Church may end up as sect, warns bishop

I had been about to blog this when my machine ran into difficulties. In a sense it is bringing to our consciousness what Mike Riddell wrote at the beginning of his book "Threshold of the future": that we need to get out of denial about the demise of organised religion particularly church, in the west and get on with the job of being the church that we can be and are called to be.

I seem to feel that much of my parish ministry has been tied up with trying to help churches to face the reality that things ain't what they used to be, that 'folk religion' no longer has a guaranteedly Christian substructure [if it ever did ... but that's another issue], that we are failing to connect with what we now label as postmodernism. In fact the biggest scandal is that we are clearly in the midst of a huge revival in spiritual interest but lack the credibility/plausibility to be part of it much because to today's spiritual seekers the church is part of the problem and mimics too exactly the unspiritual, over-busy, philosophically materialist and modernist world that they are reacting against.

Simon Sarmiento comments on this too and I found a particular resonance with this: "Part of the problem is the Church’s pre-occupation with dogma and division, at the expense of its moral message; part is because of its incompetence in managing its finances and organising its workforce."

Not sure I fully agree about the dogma and divions vs moral message but I do feel I've seen a little too much of the not being good at managing finances and organising workforce in the last 18 months [culminating in my job being restructured out of existence when most people in the diocese seem to think it one of the cutting-edge mission jobs] as the miscommunication, failure to pick up signals [and I was part of it -not knowing that it wasn't being handled by others, I failed to do so myself] and not thinking through implications. Unhappily this has had serious consequences for my family and pulled me out of a situation which was just becoming fruitful and where possibilities for new engagements between sacred and secular were opening up. The pity of it is also that although finances were the driver, it should not have been a huge hurdle to overcome. Bradford diocese: you dropped the ball.