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Dishing the Dirt.
September dawns and England crawls wearily back to work. Empty churches start to fill again and the parson drags on his pipe and looks forward to his flock returning, bronzed and eager for the fray. Empty churches? What empty churches?
As the last edition of this magazine went to press there came the announcement that the next Archbishop of Canterbury is to be a bearded Welsh Wizard. In the Northern Province the Primate (or Marsupial for the uninformed) of All England is a distant figure. In the land beyond the Humber, where the Celtic church long held sway, we might rejoice that Saint Augustine’s throne is, at last, to be occupied by one of our Gaelic brethren. The press began braying as soon as his name was hinted at, dragging out what they supposed to be the dirt. The scribblers need to have their spectacles cleaned, they see dirt everywhere, even where it does not exist.
The Church of England, nay the church in England, is, they say, deceased. The new Archbishop is presiding over a corpse. Unfortunately for them, the church was founded on faith in man who was clinically dead, buried in a cave, and rose again on the third day. The church does not know what dead is. The journalists, hunched over their computers, are as remote from reality as Canterbury is from York.
Those who look at the occasionally small congregations in our churches and weep should realise that this is the tip of the iceberg. On any one Sunday, in this parish alone, we have three services, and often four. Eucharists during the week are not empty affairs. Considerable numbers of people see fit to swell our numbers when they have their children baptized. Crowds turn up on a Saturday for weddings. When the figures are all added together they come to a considerable total. Numbers espousing the Christian faith have not fallen, they have simply been redistributed.
More than that, world-wide, the Anglican Communion is burgeoning. Rowan Williams is heading up a part of the Body of Christ which is alive and well and rearing to go.
May God bless you all, Fr. Allan
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