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RADIO 4
CURRENT AFFAIRS
ANALYSIS
A CHURCH THAT MATTERS
TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED
DOCUMENTARY
Presenter: Andrew Brown
Producer: Chris Bowlby
Editor: Nicola Meyrick
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Broadcast Date:
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21.11.02

24.11.02
TLN246/02VT1047

Taking part in order of appearance:

Dr Jane Freeman
Lord Hurd
Revd Nerissa Jones
Peter Selby
Bishop of Worcester
Graham Cray
Bishop of Maidstone
Andreas Whittam Smith
The Church Commissioners
Dr David Hope
Archbishop of York

BROWN
The Church of England no longer
looks like something at the heart of English identity, and more

like a rather futile minority interest. The news has been

unremittingly bad for years. The attendance figures fall and fall;
nothing seems able to stop that except changing the way that
they are counted. Nor is money any better. At the beginning of
the Nineties, the Church lost 800m in property speculation; at
the end of the period, it lost another fortune on the stock market.
The incoming Archbishop of Canterbury is denounced as a
heretic. The church never seems to do anything in the
newspapers except argue over attitudes to women and gays. So
does the Church matter today? Will it still matter in 20 years
time?
FREEMAN
I dont think I ever took the calculation
will the Church of England survive but I do recognise that the
Church of England which will be there in 20/25 years when I - Im
looking at the very very end of my ministry - will be a different
matter.
HURD
I used to, as Home Secretary and
again as Foreign Secretary, used to just walk across the river to
Lambeth and listen and talk to the Archbishop of Canterbury in a
very informal way.
BROWN
Dr Jane Freeman, who was a
professional historian before she changed careers, in mid-life, to
become a curate in Waterloo, and Lord Hurd, who was at the
heart of conservative governments for fifteen years. Now hes
retired from politics, and works as a merchant banker; but in his
spare time, he also works for the Prison Reform Trust, and he
chaired a Committee trying to discover whether the job
description of Archbishop of Canterbury could be changed into
one that anyone could possibly hope to do. This interest in the
affairs of the Church is not uncommon in politics. For Lord Hurd,
its not piety, but necessary realism, even in questions as political
as war with Iraq.
HURD
Were talking about decisions to send
British soldiers into the Middle East to kill people and be killed.
These phrases are sometimes disguised but thats what were
actually talking about. I dont think you should do that or you can
do that successfully now in Britain, in 2002, unless there is
general support -not unanimous, of course. But unless theres a
general body which agrees that this is a just war, a reasonable
thing to do to kill and be killed in that cause. And the churches
are important in that.
BROWN
There is a paradox here. When Lord
Hurd was Home secretary, he took little notice of the church's
policies. Now he works for the Prison Reform Trust, todays
Home Secretary, it seems, takes little notice of him. The Church
is powerful only when it reflects the general moral sense of
society. and at a time when this moral sense is changing, the
church's influence must also change. So will the Church of
England still matter in 20 years' time when ours is a very
different country? To answer that question, we have to look
down on the ground, where it derives its real strength. However
much church attendance has declined, this is still the biggest
voluntary organisation in England. More people go to Anglican
churches on a Sunday than are members of all the political
parties put together. The reach of this organisation can been
seen at a glance from the skyscraper where Lord Hurd works in
the city of London. you can see clear down to St Botolph's,
Aldgate, where the Revd Nerissa Jones worked with the

homeless.
JONES
The Church of England remembering
itself and recollecting itself and at its best remembers that its
there for everybody. It does, most of the time, for instance,
anybody that hasnt got a denomination or any belief at all
generally calls for a Church of England clergy person to take a
funeral. The expectation of what the church ought to be like and
what it ought to do I think is much clearer than one would have
expected considering that hardly anybody comes to it. Ive
always been surprised by that. For instance, in one job when I
was working very much with people who had been at the
absolute kicking end of everything - every sort of disappointment,
every sort of misery and that they were actually, by this stage
living outside on the London streets, they had a very clear idea
of what a church ought to be. It was astonishing because so
often they had been extremely badly treated by either people
who called themselves Christians or by people who officially
were - like vicars. You know, turfed out of churches when they
were only sheltering from the rain, told to leave - a series of quite
disgraceful things had happened to them and yet it just seem to
make them all the more aware of what it ought to be like.
BROWN

And what was that?

