Thinking of running some kind of Christian mission, hankering for the role of a parish priest, is something like modern business and markets. When I set out to earn my living as a translator, I attended a short course in running a small business.
The elements of a successful business are simple: supply and demand. What do we have to offer? Is there a market for what we have to offer? The stages of setting up a business begin with the idea, corresponding with the work we have learned to do well (making shoes, carving statues or programming computers, whatever) and in which we have expert knowledge and hands-on experience. Then we have to do market research. Where do we find our customers? If I advertised as a translator in my village, I don’t think I would find many customers, so my market place – thanks to the Internet – is the whole world. Then we have to adequate the idea with the market. I would have liked to translate theological books from French into English, but there is only a small market for that, and publishers are generally “closed shop”. So I had to turn to technical and industrial translating, where the money is. I do it well, and it works – so that’s my slot, as a translator.
It seems cynical to compare churches with the business world, but it works the same way. The church offers “products” and “services”. If there is a market outlet, the customers will come and consume. Otherwise, the church in question goes out of business or has to move to a place where there is a market. There is also an element of competition for a market share. Who would open a small grocery shop next to a big supermarket? It might be possible if one is offering what the supermarket cannot offer. Similarly, this is the drama of independent priests and bishops, or small dissident or “continuing” churches across the street from the Roman Catholic Church or a national church of Reformation tradition. In business and trade, people go for trusted brand names, and new products and services really have to sell themselves hard.
It is a fact that the “official” churches, namely the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England over the other side of the Channel, are in decline and have been for a long time. Their market is drying up, or their products and services are no longer in adequation with the market demand. Statistics are freely available, and the reader would do well to compare different sources and ideological points of view to get some objectivity.
In the secular world, anyone out of a job can set up a business, if the idea and the market match. There is no idea of a “one true” business, though the monopoly of big business makes it difficult for anyone to get anywhere. There’s always a hole somewhere. There is a whole underworld of independent priests and bishops, who are generally spiritual seekers as well as men who believe they have something to offer to the world – and sometimes without expecting a profit. People in mainstream churches sneer at them, calling them cranks, crooks, quacks, charlatans, impostors and schismatics. Very few have any significant community or “clientele”. But, as I have already mused, there is a question of freedom of conscience.
In the business analogy, there are people who buy their products from small grocery shops, and others who go to the supermarket. The supermarket is more practical, you can park your car and transport your stuff in a trolley, and the prices are lower. But, you are generally getting factory-produced products, something standardised and impersonal. From the grocery shop, if that shop wants to survive, you can find products from the farm, of higher quality but dearer. That is the decision each food consumer has to make, and it is the same thing in churches and religion. The difference is that no one can stop being a food consumer – they have to buy food from somewhere, or starve – or grow your own. Religion is optional and most people live without it.
Are religious people seeking for family-like intimacy or the security-giving feeling of worshipping with the masses? Do we prefer a retreat at a small monastery or a pilgrimage to Lourdes where there are crowds, all singing the praises of Our Lady?
Many can no longer identify with Christianity or the Church. Most people today have not been brought up in a religious tradition, and the Church relies on them to convert. Many seek something higher than and beyond materialism, but there needs to be a kind of catalyst for them to have the courage to find a church and start attending it, often finding the people there are cold, off-putting and bigoted. Of course, you get the “cafeteria” consumers saying that they like one bit but not another. The Church would say – Here is the package, take it or leave it. Most people would leave it, faced with the humiliating ultimatum, since there is no Inquisition van outside their front door poised to whisk them away to a torture chamber! The Church in the past relied on both the carrot on a stick and the whip – constraint via the secular arm. Did Jesus need a secular arm to get disciples and Apostles? There is no evidence of such an idea in the Gospels. Rather the reverse.
There is also a question of credibility when the scandals and infighting become known to all. Nothing is hidden and kept secret any more. Indeed, the more things are kept secret, the more they are suspect. The old “brand loyalty” is fast disappearing. This is the central supposition of a tendency that was called the “emerging church movement” about twenty years ago. The trouble is that I haven’t seen too many “emerging churches” in my neighbourhood! I haven’t heard of any in Rouen either, not even near the lawyer’s office where my wife works.
I think we do need to detach ourselves from our ideological prejudices in evaluating the market. What I call fundamentalism, the English-language equivalent of intégrisme or integrismo, characterised by intolerance and conservatism, is quite appealing to those whose outlook on life favours the strong and sacrifices the weak. The charismatic communities and anything offering enthusiasm are attractive. There is a clear divide between large cities and the rest of the country. Proximity to nature does not seem to predispose people to going to church. In big cities, the criterion seems either to a cosmopolitan outlook on life rather than a parochial one, or simply on account of numbers. If only 5% go to church, 5% of a village population of 500 is 25 persons, about the average good attendance in a French village church for the once-a-month Mass. The percentage might be just the same in metropolitan cities, and that would give a hundred times that number in the churches. There are other factors like immigrants from Eastern Europe and Africa and the booming of Pentecostal and Evangelical churches, so it isn’t so simple.
It would seem that we either have to adapt the product to the market or move to a city. Then we have competition with the established Evangelical communities and the Roman Catholic diocese and parishes. There is an alternative, remove the need to live by being a priest and cease to care whether we have customers! The temptation would be to try to ape the old “models” of church. How do you apply pressure on people when the civil authorities no longer care about churches? Threaten them with hell?
