That Was the Church That Was by Andrew Brown

Author:Andrew Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472921659
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

9

The Rowan vacuum

Somewhere on that drive home from the Lambeth Conference Andrew stopped at a motorway service station and realized that it was the first time in three weeks that he had heard Estuary English. None of the bishops on the campus at Canterbury talked like the English people who surrounded their churches. Even George Carey, who had grown up in Dagenham, had acquired unique but somewhat plummy tones during his ascent through the Church. He could no more speak the language ‘understanded of the common people’ than could any of the other bishops.

A lovely illustration of this came in 1997, when he broadcast his Christmas message from a service held on a Sunday afternoon in an Asda supermarket to all the other ones in the country. The hapless shoppers were handed service sheets and expected to sing along as they manoeuvred their trolleys. This was not a plan which would have occurred to anyone who knew people who had never gone to church, or even anyone who had ever done any shopping on the Sunday before Christmas.

It was just a tiny symptom of the general and growing detachment of the Church from the England around it. There were larger ones. The death and funeral rites of Diana were a gigantic upswelling of post-Christian sentiment. Someone described the milling crowd which formed in front of Kensington Palace after the news of her death as ‘a congregation without a church’. The rituals that emerged – the teddy bears, the flowers, the huge crowds – were not orchestrated by religion. George Carey went round the country for months afterwards giving speeches in which he claimed that this showed a deep spiritual hunger in the nation, which the Church stood ready to feed. But no one wanted what the Church was offering and no one in the Church seemed to give serious thought to the dimensions of the problem.

A similar failure attended the absurd Millennium Dome, which seems to have been intended as a post-Christian, or a-Christian, celebration of British spirituality – except that the word ‘spirituality’ was confined to a ‘spirit zone’, which had no taint of holiness or danger. Carey lobbied furiously for a year to get the Church officially represented at the opening, which in the event turned into a monumental fiasco. Guests were delayed for hours in East London, the acts were ghastly, and at the end of the evening, the Queen turned to one of her companions and said, ‘Well, there were only two people who enjoyed that – George Carey and Cherie Blair.’

The interest surrounding his successor was considerable. Among the chattering classes, and all across the media, there was a feeling – despite Diana, despite the Millennium Dome – that Christianity might be much more interesting than Carey had made it seem.

Carey’s own choice for his successor seems to have been Michael Nazir-Ali, the bishop of Rochester. Nazir-Ali, the child of Pakistani converts, had been at one stage the youngest Anglican bishop in the world. His diocese in Pakistan had been the subject of persecution by Muslims.

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