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Dear Deans – a Scottish Response

06/06/2015 By 3 Comments

Within the last week, a rather provocative blog post emerged about the experience of going to cathedrals. It was particularly focussed, I think on the experience of going to a cathedral in England. (You can find it here: Dear Deans – by A Reasonable Enthusiast).

Richard Moy, its author writes rather articulately about going to many cathedrals and finding people there whom he perceives the cathedrals to be letting down by not engaging them with the gospel during their visit. “Could there not be a homily?”, he wonders and indeed, offers to send someone along to preach one if there’s no-one locally available.

I find myself both agreeing with Richard and disagreeing with him at the same time.

I think that here in Glasgow, at least at St Mary’s, we are in quite a different situation to the situation of the cathedrals in England, particularly with regards to funding. However once you hang the word cathedral outside a building it somehow takes on a whole bunch of expectations that arise from that world. We live with those expecations and also live in a situation where we’ve got to work really hard to gather together people who enjoy this kind of encounter with God so much that they will help to support it financially and with their time and talents. There’s a rather direct relationship between the congregation’s cash and the cathedral’s cash that does focus the mind and does make things different to places where the Church Commissioners hand out lots of dosh.

Where I agree with Richard is that I think that it is true that there are a lot of big churches which don’t engage people particularly well with the purpose that the building was built for. I weary, for example, of guided tours that are about a building’s history that don’t weave faith stories into the tour. Here at St Mary’s, if I was showing any group around the building, I’ve a repertoire of three guided tours. The one I probably do most often takes in 7 places in the cathedral where I can talk about the seven sacraments and how this is a place where events of huge spiritual significance take place for individuals. Another wander around the building might involve me talking about the murals that we’ve got which brilliantly place gospel events in our locality. The annunciation is happening in a tenement flat just down the road. Of course it is.

My third guided tour would be to look behind the scenes and take in a sacristy safari and a look into places that the general public don’t normally get to see.

I simply can’t imagine doing a tour or teaching anyone else to do a tour that focused on the architectural aspects of the building or who gave which window in which year. The building has a purpose and when we’ve got visitors in, I do want to bring it to life.

I am conscious though of some churches which have been re-ordered so badly to include drumkits and projection screens that all one can think about in them is to wonder who sanctioned such ugliness. If cathedrals maintain people who care about beauty then so be it. The beauty of holiness is a concept found, you know, in the actual bible.

When it comes to services here, my presumption every week and at every service is that there are people who are there for  the first time and who don’t understand what is going on. We work incredibly hard at helping them to feel comfortable enough to participate and catch some of the wonder that has been woven into the fabric of the building for all the years that it has been built. I give some notices every week and we’ve learned as a congregation not to get bored with them but to rejoice in the fact that we are a place that seekers come to every week.

So, I agree with some of the things Richard Moy is saying. Lots of churches could engage people better.

However, I find myself disagreeing with Richard Moy too, particularly in his presumption that the only way in which the gospel can be conveyed is through a homily. The experience that I think most people who work in cathedrals would want to share with Richard is that this just ain’t so.

Boredom is one of the devil’s chief tools in church. And the truth is, I’ve found myself experiencing boredom in all kinds of churches. Cathedrals certainly don’t have the monopoly on this. Ranting sermons. Repetitive sermons. Sermons which seem to be concerned only with one view of the atonement. We’ve all heard them. Preaching itself is not the answer.

God meets people in silence. God meets people in music. God meets people lurking behind pillars wondering who they are and where they fit into the grand scheme of things.

And God meets people where people come together in friendship. We don’t talk about that often enough in church either. One of the things that happens in larger churches is that there’s a greater chance of meeting people who might become friends. (This applies in larger evangelical churches just as much as cathedrals). As I’ve said before, friendship is the great sacrament the church should have named instead of calling marriage a sacrament.

People don’t all go to the big evangelical tabernacles because of the sermons that are preached in them.

The truth is, people meet God in complex ways in church. Very many people encounter God in the worship rather than the preaching. That holds true regardless of whether one is an evangelical or whether one is whirling a thurible and scattering rose-petals in front of Jesus in the blessed sacrament of the altar. Trust me. I’ve met God in both places myself.

It is my view that preaching is rather important to those who come to St Mary’s Cathedral in Glasgow. I hope that people will often hear things that surprise them, move them and make them think. However, it isn’t the whole package and doesn’t pretend to represent it.

I preach to beguile not to convert and that may be part of the essence of what is going on in cathedrals. They represent zones of possibility, places where sinners, saints, pilgrims, visitors, tour parties, seekers, history freaks, amateur liturgists, art nuts, faithful God botherers, faithful atheists and all who pass by have a license to wonder.

Let us never remove that license by preaching at them only our presumptions about what they need to hear.