JONES
Accepting, kind, friendly - good, really
BROWN
The ideal of the parish system is that
everyone in England has a priest to whom they can turn.
Everyone lives in a parish; there is not one inch of the country for
which the Church of England is not in some sense responsible.
Its not just an organisation for believers. Its an organisation for
everyone. If you believe -- as priests tend to -- that God has a
plan for the Church of England, then even when it seems quite
ignored and despised, the parish church is still working, as Peter
Selby, the Bishop of Worcester, makes clear.
SELBY
One of the things I often ask when Im
actually doing a very standard thing like presiding at a Eucharist,
you know, church or a midnight Eucharist or something, is to say,
it is essential to the value of what were doing that we should
believe that the whole community is a better place for the fact
that we, who most people have nothing to do with and dont
know anything about, are doing this. That we are making
assertions here by what we do that need to be made.
BROWN
These inaudible assertions, though,
are, subtle ones. The community around does not respond well
to preaching. For Nerissa Jones it is almost an impertinence, to
suggest that people should come to the Church of England
because they are, or want to be Christians.
JONES
I think the Church loses an immense
amount of respect if it mentions to parents of a baby that theyre
not married - why should they be married? A parish priest who
refuses for some mingy reason to baptise a baby, and I know
that a lot of people would immediately rush in to say, your
theology, where is it Nerissa? I would call it a mingy reason for
refusing to baptise this poor infant. Within a week, probably at
least 500 people will know how beastly Saint so and so is down
the road is because the person will have been very deeply hurt
and will let all that out at the bus stop, at work and people will
say, well what else can you expect?

CRAY
Are we to be the nations insurance
policy and occasionally the nations fire brigade? No. If its true,
our job is to tell everybody we believe its true and why we think it
is and to tell them rather than wait til the house burns down and
they phone up.
BROWN
Graham Cray, the Bishop of
Maidstone, and one of the churchs leading evangelical thinkers.
Evangelicals have no desire for their church to serve as a busshelter for agnostics. No one, he thinks, would stop at a place
like that. He believes that the Church really must move into a
world where even the fundamental elements of the Christian
story have already been largely forgotten.
CRAY
In the years of things like the Billy
Graham crusades - he called back to faith people who knew the
story. He didnt have to tell the story, he re-awoke people to the
significance of it. If that is not locked away in the beginning,
there is absolutely no reason to expect that people will get to a
style of life and suddenly flip back an era that does not relate to
their upbringing. Therefore, if the church is not missionary and I
believe its fundamental DNA is to be missionary, it can expect to
become more and more marginalised.
BROWN
But for many people, there is still
something cringe-making about the church's attempts to be
missionary, or to reach out to a younger generation. Practically
no one between the ages of fifteen and thirty ever goes near a
church, but why should they? Surely, these people will just grow
up and return to Christianity once they have children of their
own, and, perhaps, need a place in a church-run school. In Kent
alone, where Graham Cray is a bishop, the Church owns a
quarter of all the primary schools. Andreas Whittam Smith,
himself the son of a vicar, now runs the Church Commissioners,
who control the Churchs still considerable fortune. Hes not too
worried about youth.
WHITTAM SMITH
The view that theyre going to grow up
into it is quite good. When I worked on the Telegraph many
aeons ago, they were always worrying about this problem. And I
said, you know, dont worry people do get to 40 or 45 in due
course and theyll come back - and they did. So, what I think we
can see is that discussions of spiritual matters are a little bit
more out in the open now in British discourse. We have been
extremely reserved and I belong to a very, very reserved
generation. I dont speak about my beliefs publicly or even
much privately, not even much inside my family - very brief
interchanges about these matters.
BROWN
This is almost anti-missionary - its
certainly close to the traditional attitude of the Church of
England. But many people nowadays, even in the middle
classes, are second or third-generation non-Christians. Theyve
grown up without ever acquiring any Christian background to
return to. Increasingly it looks as if these disputes about where
boundaries must be set are being settled, along with other
arguments, by hard cash. The facts of life are evangelical, the
kind of ministry to the agnostic or unbeliever that Nerissa Jones
believes in has to be subsidised by more committed Christians;
and without fresh churchgoers somewhere in the country, this
just wont happen. Local congregations must increasingly find
the money for everything their church does, because there is
nothing left at the centre, as the Archbishop of York, Dr David
Hope, points out.

