Amen, professor. Amen. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand—especially would-be leaders of the Church who masquerade as bishops. Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy.
Even as I was writing my column on the irrelevance of mainline Christianity two weeks ago, the Church in Wales was providing yet more evidence of the self-inflicted nature of this problem. It announced that the new archbishop would be Cherry Vann, the first woman, indeed the first woman in a same-sex relationship, to hold the position. No doubt her appointment will be seen as making the church more inclusive. The irony is that the more inclusive the church is in theory, the less people it includes in real life. Vann stated just a year ago that congregations of the Church in Wales “have few if any members under 60: the life of the Church doesn’t look sustainable beyond a decade or so.” The idea that churches can attract congregants by conforming its life and message to the political tastes of the day has not succeeded. And yet church leaders press on with the dissolution of Christian distinctives in the apparent hope that capitulating to just one more aspect of cultural taste will reverse the decline. There is no cure for stupid, as the saying has it.
By contrast, a week after the Vann announcement, the Church Times published a refreshing and clarifying excerpt from a lecture delivered by Sarah Coakley, former Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. Addressing the Littlemore Group—an association of priest-theologians and religious committed to the integration of prayer, worship, and theology at the parish level—Coakley urged parishes to return to serious theology. Pushing back against theology diluted by identity politics, Coakley called for a recovery of dogmatic faith, which finds expression in the best liturgies and directs the congregants’ imaginations toward the transcendent questions of human existence. As she expressed it:
Such theology must compel us both intellectually and affectively; it must draw the many dimensions of our fragmentated and threatened lives into a whole; it must give us true joy and realistic hope. It must be preached, and it must be taught, with equal verve and focus (and there is so much work, and necessary improvement, to be done here in the preaching area). And it must make demands on us, because here we are poised between “life and death contending”: what else would we expect, we must insist, if this is indeed the life-changing affair of Christian commitment, “costing nothing less than everything”?
Serious theology and serious worship for ordinary people wrestling with life in this fallen world: what a simple, yet profound, proposal.
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