Hope for the C of E’s future lies with the laity
by Rod Garner, Church Times:
As the next Archbishop of Canterbury is sought, an essay by Newman offers a salutary lesson.
A SIMPLE drawing in a recent edition of The Spectator caught my attention. It depicts a tiny congregation huddled together in equally sparse pews. The roof and parts of the walls of the church are missing, and the stonework of the entrance door is crumbling. The faithful shelter under umbrellas, as rain falls from a grey sky; surrounding them is a landscape of winter trees bearing barren branches. Two indistinct figures stand outside the tottering façade. They appear to be a parent and young person peering in, but somewhat uncertain about entering. In the foreground, a black crow perches impassively on a fence.
At first glance, the picture appears to be a warning or lament, perhaps even a farewell: an acknowledgement of the corrosion of time and trust, a parting of the ways, and a national Church shorn of credibility and integrity through a crisis of leadership spanning decades.
Looked at more closely, however, the drawing invites more than an epitaph. It draws the eye to the two or three barely visible worshippers who have assembled in a once holy place, where, in T. S. Eliot’s memorable phrase, “prayer has been valid.” They have turned up as their forebears did, and, perhaps, prayed much, even on the rainiest of days when the harvest of souls was meagre. They constitute the laity that maintain the Church in truth when its leaders dissemble or fail. Such was the conviction of no less a prelate than St John Henry Newman.
IN 1859, Newman penned his last article as editor of The Rambler, a post that he had held for a short time, and only after much persuasion and prayer. In this post, his aim was to encourage serious thinking on the part of the then torpid Roman Catholic hierarchy in England with regard to modern science and scholarship, and, even more controversially, the proper and dignified function of the laity in the Church.
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