Anglicans - Where Are We Going? Dreams and Expectations
The Very Revd Boak JobbinsDean, St Paul's Cathedral, Sydney
A shy and retiring young woman of sheltered upbringing was visiting New York City. She had been told New York was a dangerous place, a place where she might expect to be mugged, manhandled or murdered. She checked into her hotel and got into the lift: two African Americans followed her. The doors closed. One of the men said, "Hit the floor, lady". She did: "Don't hit me, don't hurt me: my handbag has all my money - take it. Just don't hurt me". The African Americans fell about laughing. They helped her to her feet and explained that in New York, "Hit the floor," means "Press the button for the floor".
Expectations: it was her expectations of New York that made her act as she did. She thought it was a dangerous place, she read danger in the words she heard, she responded to danger. Expectations matter.
What are our expectations for the future of the Church in Australia? We assume it will be around in the next millennium, but what will it be like? What will it look like? What will its members be like? How will it relate to the wider community? What will be the role of Christians in the society of tomorrow? What are your expectations?
I have utter confidence in the church of God. After all, it is his church which he builds to the praise of his glorious grace. In Christ Jesus the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord, and that will not be stopped until the times will have reached their fulfilment.
However, I am much less certain about the future robustness of the church in Australia, and in particular of the Anglican Church in Australia. History shows us that great and apparently powerful churches do not always last, that vast tracts once fertile with faith become wastelands. Christian north Africa is Islamic; in once christian France, a tiny few are churchgoers. What of the great South Land of the Holy Spirit?
A place to start is where we are and a good measure of where the church is today is to ask the extent to which we reflect Australian society. When I was responsible for local churches, that was always the measure I used: do we as a congregation match the social and demographic makeup of the community of which we are part? Are there people groups in that community who are not in the church? Are we in and of the whole of our district?
Let me take four markers - age, gender, ethnicity, and education - and because I am speaking to a group of Melbourne christians, let me use the figures for Melbourne and for Melbourne Anglicans.
We are old. According to Census of Population and Housing (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2015.2), in the Melbourne Statistical District the median age is 33; in the Diocese it is a shade over 50. A graph comparing us with the population of our area is like a flattened "x": they are high where we are low; they are low where we are high. Nearly 50% of Melburnians are under 40: fewer than 25% of church going Anglicans are under 40. 20% of Melburnians are over 60: 43% of church going Anglicans are over 60.
We are short on men. 49% of the population of the Melbourne Statistical District is male: 36% of those attending Anglican Churches in Melbourne are male.
We are Anglo-Celtic. 22.5% of Melburnians were born overseas in non-English speaking countries; that is so of 9% of Melbourne's Anglicans. Though I note that a further 4% of us, although born here, have overseas-born parents: we have not entirely neglected those from overseas and perhaps, through their children, we will welcome even more among us.
Learning and qualifications matter to us. Even allowing for the inflationary effect of the "Dawkinisation" of tertiary education in Australia, Melbourne Anglicans are very highly educated:43% of us have a tertiary qualification. I understand that is so of 10% or 11% of Australians.
Perhaps my choice of categories has been selective. However on the basis of that choice, one can only conclude that while the Anglican Church covers the whole of Melbourne, and sees itself as responsible to minister to all, we fail to do so. But the situation is far from hopeless. The 1998 Australian Community Survey, which interviewed 8000 randomly selected Australians, found that only 27% of Australians are antagonistic or unsympathetic to the church: 20% actually attend, 17% are sympathetic and 36% are simply apathetic; 71% attended some religious ceremony in the previous twelve months. And we are not indifferent to them: 78% of Melbourne Anglicans are prepared to invite their non church-going relatives and friends to a church service, though fewer than half of us have actually done so in the previous twelve months.
There is opportunity and willingness more effectively to reach those among whom we live and move. And that is our calling. As Luther pungently put it
The Kingdom is to be in the midst of your enemies. And he who will not accept this does not want to be of the kingdom of Christ. He wants to be amongst friends, to sit among roses and lilies, not with the bad people. Oh, you blasphemers and betrayers of Christ! If Christ had done what you are doing, who would ever have been spared?
However, any attempt to reach new people will have an impact on us. Let me talk about just one.
What will "church" look like? If I attend my local church in 2020, what will I find on Sunday morning? Let me describe what I think is a commonplace today. It is somewhat overdrawn and because I come from Sydney it has some distinctive Sydney features; yet hopefully you will recognise the underlying tensions.
