Video for June 25th, 2026
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video. It has been rather warm this week and I’m venturing out into the garden as the sun goes down. Its likely that climate change will mean these extreme weather events will become more frequent. I like hot weather, but this week has been a bit much. For other species its much more serious. So many have seen huge reductions in their range and number. Species don’t tend to go extinct because individuals are hunted and killed. Its generally because the environment in which they thrive changes dramatically or is destroyed. They cannot adapt fast enough to the changes. Polar bears need ice floes at crucial times of year to feed. In a warming world they aren’t there. We are entering into a tragic time of mass extinctions for this reason.
Reflecting on this, there may be lessons to learn for the Church. As an institution we were born from the Elizabethan settlement that bought decades of religious conflict to an end. It was almost deliberately designed to exclude the extremist and the enthusiastic. In the age of Christendom of the late middle-ages and early modern era the church of England became a pastoral presence in every community. The Book of Common Prayer assumes everyone is basically Christian; the church hatches, matches and dispatches and the ‘godless heathen’ (as they are graphically described) are restricted to the colonies. Missionary activity is overseas not here. In this country the culture basically did a lot of the discipleship work for us. Christian faith was taught without question in schools. Most people went through rites of passage mediated by the Church of England. The Bishop of Hereford at the end of the 19th century was on average confirming 53 people a week, every week for 26 years! Church buildings, especially in rural areas, were paid for by the local Lord of the Manor who enforced attendance on his tenants. There were huge numbers of clergy, some, although not all, supported by local tithes. Some church buildings, even in this diocese were built to provide the third son of the local aristocracy with a living. Others were built because the local squire fell out with the vicar and wanted an alternative place of worship. We are still saddled with the liability of looking after these vanity projects that never really served a legitimate spiritual purpose.
This culture nurtured us right up to the 1950’s. Since the 1960’s everything has changed. The theological foundations of faith were challenged, aided and abetted by a deeply unhealthy theological liberalism. Widely accepted moral norms disappeared and the church decided that vicars really ought to be paid properly and have radical things like pensions. Over the next few years, the pool of stipendiary clergy available to fill our roles is likely to drop from 7500 to 5500. Our challenge is how can we adapt to a culture that is radically different from the one in which the Church of England was born and which supported and nurtured it for several hundred years, where the clergy we have relied on to sustain the ministry are simply not available in the numbers they once were.
Fortunately, we are not polar bears! We have choices and we have the inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit. The church of the New Testament had it far worse. There were times in the first 200 years or so when it could have died out altogether. But it is God’s church, not my church or your church. He is far more passionate about its thriving for the sake of the community we serve than we are ourselves. Jesus invites us on a cross shaped journey of discipleship. He didn’t promise it would be easy and he certainly didn’t promise that the way faith was expressed would be cast in stone. If our goal is truly proclaiming Christ and growing disciples, then we will be prepared to submit our preferences to that agenda. Change is difficult but it can be facilitated by agreeing where our parameters lie. Thinking inside the box is often better for our creativity than a blank sheet of paper. In uncertainty we prayerfully rest in God’s unchanging love and grace. There is no fear in love and perfect love casts out fear. We do not know what the future holds, but we do know who holds the future.
+Richard