HOPE
Basically, the Commissioners funds
are pension funds and we have more people being paid now, in
that sense as pensioners, clergy and their spouses than we have
actually ordained stipendiary clergy. And that number, of course,
is diminishing and this is one of the difficulties - the age range of
clergy is such that the numbers of those retiring - and they are
tending to retire at 65 rather than 70 because theyre so fed up
of all the bureaucracy and the paper and all the rest of it and the
numbers coming in are not sufficient, as it were, we can measure
it with the numbers of those retiring simply to hold the numbers
steady.
BROWN
This has huge practical implications.
It threatens the whole idea of a national church, which might be
forced to retreat into disconnected patches of middle class life.
HOPE
The parish system itself, I think, is in
very great danger of breaking down almost altogether and one of
my concerns of the present time is the fact that, certainly in our
own diocese of York, were looking at adding on. Will a vicar,
whos already got 3 parishes, take on another and then another
and another. And I think that we really cannot go on like that.
BROWN
Under the headlines about sex and
schism, this financial crisis has been the story of the last ten
years: what was meant as the decade of evangelism will be
remembered as the decade of the pension fund crisis. Andreas
Whittam Smith was brought in to give the church fresh, radical
approaches to the problem. Like Lord Hurd, he is an example of
the successful and powerful layman through whom the Church of
England has traditionally exercised a lot of its influence.
WHITTAM SMITH
I think my experience as 26 years as
a financial journalist, becoming City Editor of the Daily
Telegraph, my experience of starting a newspaper, The
Independent, and so on, my experience as a film censor, Im
also chairman of the body which handles all the complaints in the
financial markets. I think all these experiences, I find each one
of them is of pretty high value to me in doing this new job. And I
should also say perhaps, that this is the most difficult job that Ive
ever tried to do - that is clear to me.
BROWN
What makes his job so hard to do is
really the fact that local loyalties seem to have no connection to
the national institutions of the Church.
WHITTAM SMITH
What I have learned about central
institutions is that to some extent youre in the driving seat of a
car with apparently a steering wheel and apparently an
acceleration and apparently a brake but when you turn the wheel
or press the pedals nothing much happens. Thats the nature of
it. It is highly decentralised. These things, if not done locally,
wont be done at all.
BROWN
So what is being done locally? This
financial crisis has given an entirely new sharpness to doctrinal
disputes. They are no longer just about ideas, on which people
can agree to disagree; thats how Anglicans have traditionally felt
themselves far more agreeable than other churches. But that
was a much more comfortable assumption when parishes
thought themselves economically independent. The
disagreements now involve congregations being asked to pay for

ideas and people they disapprove of violently.

Conservative evangelical parishes are asked to subsidise gay
priests who keep their boyfriends in the vicarage. Parishes with
women priests are expected to fund bishops appointed solely to
minister to their opponents, who believe that women arent real
priests at all.
The Church of England can only raise money from its living
members now; it has used up the generosity of its dead ones.
One consequence of this is that the dead have been very visibly
disenfranchised. Much of what goes on in churches now not
least the presence of 2000 women priests would have
completely scandalised the Christians of fifty years ago, let alone
the founders of the Church. But when you disenfranchise the
dead, you give a vote to living congregations, and the more
money they raise, the more of a say they will want in its
spending. The Archbishop of York.
ARCHBISHOP OF YORK
We need to be aware of the
fact that parishes will say, well, you know, if we get this vicar,
youre going to sing our particular tune and if you dont sing our
tune or we dont like your preaching, or we dont do this, that,
were not going to give the money. I think that would be very
unfortunate.
BROWN
ARCHBISHOP OF YORK
already about.

Do you think it might happen?

