What would the smile left behind be? Cof E disappears?

On a more serious note, this article reporting Bishop Nigel McCulloch's remarks about the possible disappearance of the CofE is sobering, nice to see someone senior saying what some of us have been fearing [and getting depressed by]. I certainly echo his remarks about legislative demands [and they are so often important and necessary]. It's as if the unsustainability of the institutional form we currently have is being underlined. Don't get me wrong; I think that any human organisation will have some institutional form or else it is not an organisation just loads of individuals sharing space. I better understand now what I think that the house church people were trying to do. Though there's a salutary lesson in that experiment; those churches have, on the whole, become just as 'institutional' as the rest of us [sometime more rigid]. I think what we need is a way to hold together the historical and institutional continuity whilst losing the kind of rigidity that we currently experience -or is it not rigidity but something else?

I was interviewed for a diocesan post last week [not my present diocese] and I candidly remarked in 'my' questions at the end that I feared it was "the job that ate my life" and since my earlier presentation had been about how the church was failing -on the whole- to connect with the spiritual revival that this country is seeing at present and one of the reasons is that we are not perceived as sufficiently 'spiritual'. So it was interesting that the reactions to my suggestion that we are working too hard and simply replicating the problem of seeming too like the rest of the 'world' and not spiritual -our busy-ness is part of that. When one of the interview panel said something about a 'prophetic voice' I realised that I probably wasn't going to get the job!

I suppose what I'm feeling towards with this is that we need to run a church whose very form incarnates our message and where human spiritual and physical welfare is at the heart. Too much of what we do is about keeping the 'show on the road' without any sense of something bigger beyond that.