This piece (slightly edited) was published in The Tablet on 25 July 2020.
Churches in the United Kingdom have now begun the cautious-step-by-cautious-step process of reopening church buildings. Public services of worship are now permitted, although social distancing and hygiene measures remain mandatory.
It is far too early to report on the experiences of that simultaneously longed-for and dreaded return, but it is not a bad time to begin to do some thinking about what the legacy of the lockdown period might prove to be.
This will be an especially pointed question for the Church of England (CofE), which famously took government instructions to heart, and even exceeded them, at one point telling clergy not to enter their churches, even for the purposes of streaming of liturgies.
Publicly, the mood of the senior echelons of the CofE has been chipper. The pandemic, it is suggested, created a ‘breathing space’ in which the church has reconsidered its priorities and road-tested innovative virtual responses to the inability of congregations to meet face-to-face. Numbers attending virtual worship have been higher than those typical for services in church buildings. This has been an opportunity to face head-on the nightmare of the cost and strain of the upkeep of thousands of aging churches in the face of plummeting attendance rates, and to embrace an ecclesiology that emphasises winning followers for Jesus rather than bricks and mortar (while celebrating consequential wins in areas such as accessibility, feminization of worship-spaces, and reduction of environmental footprint).
Even so, at a day-long virtual meeting of the CofE’s General Synod on 11 July, a large part of the day was taken up with questions about church closures during the lockdown, a topic about which there was clearly a great deal of emotion, although views were divided. A visibly rattled Archbishop of Canterbury voiced disappointment about the ‘depressing and slightly surprising questions’ and hoped that further discussions about Covid-19 response would not be ‘all about us’.
More quietly, meanwhile, countless clergy and lay people had been getting on with their ordinary jobs, churches or no churches, of caring for members of congregations, taking funerals, responding to the tensions of ordinary people in protracted lockdown and finding places for the homeless to self-isolate in safety.
So far, so good. But might those who asked the depressing and surprising questions have a point – might there prove to be a shadow side to the legacy of the lockdown? What consequences might there be, for example, as a result of the CofE’s decision to vacate the (real-life) public-square? And is a congregationalist ecclesiology focused on growing the numbers of Jesus followers a good fit for the CofE?
The Legacy of the CofE’s Withdrawal
During the early days of lockdown I binge-watched Netflix’s ‘The Crown’. It was terrific, but one episode stopped me in my tracks. The episode, simply titled ‘Aberfan’, recounts the events of the appalling 1966 disaster in which a coal tip collapsed and engulfed a village school. The focus of the episode is the response of Her Majesty the Queen to the tragedy. Although she was urged by her closest advisors, including the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, to visit Aberfan she initially refused even to discuss the matter, arguing that the last thing the good people of Aberfan would want was a monarch getting in the way of the relief effort.
The Queen did eventually visit Aberfan, eight days after the tragedy. Nevertheless, the enduring memory, it is suggested, was of the belatedness of the Queen’s response.
The emotional thesis of the episode is that underlying the Queen’s apparently selfless motive for keeping her distance lurked a pervasive, and quite personal, fear. As the episode progressed she was able to identify the fear as springing from a sense of inadequacy connected with an inability to experience, and express, emotions. She wasn’t convinced, it seems, that she had anything to offer.
The Queen (the real-life one) has publicly reflected that her reluctance to visit Aberfan is one of the great regrets of her long reign, and this is borne out by the fact that she has subsequently visited Aberfan significantly more often than the sites of other disasters.
Watching this episode, near the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown, I found myself cautiously drawing parallels between the Queen’s reluctance and the CofE’s decision to ‘protect the NHS’ by closing its buildings, actively discouraging clerical heroism and, arguably, vacating the public square.
Although clergy had been named ‘key workers’, the CofE itself seemed to back away from any assertion that its services were ‘essential’. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s published reasons revealed desires, first, to ‘not get in the way’ of the rescue effort and, secondly, to stand alongside locked-down people by being locked-down along with them. Archbishop Welby wanted to avoid the public perception that the church was claiming to be a ‘super special category’ and ‘doing its own thing’.