I have no clear answers. Historically, the Church began as a number of clandestine communities working a little like the French Résistance during the Occupation. When they got found out, they were fed to the lions or met other cruel deaths. Then one had little dioceses as attested by St Ignatius of Antioch and the monasteries in the desert. As the Church began to take on the characteristics of our modern big business and banking system, St Francis of Assisi began a whole new movement based on poverty and spirituality. Another branch of that movement against wealth and corruption evolved into the Reformation and Protestantism.
I have little knowledge of sociology or the “religious market”, but I can offer a few ideas. Stability is a thing of the past. People move around to find work and the conditions of life in which they could find fulfilment. We seem to be at a time when “mendicant” religious priests would have more credibility for people to confide in. Being a “mendicant” can mean many things – literally being a down-and-out tramp or vagrant, or living in a boat or a road vehicle so that one can be mobile. Alternatively, having a network of houses of a religious order, so that the men can be moved around as needed.
There is a certain outlet for an Internet ministry, which is a ministry of the word and teaching, if it is kept as that. In my case, I seem to put out good ideas, but I don’t get the benefit of them. Fine by me. The usual sneer brigade would say that I only blog because I have no credibility as a parish priest. It is water off a duck’s back. We have means available to us that didn’t exist in past centuries, but we live in a more cynical and sceptical society.
We have above all to keep a sense of identity. This was the famous Anglican patrimony argument in face of the movement towards the ordinariates. We need to broaden, but remain within a general idea of Catholicism. Various visions of Catholicism have become very narrow, and our purpose can reside in seeking a wider and more inclusive vision – which inclusivity can only be limited in some way. The balance has to be found between the razor-edge and the free-for-all.
I had a lot of soul-searching when I decided to use the old medieval Sarum liturgy. If few are interested in that, would they be more interested in my using the 1662 Prayer Book or the modern Roman rite or the Tridentine? Actually, the rites make no difference in terms of the religious boutique. So I identify with a form of Catholicism that seems to be more “open” than the razor-edges on offer since the late sixteenth century and especially since 1870. But it is an illusory world. What is reality? That is one further from Pontius Pilate’s What is truth? In the end it’s all about giving ideas that can benefit others, perhaps a form of prophetical vocation.
Also everything depends on whether you live in Europe, out in the country or somewhere like Paris or London, or in the USA. America too is changing as cynicism and the disillusionment with conservatism sets in. Eventually, the US will in religious and spiritual terms become like Europe and Canada. If this perspective of mobility, there are the electronic means of communications the Americans seem to like – or to which they have to have recourse because of the huge geographical distances. The idea of the “Facebook church” fills us with horror, given the superficiality of it, but we do little better with blogs.
We have to face it. Christianity as a religion of the masses is over, finished. I have a theory that human intelligence is reduced proportionately by the number of persons. How is it possible to live according to an ideal of ecclesial communion rather than individualism? Some of us are socially connected, but others who are no less virtuous are solitaries. Some like team work, and others find they do better alone. I have greatly enjoyed crewing with five other men on a racing yacht, but I find peace and joy in solitary cruising. The Church has always catered for mass pilgrimages and hermits in the desert. Some people would like that choice narrowed down too!
We are called to evangelise, and that is a difficult point where we seem to go round and round in circles. We either have to set out like businessmen, as the Americans do, using modern advertising and marketing techniques, or “sow the seeds” that we won’t ourselves reap, in a longer-term approach. We solitaries can carry on writing, and I would like to move from blogs to books. Many find the “catalyst” though a book or a blog posting that has something profound to say. That is what I try to do here. I have always been of the conviction that Christ’s love can only be transmitted by a whole experience – of human love, beauty, creation, compassion, mercy, warmth. These are the things that feed hunger for the spiritual and desire for God, not the cold application of law and dogmatic teaching.
I risk making myself unpopular among continuing Anglicans (I am still a priest of the TAC) by saying that we have to move away from our single issues. Most of the problems seem to come from issues of “clerical clubs” in churches. Clericalism is the cause of anti-clericalism, simple as that! Can we not move to other things? For example, engaging dialogue with Christian and non-Christian contemplatives and mystics. Like the so-called “liberals”, we do well to be concerned for our planet as well as the human beings who live on it. There is a non-political version of ecology that we might find good to promote.
I re-read a paper written a few years ago by a TAC priest who left us with the idea that it might be appropriate to retire from our priesthood, relinquish our vocation or illusory vocation and become a layman in the mainstream church (Roman Catholic but not necessarily). Then (or firstly), you have to find a community with which you can identify – though stability and “being settled” is an illusion. That is always a possibility, as is the idea of giving up Christianity. Each of us has his choice to make and the consequences to assume.
Another way of putting it is that we have to adapt to the market or do things in such a way as we don’t need a congregation in order to live. We have another meaning of earning our living and our priestly vocation is relieved from that necessity. Bishops sometimes might be critical of a priest who does not have a viable congregation – has not produced results – either one of their own priests or a priest from elsewhere applying to him for incardination.
I still agonise over this question of justification for being a priest, knowing that if I let it all go, I would have to pay for it in some way. My intuition points to a teaching ministry and a contemplative life, which in my case cannot be formally monastic. Resolution is an illusion. It is the lesson of Waiting for Godot. I am incardinated in a jurisdiction that does not communicate, no longer has a web site, has no synods, you get the idea… I could bring about resolution by resigning. But to what end? We have to learn to accommodate incoherence, uncertainty and loose ends. The panacea will not come, but we have to toil and labour through our three or four score years allotted to us. That’s life.
Others may be in a similar situation. It is the desert – or the sea. And here is the tabernacle of God’s presence. It is precious.
