An unvaccinated generation?

 

Both my local parish church and the one where I work have new young adult attenders.  Thing in our Mission Action Plans isn’t what has attracted them.  They have simply pitching up.  In some cases, at least for now, some of them are staying.

I am sure we can overhype it, not least because we’d dearly love to replace that narrative of terminal decline with that of what is being called ‘a quiet revival’, but something low key is going on.  It is a phenomenon being noticed and commented upon elsewhere. 

Post Covid, some of those in a serious generation explore on-line.  It appears that some of them are then seeking out places where they might expect to find a deep tradition being lived out. 

The Bible Society has done some research.  A fresh thought came to me listening in on one of their webinars.  My thought isn’t either a serious analysis nor a theory based on such.  It is more like a parable.

I used too frequently to make a poor joke.  It was about things like the Sunday School and school collective worship work to which I and others were giving significant time.  ‘It is like a vaccination,’ I would say, ‘a small harmless dose given to children now, designed to prevent them catching the real thing later in life’.

This seriously undervalued and insulted the dedication and the quality of work of many.  It also  ignored those whose Christian life was to develop and grow from such beginnings.  But any joke (however bad) depends on there being a tiny element of truth which people recognise.

My fresh thought is now this.  Young adults come from an unvaccinated generation, or at least from places where the level of vaccination has fallen sufficiently low for there to be a danger of pockets where the disease does break out.

The church has existed where the Christian disease is infectious and endemic.  It has also existed where wide spread vaccination has domesticated it to a relatively harmless level.  What we hadn’t expected to see is outbreaks among a new unvaccinated generation.

It isn’t that many people had ceased to enquire.  Everything from the Catholic Rite for the Christian Initiation of Adults to the evangelical Alpha Course have been honed and made instantly available in response to this.  Middle of the road Anglican enquirers material does of course exist as well.

But I certainly don’t remember in forty years the steady trickle of such explorers simply turning up, perhaps even expecting us to be more articulate about and more transformed by the Gospel than we sometimes are.

I found a rather good (print size, notes, lay out) copy of St Matthew’s Gospel which I gave to one of them who asked for a Bible the other day.  He wasn’t sure that I’d understood his request because even school Religious Education  had not equipped him to recognise this to be (an accessible) part of the Bible.

Meanwhile, I’ve just noticed the two FP plaques (one on a house in Newport and one on a house in Danesgate).  They are obviously a pair, and there may be others around Lincoln.  They mark the distance to a Fire Plug – literally a bung in a hole in what was then a new water main. 

Presumably the main text (FP, Ft, In) is wrought while, the figures giving the actual distance in feet and inches had been less surely attached and had now fallen off

A new stage of life

 

Each Blog post obviously simply involves selecting an image and preparing a text.  Not in itself the most demanding thing in the middle of full-time work.  Something I did on average a couple of times a week over sixteen years. 

But it has proved surprisingly difficult to fit it into the ‘time off’ from a half-time job over the last eighteen months.  So much so that productivity has ceased. 

I’ve missed thinking through some of the things which strike me.  Even more, I have missed being able to return to the record of them.  This has always been more a notebook for myself than a newsletter for any others who might happen to look over my shoulder.

What is now my eighteen month licence as a priest supporting Grimsby Minster parish lasts until the end of this month, and the newly appointed full-time Vicar will come into post in the next few weeks.  It remains to be seen whether the old blogging pattern will resume after that. 

This actual post only comes because yesterday evening the impending storm led to the cancellation of my train north.  I now have three clear days when I was to be away to visit friends in Northumberland.

The carefully managed dislocation between thirty-seven years of stipendiary ministry and whatever priestly ministry was to follow was well aided by a compulsory gap of six months without a licence or any permission to officiate at all.

I thought I saw the point that those of us whose only experience of church membership over many years had been to have a measure of control, even when the ‘control’ is that of promoting collaboration.  We needed to get used to having no role at all before something quite different and supportive could have any chance of emerging.

Being called back for eighteen months into a role involving a level of strategic leadership has rather wrecked that, and I suspect that the dislocation will be harder a second time around.

I think I am beginning to see a deeper point.  Habitual delivery of ministry can be at the cost of the development of personal discipleship.  However much one guards against it, the obvious example is too often asking not so much ‘how do this Sunday’s readings cut into me?’ as ‘what shall I say about them?’. 

This isn’t just personal.  I’ve long been aware of the dangers involved in having to focus on the viability and growth of the church (business plan, fabric financing, mission statement, essential safeguarding) at the cost of, well, kingdom-seeking.  This just seems so much acute in the modern church.

The weighed down pilgrim is from John Bunyan’s grave visited last month.  The burden (which wasn't the reason to choose the image) did fall off.