Theres an element of that

SELBY
I mean, frankly, some of the threats to
walk out and all the rest of it are power plays and they are
financial power plays at that.
BROWN
Bishop Peter Selby, who has faced in
his own diocese of Worcester a revolt from a conservative
evangelical parish which regards him as a heretic.
SELBY
I think that I want to ask people who
engage in those, suppose you won - where would that leave
you? What kind of a church would you be if you ended up being
a church that had survived and grown by withdrawing from
relationships to difficult places? That would be my question.
BROWN
Even without theological disputes,
many parishioners are simply resentful at being asked to raise
tens of thousands of pounds every year, not for the support of
their own church, but to fulfil a diocesan quota. Nerissa Jones
has to raise some of this money.
JONES
They do feel taxed and the sums of
money which are going to be asked for, for instance, for the
Parish Im in now, are considerably in advance of what theyve
paid before. Its a tremendous amount of actually teaching
people, I think, helping people to understand that where you are
richer what youre helping to pay for is for the Parish priest in that
parish x where theyve got 2 or 3 people only in the
congregation who are employed. Maybe parishes will almost
have to be twinned with other parishes so that people can see
where their moneys gone, in effect - even if its only on paper
that you could have the knowledge that your parish share is, you
know, over and above your own share is actually helping out
these very nice people here.
BROWN
This will work, but only if all Christians

think each other nice. Thats not been my experience in fifteen

years of writing about them. And what happens when nice
Christians find they have to give to nasty ones? This is a
question that really threatens to disrupt the Church of England.
Weve seen how the perhaps ridiculous structures of
formal establishment are sustained by the respect and affection
in which the Church of England is held. It can, it appears, survive
perfectly well in a country where people dont believe in God.
Historically, it has always been threatened far more by people
who believe too fervently. But can it survive when its own
members no longer believe in the Church of England? The
financial crisis, where the Church can no longer depend on its
inherited wealth goes hand in hand with a crisis of legitimacy,
where the church can no longer depend on authority inherited
from a vanished Christian past. Instead, it relies on the consent
of the taxed. It even has a sort of parliament, the General Synod,
where elected representatives discuss, and occasionally decide,
the Churchs future. But Democracy, even the limited and filtered
democracy of church government, is powerful, dangerous stuff.
Its difficult to find the dose which will invigorate the patient
without exciting him to death. The really disruptive thing about
decision-making is that churches they have to believe that God is
speaking through the election results. Peter Selby.
SELBY
The process of appointing or
choosing an Archbishop is itself a representative process. There
was a huge input of stuff that gets funnelled gradually like an egg
timer into a room full of people and prime ministers and all that
and out of that comes an Archbishop. And then, the call thats
gone to the Archbishop and that Archbishop becomes a call to
the rest of us. Because having got that Archbishop, that then
constitutes a question to me, a question to all of us what that
says that it was that Archbishop, that kind of person at this kind
of time, what that says about what Im suppose to be doing and
who Im suppose to be being.
BROWN
But there are quite clearly groups in
the church to whom what the choice of what this Archbishop
says is, hang on lads, were out of here.
SELBY
Well that is a response.
BROWN
Democracy seems to me inherently
fissiparous. Churches governed by their congregations are
notorious for splitting all the time and sitting loosely to any form
of central authority. If you don't like things, you discern that God
doesn't like them either, and go off and found a new
denomination. That is certainly the model of market-driven
Christianity in America. Its something the Church of England has
avoided up till now, and some people, like the historian and
priest Dr Jane Freeman feel confident that it will still be
avoidable.
FREEMAN
The Christian church has played the
game of whos got the clearest doctrine since it first began.
Thats a very, very old game that Christians get engaged with.
The Church of England has, from its very beginning, struggled
with those who wanted it to be slightly different or very different
and its gone on with that down the centuries. From the 16th and
17th Century Puritans to the 19th Century debates over biblical
criticism and evolution, the hostility to the Oxford Movement you have always had people who felt the church should be
different. And it has weathered those storms and remained, for

the most part, inclusive rather than exclusive.

