Bishop John Brown

We said farewell to Bishop John with strong Easter hymns this week. Few people really realised the stature of man living among them in his retirement in Cleethorpes, but then he was the last person to stand on stature.

Before I was born, he was serving in Jerusalem (there is something special about his having been ordained there) and becoming proficient in Arabic. Twenty-five years later, having served in Sudan and in Berkshire parishes, he was my Archdeacon (and may well have been the one at my ordination in Reading who read out the formal assurance I was a suitable candidate, but I don’t recall that sort of detail about the service).

Quite soon afterwards the Anglican Communion needed someone, ideally an Arabic speaker with rare diplomatic and leadership skills, to be Bishop of Cyprus and the Gulf, and it was on the then Archdeacon of Berkshire that they gratefully lit.

He served there for just eight years (1987-95), but those were the testing years of Terrie Waite’s captivity and release and of the Gulf War when the quality of our Bishop for the Arabian Peninsula was telling. At the thanksgiving service for his life this week people spoke of both his patient building up of the chaplaincies of the diocese and of his regular high-level encounters with the leaders of the countries across which they are scattered.

His knowledge of Arabic and local culture was crucial. He recalled one instance when he was aware of what was being said to him in Arabic (nothing less than a Muslim reflection on the theology of Martin Luther) was quite different to what the translator was attempting to express in English (not least because the translator misunderstood the subject to be Martin Luther King), and there must have been many others instances when his knowledge and careful attention was equally fruitful.

He was proud of being the subject of a fatwa - a formal religious opinion, patiently courted, which allowed Christian worship and the reopening after thirty years of Christ Church, Aden; it was for work in the clincic there that collections are being made in his memory.

He was a local lad who had sung in the choir at Old Clee, and his retiring back here was returning home (where, among other things, his elderly mother was still living), where he got stuck into bread and butter ministry without any pretensions (although, on feast days, in a spectacular pink cope); he often offering me as Rural Dean a range of Sundays when he simply hoped he might be quietly used.

A month ago, he called me over when he saw me pass the end of his cubicle in hospital.  He was being given blood because people were alarmed at his low blood count; his cancer was clearly running away at that point.  He was full of kindly enquiries and of understatements about his condition which he said he had been keeping quite. We heard that he had died when we were in Cordoba during Half Term, and the ancient Islamic art from there somehow makes an appropriate picture for this post.

Too many churches?

This week, the local Catholic Church (St Peter’s) is expecting the delayed announcement of its closure. This is part of a radical recasting of the Catholic Community in North East Lincolnshire. Ten years ago the number of Catholic priests in North East Lincolnshire was reduced from four to three. Instead of rearranging the four parishes into three, the bold decision was made to create one unit; the Sunday Mass times in the six churches were arranged so that two priests could cover all six services if the third priest was ill or away. But things have moved on in the short time since. Now it seems the Catholic diocese will only be able to deploy two priests and St Peter’s may not be the only one of the six churches to close.

So here is a picture of St Peter (who I greatly enjoyed finding on a door post when on holiday in Ireland).

And here is a version of the sheet I shared with our Anglican Deanery Synod a few months ago about our own need to face a similar situation.

• The physical landscape around us changes gradually until it becomes unrecognisable. Some change we hardly notice, such as the slow silting up of a harbour. Some change is observable over a few years, such as the rapid retreat of a cliff. Some change is instant, such as the result of levies breaking or land slipping.
• In the past, change in the Church of England has been of the first hardly noticeable sort. In the 150 years before I was confirmed in 1974 the pattern of clergy deployment, relating to society, theology and worship changed fundamentally without any of the individual increments being revolutionary.
• In the present, change in the Church of England is of the second rapid observable sort. The Alternative Service Book came and went in just twenty years, and the number of clergy deployed in most of the parishes in Grimsby & Cleethorpes today is half the number in the Pastoral Plan of the early 1990s.
• What is hardly grasped by anyone involved is that change in the Church of England immediate future will be of the third instant sort. The ground beneath us is moving. The pressures created by the demography of our congregations, the tightening our finances and shifts in society have been building inexorably.
• The demography of our congregations is such that the presence of those who were formed as present and future members of the Church of England in the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s has masked the startlingly smaller number so formed in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s, but as the former begin to die a huge gap is exposed.
• The tightening of our finances has reached the point where it costs over £100 a day to deploy a stipendiary priest before we even begin to finance our church activities and buildings; this will continue to increase in real terms.
• The shifts in society include everything from most people’s use of Sunday, the proportion of split families, a step change in individual consumerist expectations, and a sharp decline in active participation in everything from political parties to voluntary work, all of which work against traditional patterns of church commitment.
• A very significant financial subsidy from the historic resources of the diocese and the deployment of some full time Curates has helped shore things up, but very soon the combination of these pressures will mean that we suddenly cease to be able to operate as we are.
• Some people of all ages will continue to make Christian commitment, and many people will continue to look to the established church for varieties of Christian ministry, but the numbers of those committed will simply not be able to sustain anything like our present provision of buildings or stipendiary ministry.
• Some small parts of this deanery continue to operate as if change is still very gradual; the presence of a priest with security of tenure paid by someone else next door to a single church in a parish means that change doesn’t have to be faced at the moment at all.
• The majority of the deanery operates as if rapid change is enough: most places where ten years ago a priest lived next door a church in a parish which was his or her sole responsibility have ceased to operate in this way; systematic development of authorised lay ministry and alternative worship is quiet common.
• Hardly anyone operates as if the major crisis is coming, and the ugly experiences of our Methodist neighbours when seeking to bring together three small churches in the centre of our deanery is one indication of why we have shied away from seeking to propose anything bold.
• But if we were to be bold we would be doing things like uniting every pair our churches now to create single sustainable congregations in seven or eight places across the deanery which could each be resourced by just one stipendiary priest and together serve a wider area, and we would be deploying some priests directly in community engagement and mission posts.
• However we know (as the Methodists do) that the personal investment of most of us in the particular congregation of which we are part means that even coming to a common mind about which places to identify and then willingly ceasing regular worship in some others is a task which is beyond us.
• So are we more likely to wait until the levies break or the land slips, until further specific congregations become unviable or until the provision of stipendiary ministry across particular parts of the deanery becomes impossible, and make emergency plans in the new landscape only when we are confronted by it?