 

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A moratorium on mission?

13/03/2015 By 11 Comments

communicants roll

My introduction to irony came when I was but 7 years old, in the form of the title of the television programme. It was called: Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go Out and Do Something Less Boring Instead?

It seems to me that this title allows us a way in to thinking about something that’s quite difficult to talk about in many denominations including my own.

Here in this little corner of God’s vineyard we had a diocesan synod recently and in the company of others around the Scottish Episcopal Church we were asked to reflect on the diocesan statistics and to say something about what we thought that they meant.

It was obvious fairly quickly that few people wanted to get up and talk about what is very obviously not terribly good news.

Predictably, someone said that if we changed the way we measure the stats then maybe they would show that we are engaged with more people. Well, that’s true. However it is not really dealing with the question at hand. Some of the statistical records that we have got back over decades and are reasonably accurate. Indeed, I suspect the count we keep of how many communions each church has served is very accurate indeed. It is quite important, I think, to keep on recording the same statistics, even if in time, we decide that we want to know more in order to add something to our knowledge of what’s happening.

The plain fact is that like a lot of mainstream denominations, our stats are going down. It is also plain that this is not a universal reality. Some dioceses appear to be doing a bit better. And within dioceses, some congregations seem to be doing better whilst others are doing worse.

The whole point of gathering church stats is surely to try to understand the overall picture and see whether anything can be learned from them that will help people to plan for the future and make tweeks in our common life that might lead to growth – or at least starting to stem the decline. It is obvious that in this diocese at least, little that we’ve done in the last 30 years has made very much difference. We’ve had plenty of mission plans and plenty of decline.

One interesting observation that I’m looking at right now is at least worthy of investigation. It appears that those dioceses which are engaged in Mission Action Planning are declining at a faster rate than those who are not engaged in that exercise in Scotland.

Now, understanding why this might be so is rather important.

Here are some possibilities:

  1. Perhaps it is the case that dioceses that are facing a more challenging situation are more likely to engage in Mission Action Planning.
  2. Perhaps it is the case that the priorities set by dioceses in their Mission Action Planning are the wrong priorities.
  3. Perhaps it is the case that Mission Action Planning just doesn’t work and is in fact displacement activity that people engage in because it is easier than tackling the situations which lead to decline – something which is a very difficult thing to do.

The graph that I’ve posted at the top of this post is one that is causing considerable reflection here in the Diocese of Glasgow and Galloway. It shows fairly consistent decline over decades. The only particularly significant interruption to a fairly constant pattern is a significant drop in the first couple of  years of this century. This could be because that period was just after the collapse of the Mission 21 initiative through lack of funds. It could be because this period also saw the retirement of Richard Holloway who had given the Scottish Episcopal Church a significant profile that has never been recovered since. And it could be for neither of those reasons, for some other reason or it could just be one of those things we can’t explain.

However it is also fairly easy to see that big changes in mission policy in the Scottish Episcopal Church have made little impact here in this diocese. We’ve tried to change the church so that the diocese is the focus of mission rather than having a Scotland wide policy and each local bishop is now thought of as the leader of mission in their dioceses. I’ve opposed that policy shift. Others have thought it was a good thing. Whether good or bad, there’s no sign in the numbers that it has made the slightest difference whatsoever. Similarly with the Diocesan Growth Strategy that a lot of effort has gone into here. Again, I’ve struggled with it as I’ve always thought the priorities were the wrong priorities. However my own views don’t really matter right now. It isn’t working regardless of what anyone thinks about it.

To some extent, we should expect the stats for this diocese to have declined anyway just through demographics. Glasgow is depopulating and the population of Scotland is moving East. We should probably expect to see a small rise in the stats for Edinburgh diocese that reflect this. It is also the case that we may be doing less badly than some of our ecumenical friends.

My questions at the moment are these:

  1. What lessons can be learned from churches which have been growing through this period against the trend? Are their priorities different to the priorities promoted through the mission planning tools that are often used?  (No-one ever asks me why we’ve grown here at St Mary’s).
  2. Why do we think anyone might want to join a Scottish Episcopal congregation and how do we communicate that?
  3. How do we develop a new ecumenism that allows us to ask openly:
    Who are the most likely people to come to repopulate Episcopal churches and what specific strategies do we have to attract and retain them?

  4. Should we be interested in thinking about the “market share” of those who go to church and how should we measure this?

My suspicion is that growing churches tend to have good music, good websites, interesting worship and look somehow out beyond themselves – so I find myself asking whether we could be learning something from that.

In other words, Why Don’t We Just Switch Off Our Mission Planning Schemes and Go Out and Make Our Churches More Interesting Instead?

Do we need a moratorium on mission for 10 years until we’ve done that?

Thoughts?

 

 

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