Clergy and Locked Churches: the Bells Not Tolled

When I was a parish priest, my curate and I would meet twice each day to say morning and evening prayer in the church. We would toll the service bell first and wait a minute or two in case anyone joined us. Two or three usually did in the evenings. In the mornings we’d be on our own.

Overlooking the churchyard was a residential home for elderly people. A number of them had rooms that looked out on the medieval church in its beautiful setting. One day, I had to be away. It was my colleague’s rest day. So the church remained locked and the bell silent. Next morning as I walked into town I bumped into a couple of women who lived in the home. I hadn’t met them before. They stopped me, looking solicitous.

‘Are you all right, Vicar?’ they inquired. ‘We were worried about you.’
‘I’m fine, thank you. But why do you ask?’
‘Oh, it’s just that you weren’t at your prayers yesterday. We always notice you walking across to church from the vicarage and listen out for the bell. We thought there must be something wrong when we didn’t see you.’

It was nearly forty years ago, but I’ve never forgotten that encounter. I was a young incumbent and had a lot to learn. Without realising it, in five minutes those good women taught me one of the most important lessons of my life. It was that when you are a priest of the Church of England, you are there for the whole parish, not simply your congregants. You are a public representative of God, the Christian faith and the national church. And when you go into church to say your prayers, you take the parish with you in mind and heart as you lay before the Almighty the life of the community you live in and serve in God’s name. You may be alone in the building. But you’re always engaging in an act of public prayer. Because you do this on behalf of the parish, it’s an act of common prayer. And you are noticed!

This witness is part of what we’ve learned to call public faith. It’s built into the Church of England’s understanding of itself as a national church whose parish system ensures that there is ‘a Christian presence in every community’ with a duty of care to all who live there whatever their faith affiliation. The incumbent belongs to the visible sacral, social and legal symbol-system that connects the church building and the geographical parish to the persona of the ‘parson’. And this is what gives the witness of priest-in-church-and-parish its public character in worship, pastoral care and outreach.

Which brings me to the lockdown of our churches during the Coronavirus emergency. I haven’t blogged about this before because I did not want to make the life of our bishops and clergy more difficult than it already is at this demanding time. I realise it’s contentious, and ill-tempered spats on social media don’t help. But reading Bishop Peter Selby’s article ‘Is Anglicanism Going Private?’ in this week’s Tablet (£) has reinforced my original belief that the decision to prohibit (or strongly dissuade - which is it?) the parish clergy from going into their locked churches to say their prayers is fundamentally misguided. I’m sorry to say that I think it risks compromising the Church’s public witness during this crisis.

For this reason I have signed a letter in today’s Times (£ - but go to the end of this blog). It suggests that this policy ‘is a failure of the Church’s responsibility to the nation, stifling our prophetic witness and defence of the poor’. As we know, the clergy are regarded by the Government as ‘key workers’ who are explicitly permitted to enter their buildings during the course of their duties. So there is no question of challenging the law. Our concerns are more theological and pastoral. As Bishop Selby says, ‘our churches are not just optional when useful and available but are signs of hope and healing for our communities and our nation’ (my italics). Our letter speaks about church buildings ‘whose architecture, symbolism and history represents the consecration of our public life’. So we are urging the bishops at their gathering this week to change their current policy, and ask that ‘the processes and thinking which led to these decisions’ should be openly debated through the Church’s synodical structures.

Let me make four points about this. The first is that I do not doubt that the bishops acted for the best of reasons. They are concerned about public safety like everyone else. They want clergy to demonstrate responsibility in complying with the lockdown regulations and to show solidarity with the public. They are right to insist that priests should not be thought of as taking advantage of their position in ways not open (literally) to lay people.

Secondly, nothing in our letter or this blog is meant to disparage the wonderful work being done by parish clergy across the land during this crisis. I want to pay tribute to my own parish priest here. Whether it’s the streaming of services, producing resources for prayer and reflection, maintaining pastoral contact with parishioners or catalysing and contributing to local voluntary efforts in support of the vulnerable and needy, the imagination and inventiveness of our clergy has been hugely impressive. They deserve our warmest thanks.

Thirdly, there is no quarrel with the decision to suspend services of worship and close church buildings even for personal prayer. This is a clear matter of public safety, and is consistent with how all public gathering spaces have been regulated in this crisis. I did not support the plea made during Holy Week to open up our church buildings for members of the public to engage in private devotion on Easter Day. The risks would have been too high.

