The Church of England is in serious decline but at last the leadership of the church is facing up to this challenge. That was the theme of one item on Radio 4’s Sunday programme last week. It featured the statistician Linda Woodhead, from the University of Lancaster, who produces all the figures on decline. She was pleased that the Church of England is doing something but less pleased that the policy so far is to produce better bishops and clergy rather than exploring the reasons for the decline.
There are I suppose three aspects of decline all of which have different explanations. There is decline based on people leaving the church; decline based on increasing ignorance or misunderstanding of Christianity; and decline based on antipathy or active hostility to any kind of religion.
People give up going to church because they find nothing there to hold their attention and sympathy; as newcomers they may feel unwelcome; as children growing up they may find the church irrelevant to their needs and interests; as longer standing Christians they may disagree with a new vicar, who changes the church they are familiar with, or else some tragedy may occur in their lives and the church fails adequately to support them, or people just become bored and wonder whether they actually believe what their faith teaches them. Every congregation has a responsibility for being alert to such reasons for decline – we too need to find ways of being as hospitable, alert and supportive as we can.
Decline based on misunderstanding, ignorance, antipathy and hostility, is harder for us to respond to. There are certain things any one church can do, but an adequate response depends on the churches working together, on their public engagement, the quality of their leadership, their representation in the media, and the depth and sensitivity with which faith is lived and spoken about.
That last responsibility is one which also belongs to every individual Christian in every aspect of his or her social life outside the church – with what depth and sensitivity do we live and speak about our faith? I suspect we may on the whole be more comfortable with the idea of living our faith rather than talking about it. Being kind to our neighbour is that aspect of Christianity we can all aspire to; and yet we may all be challenged by the idea of heroic kindness – how far can kindness go and what form should it take in difficult situations? It is when kindness becomes difficult that we have to reflect on what our beliefs teach us. What is it about my faith which keeps me being kind however difficult it becomes?
And so we come to one of the crucial factors in the decline of faith – what are the factors that make it difficult to talk about faith with depth and sensitivity? Perhaps our gospel reading is a good place to begin. On the surface it looks not a little incredible with its supernatural glow, and vision of dead prophets. That is one problem the modern world has with an ancient text – it records things we do not expect to happen in our world, it portrays a society very remote from our own, where people believe things we can sometimes find very unpalatable. In the past people felt closer to the Bible because they found its world easier to imagine. That I suspect is not so with us. It may now seem that you need to know a lot more about the Bible – its history and context – before you can understand it. We no longer take it for granted that every Christian is a Bible reading Christian; so that is one challenge we have to set ourselves – can we become a more Bible reading church? Coming to our Lent course on Mark’s gospel might be a good place to start.
And then in a moment we shall say the Creed. Again that is full of statements which we may find hard to understand, however often we say it. So how do we find a language which makes the beliefs in our creed easier to communicate? I suspect that most preachers, including all of us who preach here, aren’t always aware of using language which we take for granted and don’t realise how difficult it may sound to others. Even a familiar phrase like, “God loves you””