After Welby

Desiring a More Soulful Church

“But now there is a higher call, who cares about your lonely soul? We strive towards a larger goal, our little lives don't count at all.” (Les Miserable)

You have to be a vicar to understand that in the current Anglican ecosystem few talk of souls anymore. In our seaside parish the RLNI banner outside the lifeboat station makes its mission plain,  ‘Saving lives at sea’. If only the Church has such a clear objective.  Most of us if pushed to identify the basic task of the Church end up garbling out this or that but rarely does that answer involve saving souls.

The inner life and the consequences of eternity are now somewhat passé. Perhaps the marketing people in Church House have calculated that an old-fashioned message like “Saving Souls on land” implies that there is something amiss with our spiritual state? It’s all a bit too fiery! Are we as an institution overly worried about “consumer resistance”, it seems so. Funny then that gyms don’t do this in January. They are unabashed at offering sweat, pain and physical struggle as enhancing goals.  

The great theological questions of what I am to become are now secondary to a sort of smorgasbords of social activism and DEI objectives. The danger is we get a Christianity more familiar and catechised with the UN Millennial Goals than the Nicene Creed. The official message often reads as if individual salvation (remember that!) has largely given way to saving the planet. When it comes to wrongdoing, sin, the ultimate consumer inconvenience, is out and participating in structures of social injustice is in (whatever that means!)

The irony is that this is at moment in history when loneliness, anxiety and even despair are at epidemic levels.  Who doesn’t feel that a de-christianised culture is blindly marching towards a precipice and taking many of us with it? Just when society is screaming out for doctors of the soul, the Church offers us social workers and worse still, activists. Addicted to drugs, gambling or porn? Suffering from depression and anxiety? Does everything in your life feels stale and pointless? Jumping from relationship to relationship? Just found out you’ve got terminal cancer?  Don’t worry the Church will tell you it’s probably down to the last Tory government cutbacks. Much consolation that will give!

In shutting down the country and confining us to our homes the Covid lockdowns only heightened this meaning crisis. Ever since 2020 it’s as if the sheen of modern life has gone and we are struggling to make sense of life. You don’t need to be a social scientist to understand that the upcoming younger generations are troubled, pushed and pulled by every oncoming global crisis, social media, and punished by the economic downturn. They have stumbled into adulthood poorer and lower spirited than any other generation. And yet, I think they are also more acutely aware of their spiritual needs, more so than even perhaps their mental health problems. The soul is back on the agenda. If only the Church would wake up!

In the post-industrial age where manufacturing is offshored to cheap labour    western men and boys feel the brunt of this existential crisis. They have nothing to make and nothing to fight for. To add insult to injury the new orthodoxy pushed in school curriculums and Hollywood scripts points the finger at the so-called patriarchy as the cause of all society’s ills and presents my gender as potential monsters or Neanderthal dimwits. Fight Club’s infamous Tyler Durden played by Brad Pitt sums the rage, “We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war; our Great Depression is our lives.”

My experience from parish ministry and podcasting is that this GenZ are up for a spiritual adventure. So, what do they see when they click on our denominational homepages? They find little on the eternal truths of the Gospel but a lot on carbon capture, Historical slavery reparations and torturous triangulations on human sexuality. Many who take courage and knock on the church door on a Sunday can sadly too often find the vicar is not interested in their newfound religious curiosity. Indeed, I’ve met some who shared quite personal religious experiences only to have them laughed off. One young woman I spoke to told her parish priest she had come to faith after watching Jordan Peterson’s Bible series. The Reverend gave her public dressing down at the back of the church during coffee equating Peterson with Neo-Nazis. She left crying and never went back.

If we as churches are not talking up the soul, then can we be surprised if the boys drool over Andrew Tate and the girls “manifest” the latest Wicca Tik-Tok? The bishops seem naively obvious that whacky influencers and their weird industries are only too keen to take custom from the churches and in the process completely trash the spiritual lives of a generation. This is a time for us as churches to push hard and show that we as Christians have the singular deeper magic before the dawn of time (Narnia). Sadly, however we’ve lost our competitive edge and seem resigned to losing ground. Instead as churches we’ll focus on saving the planet because surely that’s a higher goal than any individual lives?

Like Monty Python’s Judean People’s Front we are ever so busy writing motions to Pontius Pilate to concern ourselves with action. Of course, underlying this is a very basic human question for the church as an institution and its clergy;  do we really care? A lot of this annoying people stuff takes time and energy. Catechising is a demanding process not only for the enquirer but the catechist. Can we be bothered?  A woke corporatised C of E obsessed with compliance management woo-woo can easily be too busy for people who come seeking let alone their eternal salvation. We might bemoan Archbishop Welby for his safeguarding misdemeanours but in the parish find ourselves up to our necks in churchy-admin- stuff, committee work, parish politics, diocesan paperwork and the ever bulging in-tray.  

People matter. If all we have to offer is a spiritual version of the Liberal Democrat’s student politics, sandals and all, then why bother? But giving attention to people’s spiritual pain and their soul takes time and effort. I believe it’s even more demanding than say therapy because unlike most therapy traditional Christianity majors on conversion rather than affirmation. This is where Welby in talking of his own mental health issue didn’t go far enough. Though moving and inspiring he failed describe the bridge between the inner life and what Christ called, metanoia– repentance.  As a deeply unfashionable concept repentance remains at the heart of the Bible’s transforming power and Christ’s preaching. That ability to stop pointing the finger out and instead point the finger in, doesn’t make much sense in a blame culture suffused with social media and victimhood. Nevertheless, the narrow path up to Calvary and beyond to the Empty Tomb only makes sense when each of us learn to admit and own our faults and begin to carry our crosses. It’s here that we learn the terrifying but liberating truth that we cannot save ourselves, only God can. For complex historical reasons the last Archbishop and much of the Church struggled to articulate these basic life-giving truths just when people want to hear it. The demand is growing.

A new archbishop of who can prioritise the human soul will have the ears of the public prick up. If he or she speaks into the contemporary gnawing emptiness I guarantee the audience will grow and grow. Too many people are dying inside, and this is surely the work all of us clergy are employed to do?  Yes, an archbishop will have to battle with the vast army of church bureaucrats, synod apparatchiks and politically correct busybodies who will inevitably compete for their attention. But the man or woman on St Augustine’s Chair who gives time to our spiritual health and our salvation will have all to play for. Who knows, they may even inspire their clergy to be reenergised to their core work, namely the cure of souls and the evangelisation of the Nation.