The final clarification is that for me, the emphasis is less on streaming acts of worship from church buildings as opposed to vicarage kitchens or dining rooms, than the more basic question of what our church buildings are for. I have to say that in this respect I think the Catholic Church’s decision to maintain the daily offering of mass in local churches, streamed or not, is exemplary. It’s true that we refer to streaming in the letter. But it’s the principle of clergy praying in their churches that has prompted it and is uppermost in my mind in writing this blog.

It comes down to this. I believe that even during this emergency, parish priests should do all in their power to keep their churches in use, even when the doors are locked. I mean that clergy should continue to ‘inhabit’ them by maintaining the sacred activity for which they were built, which is the offering of prayer. Whether it’s the eucharist, the daily office or simple acts of reflection through scripture and silence, it’s keeping the soul of the building alive that matters. To walk away from our church buildings, even temporarily, is in Peter Selby’s words a worrying sign that we may have reached ‘a decisive point in the retreat of the Church of England from the public sphere to the private realm’.

Our churches are the most visible tool of mission that we have. At times of threat, people instinctively turn towards them for solace and strength. They are places to lay burdens of worry, sorrow and despair, calm the spirit and find peace and hope. It’s a cruel feature of this emergency that this cannot take place in any corporate way. But it can still happen by engaging the imagination and the spirit. The church building is always there: inspiring, steady, reliable, a potent symbol of God’s presence among us, and of a community of faith and care for whom it is the primary focus of life together. But its witness needs a human presence if it’s to be effective. It needs the heartbeat of its rhythm of prayer to help sustain its community in hope. Like the high priests of old who bore the people on their hearts as they went alone into the holy place, the incumbent praying in church on behalf of his or her people is a beautiful and eloquent symbol of something deep within the human psyche.

Representative priesthood, public witness and the symbolic function of sacred space are rich ideas but they are not unduly mysterious. The spiritual potential in knowing that the priest is at prayer in church shouldn’t be underestimated. Far from the incumbent invoking the privilege of holy orders in order to do something disallowed to lay people, the representative character of prayer turns it into a profound act of service to the parish.

‘Those who live around’, the meaning of the word paroikia, may or may not be aware that their priest is doing this for them, and in an important sense, with them. But whether they are aware or not isn’t the point. What matters is that the incumbent sees himself or herself, not as a private individual but as a representative person who goes into church to serve. Liturgy is literally an act of service. And whatever expression it takes, formal, informal, traditional, contemporary, virtual or face to face, in the sacred space or outside it, all Church of England worship ultimately derives its validity from the church building and the geographical parish, the twin visible foci of the incumbent’s ministry as Anglicanism understands it.

Which is why the bishops’ decision is not so much distressing as baffling. It’s a lazy binary to perpetuate the cliché about how ‘the church isn’t buildings but people’. The truth is that it’s both. Ask parishioners! Sacred buildings work so well as numinous symbols because they gather up and bring into transcendent perspective the whole life of human communities whose tragedies and triumphs, fears and longings, hopes and aspirations are embodied and cherished within them. Holistic mission always means grasping the ‘both-ands’ of the material and spiritual dimensions of an incarnational way of ministering. To lock our church doors against the very people set aside to represent this servant ministry and put it into practical effect makes no sense.

How institutions behave in crises is always a big test not only of their resilience but their virtue. History will judge whether the reputation of the Church of England has suffered as a result of its response to this emergency. Its verdict may not be kind if Peter Selby is right that we are sliding ever further in the direction of a privatised, congregation-centered existence. As our letter says, we must look again at the assumptions behind this policy. And as a matter of good theology and practice, we must allow our priests inside our churches and let their prayers breathe the prayer of the living Spirit back into our beloved holy places once again.

Here is the full text of the letter (with the full - and growing - list of signatories).

Chaos, the Virus and God

The thing about the virus is that it's pretty much beyond our control. Left to itself, it would run riot throughout the human race. Which is why we're doing everything we can to keep it within bounds, restrain it, put limits on its capacity to hurt and destroy us.

Most of us in the developed world have never before had this sense of a power beyond ourselves that threatens our very existence. My parents' generation did, living through the war. Survivors of the Blitz used to tell us as children what it was like to greet the morning with relief and gratitude at still being alive after a night of bombing. They learned to live from one day to the next, help one another through seemingly endless ordeals. It brought an awareness of the fragility, and therefore the sheer preciousness, of life.

In this pandemic however, the 'enemy' is far more elusive. We can't see it or detect its presence. It creeps upon us by stealth, lurking as an invisible threat that's all around us, maybe even within us, yet as an unknown, sinister presence to haunt our imaginations and stoke our fears. Not only that, but we can't even find strength and solace by facing this intangible foe by being physically together. There are no bunkers or air-raid shelters where we can hold one another through times of assault. In spite of our digital connectedness (which is a great benefit), we are more alone than we've ever had to be before, especially when we need one another so much.

