I began to write this letter the day after hearing the news that our much loved Church Warden, Sarah Knight, had died peacefully after a final struggle with a cancer which returned more quickly than we had expected. We will pay tribute to her and all that she did for this church in next month’s magazine. In the meantime parish life goes on as she would have wanted it to, building up this church in ways which she did so much to support.
Some of you will remember the London Challenge, launched in 2002, which encouraged the provision in every parish of an education course in the essentials of Christian belief. Fr Jim wrote about the course we are about to launch in last month’s magazine, and you will I hope have seen posters advertising it around the church and in Hampstead. Here I want to reflect more generally on the importance of education in the life of the church. We currently provide three Bible study groups, which each meet twice monthly, three lecture series a year in the Hampstead Christian Study Centre and an ecumenical Lent Course, of which the last is the best attended. In recent Bible study groups the same issue has emerged “It feels more and more as though you have to be an expert to be a Christian!”
It is undoubtedly the case that being a Christian has become intellectually more challenging for clergy and laity in modern society. Unbalanced by the rapidity of social, cultural and technological change we feel more and more at a distance from the world of the Bible and the ancient and medieval Church. Confronted by a press which loves to highlight divisions within the church, and atheistic attacks upon the church, we pine for clear and simple answers, strong leadership and the silencing of those we see as trouble makers. And yet paradoxically we also find authority difficult, we are not sure we like being told what to think, we each have a basic view of what Christianity is really all about’ which is why we are in church in the first place and many of us carry a set of doubts or uncertainties which make us wary of identifying too closely with the Church (with a capital C’). We may be aware that there are many things we don’t know – even our children ask questions we can’t answer but we are anxious about exposing what we think of as our ignorance.
So what is the place of education in the church and what are the proper principles behind it? Cardinal Newman had one of the most subtle and sensitive theological minds of the 19th century and his calling was to be a teacher. When he left the Church of England for the Roman Catholic Church he took with him a concern for the education of the laity which curiously to us seemed threatening to the Catholic hierarchy. Notoriously a certain Monsignor Talbot claimed that the province of the laity was to hunt, to shoot and to entertain. These matters they understand, but to meddle with ecclesiastical matters they have no right at all.’ Behind that rash statement lay a more complex argument about how doctrinal development came to be defined, how the sensus fidelium’ (the settled opinion of the faithful), was to be discovered. Newman had a strong sense of the wholeness of the church; the Church has authority only while all the members conspire together’ by which he meant, not to plot, but to work together for a common purpose in the faith. To cut the laity off from education and discussion in the faith would, Newman felt end either in indifference or superstition. When clergy and laity work together in the task of learning the church becomes a place of dynamic and therapeutic grace, where heart, mind and spirit come together to bring about wholeness or holiness in all its members.
Methods of teaching and learning may have changed but the basic principle remains the same. We shall only grow as a Christian community if we are prepared to share our ignorance and uncertainty as well as our settled convictions and understandings. We shall only grow if we can be challenged and informed; and more particularly the clergy will only be able to preach more directly and helpfully if they can see more deeply what is going on in the minds of those to whom they preach. And finally we shall only grow as we discover together what matters most to us, and what will give us the courage of our convictions. Our faith is not, whatever the media may think, a private opinion; it is something which is only true and for our good if it is true and good for everyone and therefore to be shared, not threateningly or arrogantly, but in ways which show both passion and compassion. Only if we have learnt to share our faith together in such ways will we be able to find ways of sharing it with others.
With my love and prayers,
Fr Stephen