I can certainly see the logic in this, and a genuine pastoral motivation. Nevertheless, I fear that time will show that the message ‘sent’ by this move was not the one ‘received’ by church and public. What the CofE communicated, I fear, was that, in the prevailing crisis, what it had to contribute was not important, or in any event, was less important than that offered by hospitals and supermarkets, off-licences, take-away restaurants, post offices, banks, public transport and DIY stores; the best thing the CofE could do was get out of the way, fearing that its involvement might cause more harm than good.
The really chilling implication of The Crown’s portrayal of Aberfan is that the CofE might actually believe this to be the case – that the CofE, like the youthful Elizabeth, had little confidence in its ability to contribute anything. ‘The Crown’, of course, is just a dramatization, but there are nevertheless signs that support this implication. The CofE’s concern to avoid any perception of a claim to be a ‘super special category’ is foremost. In fact, of course, the CofE, as ‘the Church Established by law’ is precisely a special category and what it does is never purely ‘its own thing’, but rather what it does for the nation. The CofE’s concerns about its public perception communicate that it doesn’t especially value its role as Established Church, or isn’t especially confident about its exercise of it, or both.
Churches and Disasters
I have spent the last few years engaged on a project resourcing clergy to respond to disasters (see www.tragedyandcongregations.org.uk). Its beginning coincided with the string of disasters that rocked England in the summer of 2017 – the Manchester bombing, the London and Westminster Bridge attacks, attacks on a mosque and on a tube station, the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury and the Grenfell Tower fire. We saw a dramatic development, over that time, in the way that the public, government and emergency services perceived churches. Churches’ responses to these disasters were so prominent, local and immediate that all of these groups suddenly realised that the churches were there. These responses ranged from the opening up of church premises to cater for the wounded and homeless, or collect and distribute donations, to the use of churches for public meetings and mediation between victims and local authorities, to the conduct of formal services and informal liturgies of reclamation of spaces in Salisbury, London Bridge and Borough Markets.
Some tangible changes occurred after these disasters. For the first time, police and first responders began to invite clergy to enter disaster cordons and local authorities started including churches and clergy in the first stages of disaster planning, instead of late in the process, as courtesy or afterthought. They had recognised that clergy were skilled pastoral professionals and that churches were large, local buildings, with tea and coffee-making facilities and armies of willing volunteers.
The Covid-19 pandemic is a very different kind of disaster. Even so, I can’t help but wonder whether the CofE’s withdrawal, and its determination to be seen as ‘not about the buildings’, will prove short-sighted, squandering a very real opportunity for mission. After 2017 England recognised the value of its churches, and the English people will have been looking to the churches to minister to their spirits and to their sense of community when the virus hit, just as the Welsh looked to the Queen after Aberfan and the whole Commonwealth, similarly, after the death of Diana.
The CofE risks turning our back on this kind of service if we continue to pursue an ecclesiology focused on converts rather than on service to the whole population, and if we remain content to forego our special role to welcome and co-ordinate the activities of all churches in the face of public disaster. There can be no doubt that the CofE must, for its own well-being, and that of its clergy, rationalise numbers of its buildings, both in cities and in the countryside, but it should not do so without consideration of the responsibilities, and opportunities for ministry and mission, that come with being established.
In the short term, the CofE decided not to visit Aberfan. If the parallels I’ve drawn here have any substance, then, like the Queen, the CofE is going to have some serious public relations work to do to rebuild the trust and recognition established through the 2017 diasaters, prior to the virus. It will also need to remind itself that what it offers is of value, even to a non-churchgoing population. Will the legacy of the lockdown see the CofE recover a sense of its public role, or instead choose to capitalise on a perceived opportunity to move away from the parish system, local churches and the privilege and responsibilities of establishment? Only time will tell, but I sense that, ironically, not asking these questions could just be the very thing that risks making it ‘all about us’.