Reflections

One week into lockdown, and a fortnight since the Archbishops suspended all public worship. My social media is full of Anglican clergy bereft of public worship and their role within it, actively transferring that role to livestreaming. Yesterday, I hosted a zoom service for members of the congregation at St Nicholas’, and it was good to see and hear them. But I can honestly say that I haven’t missed presiding at the Eucharist, privilege though it is; or gathering in a church building, lovely though the building is and lovely though at least some of the people are some of the time. I certainly haven’t felt any loss of identity, which I have always seen as to disciple people to hear and respond to God for themselves in the context of their own personal and communal lives. The way we have done gathered church has not necessarily helped that, and I am aware that as clergy the choices we make in our present circumstances will nurture the Church towards infantile dependency on us or towards deeper maturity. This is in no way a criticism, but a recognition that we face a fork in the road and must choose wisely which way to take.

A significant part of the reason why I am more relieved than anxious about the present upheaval relates to my past experiences of church in other places, significantly as a teenager at West Glasgow New Church and as a young adult at St Thomas’ Church, Sheffield. And this, in at least three ways.

Firstly, every Sunday for the last six years and counting since moving to Sunderland has felt like Psalm 137: ‘By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion ... How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?’ Every Sunday has felt like living in exile, having to learn how to worship God away from the forms of corporate worship that have nurtured us, without a significant (critical mass) community of peers working out their faith together. That being so, someone might ask, why have we stayed? And an honest answer would have to include, there have been times we have not wanted to, but God, not least through circumstances out-with our control, has kept us here. But a fuller answer would also have to include, the place you are called to be is not necessarily the place you would choose, is not necessarily revealed in being the place of self-fulfilment, the ‘dream job’. Daniel and his friends did not choose exile (and, again, please hear: this is not a criticism of the church here, which, for others, is home rather than exile). David did not choose to live as an outlaw hiding in caves for many long years. Paul was not stubbornly enduring the wrong place when he spent years in Arabia and Damascus. We are where we are — and God is there, too. So, to those who feel carried away from home, (a genuine) welcome!

Secondly, there was a time in Sheffield, lasting about a year, where the church of which we were a part could not meet together as one. We were a church of many hundred, and had been worshipping in a former nightclub we had taken on (first job: deal with the beer-soaked carpets and black-painted walls) that was eventually condemned as unsafe. And so, on Sunday we were commissioned and sent out, to meet as smaller and lay-led groups in homes and schools and hotels and cinemas (who knew you could hire a movie theatre once a week?) and garages across the city; while the staff team (ordained and lay) figured out innovative ways of holding us together as one local church as we were scattered in many localised expressions. We could still meet together, and we didn’t have zoom; but there are parallels. This lasted about a year, before we were able to build a new home from a campus of engineering buildings, or, enough time to bed-in new patterns that were not simply abandoned when the immediate crisis was past. And that is something hopeful to draw on.

Thirdly, as I have already mentioned, the opportunity in the present moment is one of discipleship. There is no shortage of livestreamed worship to be found on the internet, some of which is excellent but all of which bends us towards being consumers; and there is certainly no shortage of platitudes to stick on your fridge door or Facebook wall. But what our congregations need is a good toolkit for living out their faith in time of lockdown (they will have the time to learn how to use them). Such tools are always best understood communally. The ironic gift of social distancing is that it has the potential to draw us out of self-sufficiency, or even dutiful patronage, to a greater inter-dependency and vulnerable sharing of life than certainly we have ever witnessed since moving to the north east. But further consideration of the discipleship opportunity will be worth further posts.