A Plea to Save the Church of England
from The Tory Socialist:
The Church of England is dying, and the process is being hastened by a process of managerial euthanasia overseen by its episcopal leadership.
Almost as bad as this is the fact that our (not-so) slow death is only the second stage of a process which will first see us transformed into a set of charismatic quasi-nonconformist wannabe ‘megachurches’ that totally reject traditional Anglican doctrine and practice. We won’t even be allowed to die with dignity.
We have to do everything we can to stop this. We have to save the Church.
[…] I thought to myself – well, the Church of England must have some money. And it is a fair point that much of it is tied up in pensions, paying employees and maintenance of buildings. But it became clear very quickly that its remaining money is being poured into grand ‘strategic development funding’ projects that sound suspiciously like either a) white elephants or b) means of shifting all the funds to grandiose evangelical propaganda projects (or both). Not only that, but such projects seem to be picked not according to any evidence of their effectiveness for revitalising the church, but purely for fitting in with the ideological and theological idiosyncrasies of the Welby agenda.
But that’s not all. It became clear to me that the liberal church Establishment doesn’t, as I assumed surely anyone would, see our heritage of churches – from exquisite Suffolk churches dating back to the Middle Ages to grand Victorian edifices, from those built around the time of St Augustine’s mission up until the apogee of the Oxford Movement – as a gift and a precious tradition. They see them as horrible burden, a pointless money pit that is totally unnecessary because ‘the church isn’t its buildings’.
But the poverty of the church leadership’s aesthetic sense, its total refusal to understand the power of the ‘beauty of holiness’, the great gift of those wonderful architectural, musical and literary heritages that most national churches would be absurdly proud to cherish and guard, doesn’t stop there. Suddenly I noted story after story in the Church Times about plans to close down the Church’s choirs, the backbone of its justly famous choral tradition. I found the casual cultural vandalism involved, the heedless desire for ‘change’ and innovation for its own sake or to satisfy the greedy importunities of the secular culture and ‘woke’ politics that the Church slavishly tries to follow, to be as shocking as it was disgraceful.
This was all the more shocking when I began to regularly read the jobs pages in the Church Times.
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