I've been searching for metaphors and analogies that will do justice to what we are experiencing. To my mind, the image of warfare only takes us so far. But I found a different clue in a recent news item about the victims of the catastrophic floods on the Yorkshire River Don in February. Just as homes were beginning to dry out and repair works getting under way, the virus hit and lockdown was imposed. If you've ever been flooded, you'll feel for those poor householders trying to recover fromi a watery ordeal only to be overwhelmed by another kind of chaos that is putting a stop to so much everyday human activity.

Chaos is the idea I want to focus on. If you think about it, lockdown is how we always respond to chaos or the threat of it. Here in Tynedale, we became all too familiar with floodgates and sandbags in the floods of Storm Desmond in December 2015. As 'biblical rain' was bucketing down outside, I watched the water creep up the cellar stairs over a period of a couple of hours until it was two metres deep (yes, exactly that emblematic measure by which we now calibrate our social distancing). It was slow, it was silent, it was relentless - and it was sinister. How far would it rise? Would it invade the ground floor? That's when the image of chaos became a vivid reality. I was facing an invasion. The good order of my much-loved home was threatened by an enemy I could see (it's true), but could do nothing whatever to stop.

At once I was taken back to the Hebrew scriptures. The Psalms are full of references to keeping chaos at bay, mostly expressed in the language of the flood that was always threatening to overwhelm the dry land and civilised life. 'The floods have lifted up their voice; the floods lift up their roaring.' To the Hebrews, for all its life-giving benefits, water was a force to respect and be afraid of. They never forgot the defining myth of the global flood that had all but destroyed life on earth. So they needed again and again to reassure themselves is that there was a power that was greater even than they were, strong enough to banish the waters to their proper place and reimpose order. 'More majestic than the waves of the sea, majestic on high is the Lord!' (Psalm 93.4).

This idea is fundamental in the first creation story in Genesis. 'In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep' (Genesis 1.1-2). In Hebrew, tohu wa vohu describes the chaotic ocean where, in semitic mythology, malevolent demons lurked, presences that needed to be overcome in a primordial battle with the god before the world could come into being. In Genesis, the separation of light from darkness, waters above from waters below, dry land from sea hint at this mythological battle with chaos. It was all part of the Creator's programme of introducing shape and structure into the cosmos so that it could become a place where life would flourish. When Jesus stills the storm in the gospel story by addressing the turbulent sea as if it were a malign conscious presence, 'Peace, be still!', he is recalling this ancient theme in an act of new creation (Mark 4.39). No wonder his terrified disciples were in awe of him.

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I'm wondering whether we are experiencing the virus in this way, as a kind of flood that must be kept within boundaries so that its power to damage is limited. Most of us are locked-down in our homes, safe places that we trust are havens from the flood of infection. But for many they are also experienced as prisons where freedoms are drastically curtailed. Our health and care workers are armed (when they are) by layers of personal protective equipment (PPE) observing hygiene protocols that are as exacting as any sanctuary ritual. All these are necessary acts of defence against the chaotic threat we are not yet able to cure or immunise against. The watery analogy is especially apt when you consider the etymology of the Latin word virus. It means a fluid that has potency to change things, usually in the bad sense of a poisonous liquid or venom. Those who have experienced the effects of the virus in themselves or others describe the saturation of the lungs as akin to drowning. Which is to be overwhelmed by water.

There's an important consequence to draw from this. Water is good, wholesome and utterly essential - in the right place. It gives us life, keeps us clean, provides us with energy. But when it overflows its appointed bounds, it becomes a threat, even a danger to life. The point is that water isn't evil in itself. It's only when it becomes an uncontrolled chaotic power that it has the capacity to destroy. Similarly, without viruses life on earth could not have evolved in the form we know it, nor would we exist as human beings. However damaging viral mutations like Covid19 are to us, they are no more intrinsically 'bad' than water (or fire or storms or volcanoes or earthquakes or any other natural phenomena). They simply are. 