BROWN
Perhaps the church can still
overcome theological difficulties, even those as deep as divide
Jane Freeman and the Archbishop of York, an unyielding
opponent of women priests. After all, however the clergy may
differ from one another, they all share the same pension fund,
and that is a powerful force for unity. But the past no longer
seems a wholly reliable guide to the future. The Church of
England today, like the country that surrounds it, is deeply
uneasy about its inheritance, both of privilege and of buildings.
Yes, the buildings. They are an extraordinary glory. They seem
to define our heritage as a nation. Whatever happens in the
doctrinal or sexual struggles, the deadliest threat to the future of
the Church of England may come from the most greatly loved
and inspiring things it owns: the almost empty churches. The
sums involved are terrifying. An international tourist attraction like
St Pauls Cathedral can raise 2m a year from visitors; but there
are thousands of churches youll never visit or even hear of that
could each use all that money. The members of the Church of
England raise locally more on the upkeep of heritage buildings
than any other institution, including English Heritage itself. To
Graham Cray, the Bishop of Maidstone, this is almost a scandal.
CRAY
I can give you a very stark example.
If you go to the Church of St. Nicholas, New Romney, you know,
a significant Grade 1 building, the vicar there whos due to retire
in a couple of years, through English heritage and other groups,
by the time he has left, will have raised a million pounds for that
building to make it just less than tolerable. Which basically
means to keep it dry. He has a lovely bitter sweet line to me he
says, in winter you can see every word. We have the legal
responsibility for these buildings and have to do it by the giving
of volunteers who dont have to come and dont have to give.
And Im quite convinced that at some time in the next decade a
very serious re-negotiation with the nation has to take place.
BROWN
So if the nation wants these churches
for heritage, the nation can pay for them for heritage - is that
what youre saying?
CRAY
Basically yes. Which is precisely the
situation in France which is considerably more secular than we
are.
BROWN
But it is not just the state, not just the
taxpayer, who might object to this. Any simple policy of getting
rid of church buildings that no one needs, and which may in fact
be actively demoralising because they are always three-quarters
empty, will run into fierce resistance from the local loyalties of the
Church of England. Andreas Whittam Smith.
WHITTAM SMITH
The test is if nobodys very fond of it
or not very greatly attracted to it - try making it redundant or
close it down which, in a way, should happen because theres
been two periods of competitive church building in this country.
One was toward the end of the medieval period when people
competed to put up churches purely to pray for the souls of their
family and so on. You go to Ipswich, youll see them all about 50
yards apart and in the Victorian period there was competitive
church building by people who wanted to make sure that their
particular branch of Anglicanism was well represented and so
on. So, me, Id be a little unsentimental about this - there were

never worshippers or parishioners for these churches from the

beginning - not since the day they were consecrated. But you try
making one of them redundant and youll find that people will
always, always defend them to the last.
BROWN
A church that gives up on its beautiful
buildings is also giving up a great deal of what makes it attractive
to outsiders. For the Archbishop of York, the church needs all the
resources it can use to make religion as compelling to the modern
imagination as art is. But in the Millennium year, the most
compelling displays of Christian art were found outside the
churches.
ARCHBISHOP OF YORK
In my view, it wasnt anything
that the churches did in the Millennial year. One of the most
telling things was the exhibition at the National Gallery - Mystery
of Salvation. People went and they looked and they gazed,
beholding salvation. And they came to the mystery plays in York
which were put on the whole of the month of June, a thousand
people a night and there they beheld the mystery of salvation
and there was no pulling of punches at the end. As you know in
the mystery plays they said now you lot, basically, youve been
watching this, youve got a choice. You can either go that way to
join the eternal in Heaven or you can go that way to join the
damned in Hell - watch it! And people went out of these
mysteries saying, you know, it had changed their lives. Now,
when they go into worship, is that a kind of reaction? Do they
come out of church as they came out of that exhibition beholding beholding salvation?
BROWN
The policy that seems to be emerging
from what youre saying is the church must get rid of all the ugly
buildings.
ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY
Theres a good deal of
ugliness about in certain parts, I have to say. But we must find
ways of ensuring that our buildings are not just heritage centres they are places of devotion, of prayer, of pilgrimage.
BROWN
The Church of England still has those
great cultural treasures, reserves of affection, and influence on a
local level. But when you look more closely at these assets they
can all be sorted into two categories. Theyre all either things it
cant afford to keep, or things it cant afford to lose and
distinguishing the two will not be simple. You cant just say get
rid of all the buildings, or get rid of all the old building or even,
in practice, all the ugly ones. The Church of England cant
realistically hope to be everywhere for everyone all the time any
longer. But if it retreats into being a club, or even a network of
clubs, thats run for the benefit of its active members, it will
shrivel completely. It has to maintain the ideal of parish life while
the reality changes. Whatever happens, therell always be
something called the Church of England. But if it gets the choices
wrong, of what to keep and what to leave behind, it wont be much
of a church, and it wont matter much to England.