The young Reverend Simon Zealotes has been inducted as the Rector of St Hagg's Decrepitae, congregation four: one plays the ancient and asthmatic pedal organ; Selma, fully robed, is the choir; a third is the congregation; and the fourth, the Churchwarden Jim Dim whose mother dropped him from the kitchen table forty years earlier, wanders about to ensure order is kept and to take up the collection. There is, nowadays, only one weekly service at St Hagg's: Choral Matins at 11.00 each Sunday morning. The Psalms and Canticles are sung, Book of Common Prayer of course, and Selma always renders an Anthem, though years of singing lessons have never enabled her quite to bridge the gap between Handel and herself.
Despite its name, the Parish of Decrepitae is in a beautiful suburb, which has been revitalised. Almost all the old-timers have gone - to heaven, hell, or Mowll Village - and their houses bought by a new generation. Within half a mile of St Hagg's there are hundreds of young families and children, but none ever comes to St Hagg's: and Simon knows they never will. But he has a passion for these people, so with some friends plans to serve and save them.
At 10.55 one Sunday morning, the faithful four arrive to find St Hagg's locked: a sign says there will be a Christian Gathering at noon. They wait. At 11.45 Simon arrives in open-necked shirt and jeans: locals begin to stream in. The "Meeting' begins: Simon welcomes everyone and a friend from Deaconess House, dressed in a lurex leotard, does some liturgical dance and sings a gospel song; other friends perform a drama - script compliments of Willow Creek; there is a short bible reading and Simon speaks, powerfully and passionately.
Over Chardonnay and prawns at the back of the church afterwards, it is clear the locals have loved it: many want to talk more about Jesus and all want it to happen again next week - and they will bring their friends. The faithful four are less sure.
I agree the illustration is a little exaggerated, for rarely are resuscitations so rapidly successful or parishes so despairingly bad. Yet is it not us? Are we not a church struggling with our identity, with who we are and what we should do when we meet? And if we are not, should we not?
What we see at Decrepitae is a church attempting to relate to the culture, the people amongst whom it finds itself. A book-dependent church adjusting to a visual culture; a traditional church wanting to sound contemporary; a formal church seeking to be casual; a private experience, almost isolated, group attempting to build community; a logical and rational phenomenon moving to be impressionistic and sensually engaging; a liturgical church of the familiar and well trod becoming serendipitous.
Whether it was done well, or should have been done differently, is not the point. The point is St Hagg's saw that it looked less and less like its community, that it was there for the community and that it could not expect the community to come to it unchanged: so it made an effort. It will be churches that make that effort, in ways that are appropriate to the particular communities of they are a part, which humanly speaking will have a prosperous future.
There are great challenges in making that effort. How at St Hagg's will they retain a sense of the supernatural, for the church is "to the praise of God's glory"? Churches are about the worship of God as well as about serving and bringing people in to know and worship God. But the two are not unrelated.
Like me, you may have been astonished by the worldwide outpouring of public grief at news of the death in August 1997 of Diana Princess of Wales. Arguably, what we saw was a rejection of modernisation and urbanisation, or at least a widespread recognition that there are horrors in the face of which our cerebral and technological world is silent. People banded together against death, and that coming together in grief and mourning was a symbolic reconstruction of the kind of society we are told no longer exists, reaching out for those caring and communal values which those at the top of our individualistic and rationalistic society of the west in the 1980s said did not count. Almost instinctively, people turned to places they rarely venture into, to churches, in search if not of God then of the supernatural, of something other than the this-worldly which might help to make sense of tragedy, or at least ameliorate the pain. And note that the places sought out were the recognisably supernatural.
How will the faithful four and their fellow thousands be cared for and nurtured? When in 1978 An Australian Prayer Book was introduced into her parish church, the mother of a friend said "They should wait until the old people are dead before making all these changes!" Well they might, but will there be anything left to change? We older people could also be more flexible and welcoming of the new and different - and we must be - but to suggest that will be enough is a counsel of perfection. What is happening and will continue to happen is increased diversity: different styles of service for different kinds of people, a "Balkanisation" of the church and of parishes, with traditional liturgies for the "old people" and contemporary "meetings" for the new. Gone is whatever unity a common liturgy once brought; all that is left is a commonality, a general cohesiveness of elements in what we all do when we gather. That diversity will be the pattern at least until "the old people are dead".
In that diversity and in whatever comes out at the end, the challenge will be to preserve what the past achieved, or at least to find other ways of securing it. The fixed liturgy of the Anglican Church is an immensely valuable educative and pastoral tool. It teaches you to approach God humbly, penitently, trusting in his love and mercy in Christ; it teaches you that your duty is to listen to God and to respond with trust and joy and obedience; it teaches you what you believe; it teaches you how to pray, for the breadth of matters that should fill the hearts and concerns of the godly as they fill the heart of God himself And it teaches you all that quite unselfconsciously: its repetitiveness grinds truths into your mind and in time into your being. How will Simon and his fellows achieve those things in his "meetings" that are individual and need-centred, and attractive because they are that as well as entertaining?
