bit harder on the preaching. (Is there preacher that can’t get better? – I don’t think so). It might mean setting up a worship committee and comparing its budget to the property budget annually. It might mean looking to cathedrals as training resources for the wider diocese in this area – though my most recent attempt to hold a day in St Mary’s for clergy and musicians from around our diocese fell flat on its belly.

It seems to me that there are all kinds of things that might be done.

We seem to recognise implicitly in the statements that are made about cathedrals that quality matters. Why do we find it so difficult to commit ourselves to the obvious consequences? What are we frightened of when we think of the words quality and excellence and associate them with worship?

Are we yet offering all that we are and all that we have?

Cathedral as Emergent Community

Never mind the quality, feel the width

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