Post-Christendom: rafts or trawlers?

Steve Hollinghurst works for Church Army in Sheffield, researching the cultures of people who don’t go to Church in the UK. He came to our local Deanery Synod last night with simple facts and figures about post-Christendom England.

• It’s an immensely fluid and complex picture out there. Fewer people buy into institutional church and the whole “Christian England” thing. Denominations are a thing of the past — a phase we went through, that means nothing to most people now. We are also globalizing massively.
• As “Religion’s” stock (genteely) declines, “Spirituality’s” increases. There’s a lot of curiosity out there. Steve contrasted the ubiquitous modernist “Scooby-Doo” interpretation of paranormal phenomena 30 years ago with multiple wall-to-wall ghosthunter shows now... Tech is cool, but the Eagle Comic optimistic scientism with which we all grew up has, worryingly perhaps, collapsed into widespread pessimism and cynicism about Science. People are massively switching off assertive fundamentalist certainties. Experts are now as good as their last job; Richard Dawkins is, in fact one of the best recruiting sergeants the Churches have.
• People find Churches spiritual places, but most of all when we’re not there! More people are passing through and by Churches (now up to 82% of the population a year), but far fewer committing themselves to the gathered twice-a-week experience.
  

So what do we do? We could retreat fast into the bunker, clinging on to what we fondly imagine were the certainties of the past. We could get the wagons into a circle for vigorous “Judaean People’s Front” debates around then camp fire. Alternatively, we can get the wagons out onto the trail, and see who we meet along the way. Where we decide to do the latter we will find ourselves needing the same kind of utter versatility St Paul talked about in I Corinthians 9 — Greeks to Greek, slave to slave, Jew to Jew. We need to distunguish clearly the gospel from its cultural wrappers. It’s a simple story — love is strong as death.

• Keep the core simple and authentic.
• Don’t rob the Word of its power as mystery — embrace the subtlety and poetry of it.
• Get engaged. Be holy pragmatic / entirely versatile about the wrappers.