However the greatest challenge facing the Anglican Church is not the internal issues over which we divide from one another: things like liturgy and the nature of church gatherings, the role of women in church and of the unordained in communion services. Nor is the greatest challenge those issues which are hard work and we do well, though where we could always do more, such as evangelism and social welfare and ministering to children and the young. The greatest challenge facing the Anglican Church is our engagement with society.
I do not mean by that individual Anglicans talking with their neighbours so that they, too, catch the faith, nor the ways we might seek to integrate modem people. What I mean is the leavening of society by Christian views and values, of society being different because Christians are active in it. What I mean is our ability and willingness to empower Christian people to be different as they live their lives in the workaday world; our ability and willingness to participate in the process of shaping the values and norms of our society; our ability and willingness to enable Christians, as Christians, to contribute to the political process and the decisions of government; our ability and willingness to give input as Christians to our hopes and aspirations as the Australian people.
Over the past one hundred years, with a few notable exceptions, we have progressively withdrawn from that engagement. For reasons of history, Christians, and especially members of the Church of England, were effective in those areas for the first one hundred years of European settlement. Since then we have been more interested in citizenship in heaven than citizenship on earth; as Australian society became more diverse and other voices clamoured to be heard, we have been content to exchange a substantial hearing for ephemeral privilege and preference; we have become preoccupied with our own housekeeping; we have acquiesced as questions of religion and faith came to be excluded from the public domain and to be seen as matters of private preference.
To illustrate our place in society today, at the end of May a Drug Summit was called by the Premier of New South Wales. Present were all State parliamentarians, together with several hundred invited delegates who were seen to be people with a contribution to make. I think 1 am right in saying that not one Anglican as an Anglican or as a representative of an Anglican organisation was invited. With respect to one of the greatest threats to our society we are regarded as irrelevant.
Reversing that trend is, in my view, our greatest challenge. There is some hope. Dr Bruce Kaye is doing some fundamental thinking on the place and life of the non-ordained: 1 look forward to hearing more from Bruce, not least what he will have to say about the church, not as a collection of individuals but corporately, and its role in our society. Last Friday, I attended a dinner to launch the Macquarie Christian Studies Institute: the Institute is a joint venture with Macquarie University. The Institute will offer courses in Christian Studies which the University will credit towards the award of a degree. The hope is that as Christians prepare for their careers, so through the Institute they will have opportunity to reflect as Christians on what they learning. The goal is that they will be different and will bring a different perspective, a Christian one, to the world of which they are a part.
There are other things we might do. Our society does not think so, but among the most significant and influential people in our world are school teachers. Teachers do so much to shape the lives of those whom they educate, yet it is a lowly-rated occupation, undervalued and under paid. We would do well to raise its status, to persuade our best to see it as a vital occupation, to empower them to give their lives to transforming the lives of future Australians. Again, might we not seek to re-enter the marketplace of ideas? I have tried, with great lack of success, to establish a Millennial Lectures Series, to give Christians a voice on the issues that face Australians on the cusp of a new millennium. Do we not have something to say and do which is not market driven? Or what of a Future Leaders Forum? Who will be the leaders tomorrow of the professions, in government and public service, in industry and commerce, in the media and the arts and all the rest? Why should it not be Christian women and men? And why should we not seek to identify them now and sow in them a vision and enable to build networks that win empower and transform them? Ambitious? Perhaps. Yet we spend the bulk of our lives in the world beyond these walls, a world that is broken and divided, a world that breaks and divides. The people of God have always seen it as their role to help shape the values and aspirations of that world, demonstrating what real life is as they live out their workaday lives, modelling supportive and inclusive relationships, contributing to the welfare of the city of man, bringing true life to that city.
The statistics and some of the ideas I have mentioned have come from the National Church Life Survey book, Build My Church. A colleague saw the book on my table and said "It's a misnomer. Didn't Jesus say 'I will build my church'?" And so he did. Our expectations and hopes have a place, as do our efforts and plans. But it is God's church and its fate is in the hand of our great God. As we look to the future, those of us who make up God's church in this place and time will do no better, than to put ourselves deliberately and dependently in the hands of that same sovereign and purposeful God whose church it is. Then we might expect great things.
The time came for our expectant visitor to New York to check out of her hotel and pay the bill. She was told there was nothing to pay: someone else had already paid. There was a note. It read "Thank you for the best laugh we had all year. Eddie Murphy." May the story of the church in the great South Land of the Holy Spirit, and of its people and their expectations, end in similar delight.
- The Very Revd Boak Jobbins, 16 July 1999