So we should be careful about our language. In particular, we need to resist attributing personality to the virus by calling it 'evil' or even 'the enemy' as if it had some devious moral purpose in being out to get us. It doesn't. It just is what it is. In a universe of accident and risk, the only kind where life can evolve and humans come into being, stuff happens. It's unbearably cruel at times. But we're not to take it personally. Nature is already 'red in tooth and claw' as Tennyson said, as capricious against itself as it is against us. It may be a cold comfort to realise that the virus is indifferent to our destiny, and is only being true to its own nature in finding hosts in human beings. Indeed, what we experience as ‘chaos’ is in reality merely following its own rules which can be understood and described, such as the behaviour of the virus in human populations or of floodwater flowing in particular environments. But it's not 'meant' in any ultimate, metaphysical way. We all tend to ask, when afflicted by pain or disease, what we've done to deserve it. But as the Bible's wisdom literature makes clear, it's not only unanswerable, it doesn't even make sense as a question because it misconstrues reality. When they asked Jesus whose sin had resulted in the man being born blind, Jesus' response was to challenge the very assumptions of the question (John 9).

But there's one more aspect to the flood analogy. Just as the chaos of flooding is the result of water violating its proper boundaries, we can say precisely the same about this virus. The science points to Covid19 having 'transgressed', that is, crossed over from one species to another. In the bat (or whatever animal life it was resident in), the virus did no harm as far as we know. In jumping across to human beings, it transmuted into a presence whose effects we are seeing all too clearly. It not only causes dreadful chaos and destruction to the human body, it's also capable of replicating that same chaos in our collective social and economic life together, not to mention our spiritual, mental and emotional health. The body corporate is as much a victim as our physical bodies. Like flood water, it's an alien intruder that has violated its proper bounds. (I'm aware that even this graphic way of putting it may invoke memories of the Alien films and invest the virus with personality and moral agency which it doesn't have.)

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What's the answer to chaos?

In the Psalms, God's reign reintroduces order into the realm of chaos by subduing it, driving it back behnd its boundaries so as to contain it and recreate a safe place. Subduing the virus is what social distancing, quarantine, self-isolation and screening are all designed to do, 'flattening the curve' so as to contain within secure boundaries. At the same time, testing, tracing and monitoring help map the way this chaos is infiltrating the population and in time, please God, retreating to its proper place. A vaccine will probably not be the 'answer' to Covid19, but it will be a powerful tool to help curb its worst effects until it poses no further threat to us. (But it's imperative that we learn from this experience how to respond next time a pandemic strikes - which, the experts tell us, is not a matter of if but when.) 

We are not to look for a deus ex machina to rescue us from this or any other predicament that ambushes the human race. It's futile to pray that the virus will go away as a result of divine intervention. The chaos of this Coronavirus will not be subdued by divine fiat, only by natural processes such as the virus exhausting itself, or, more likely and certainly more swiftly, and at vastly less cost in human lives, as a result of concentrated human intervention. And theology wants to say that it's precisely through skilled human agency in ordering chaos that the hand of God is at work. I think this should be the clear focus of our prayers, alongside holding victims in our hearts and remembering those who care for them. And the very act of praying in this way begins to lay a template of good order over the chaos because it's fundamentally an act of love. It makes a real difference to the Zeitgeist, the sentient world of thought and feeling in which we experience our life together. It puts positivity and hope back into the system. We mustn't underestimate what this can do.

I think of St Benedict in the sixth century. He lived in the aftermath of the collapse of the Roman Empire, surrounded by the crumbling ruins of a great civilisation whose memory he held dear. It must have felt as though darkness was extinguishing every lamp of knowledge, culture, law and social life for which ancient Rome had been famed throughout the world. Just as the prophet had predicted of the holy city, it must have seemed as if the entire world was unravelling, reverting to that primitive chaos of Genesis, tohu wa vohu (Jeremiah 4.23).

How might the best of the empire be kept alive in these disintegrating times? Not the cruelty or love of display, not the lust for blood and sex, not the self-deceit and idolatry but all that was best in Roman civilisation as Benedict understood Christianity had transformed it: its nobility, its virtue, its public institutions, its art, its discipline, its sense of honour, its spirituality. His answer was to create monasteries, cells of men and women living under Rule, in which the light of civilised life, however precarious, could be cherished and safeguarded. He saw the good order of his communities, and especially the ordering of place and time through the threefold division of activity into prayer, study and work, as vital to a healthy common life. These local efforts at keeping chaos at bay may not have seemed much at the time. But it's hard to exaggerate their influence fifteen centuries later. It's not too much to say that the monastic vision and the movement it gave rise to kept European civilisation alive.

By kindling lights in dark places where people are overwhelmed and frightened, we 'bear witness' to the conviction that chaos does not have the last word. It's a mighty act of faith, of course. But it's the only antidote to despair that I know. We all have a part to play in affirming God’s good order in the face of the threat we face, indeed, helping to establish it in every aspect of our life together. It’s what I understand by the kingdom of God which, says the gospel, is already birthing within us.