On wobbly Jenga towers, church governance, yeast, broken bread, communion, metamorphosis and a modern, free and inquiring religion
 |
| The communion table at Cambridge, ready for our Pentecost Communion Service in 2018 |
A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation.
(Click on this link to hear a recorded version of the following piece)
—o0o—
In early January 2019, Shirley Fieldhouse (1935–2019) died. Over the course of nearly 60 years, Shirley had become this congregation’s key figure and, as such, she did everything; she was the chair of the congregation, its secretary, its treasurer, its caretaker, cleaner, lettings manager, gardener, and more besides. But as volunteers became increasingly hard to find — and every modern voluntary institution has come to experience this — Shirley, amazingly, had both the time, energy and willingness to hold more and more of these roles simultaneously. Now, to you and me, perhaps, this would have seemed an unimaginably horrible situation but, following her retirement in 1999 after 40 years as secretary to the Head of the Cavendish Laboratory, these roles in the church filled her life fruitfully and were deeply meaningful to her and, of course, to us. For her life and service, we will remain forever grateful. |
| With Shirley Fieldhouse at my induction service in Sept. 2000 |
And then, on March 24th 2020, one year and two months after her funeral, the first COVID lockdown began, and the church buildings closed entirely for worship. As a congregation we did not meet again, face-to-face, until September 5th 2021 — a closure lasting 534 days.
During that time, whilst I was working, walking around, reading and meditating in these buildings and in our little garden — mostly entirely alone of course — along with the aforementioned problem with our governance structures, I also began to see these things more clearly:
- That the buildings we had built in the 1920s for the kinds of activities and needs that prevailed back then were rapidly becoming unfit for the modern situation.
- That many parts of our buildings were at the end of their life — particularly the roofs — and would cost many hundreds of thousands of pounds to put right.
- That the basic business model upon which we once relied to survive was not going to sustain us over the longer term because we were not going to be able to generate enough income from hiring out our increasingly unfit-for-purpose and dilapidated buildings.
- It’s also worth noting that during the lockdown I took the time to read and re-read a number of history books about church decline in the 20th century [for example, this], especially Non-Conformist, liberal Protestant decline. This meant I was also able to see that pretty much every one of their predictions was turning out to be correct — albeit often a few decades later than their original authors predicted. In short, I saw that the age of the liberal Christian church as it once was, really was over.
- Connected with this, it was also a time for me fully to digest the fact that Christian belief, especially the liberal kind upon which the Unitarian movement had been founded, was continuing rapidly to dissolve in British culture. And that even as many of the Cambridge congregation’s members remained deeply committed to the basic teachings of the human Jesus — as, indeed, am I — we were now a complex spiritual community consisting of liberal theists and non-theists, religious humanists, religious naturalists, and advocates of various kinds of Buddhist philosophies and practices. In short, I saw there needed to be a frank acknowledgement that this local congregation could no longer meaningfully be characterized as being a liberal, Unitarian Christian church, but had, instead, begun to become something different. It was being forced to meditate upon this truth for 534 days that finally clarified for me the urgency of explicitly shifting our community’s corporate centre of gravity and identity to what our General Assembly’s object describes as, “a free and inquiring religion,” and which I have been exploring with you ever since through the work of the Japanese Yuniterien (sic) and advocate of Free Religion (jiyū shūkyō), Imaoka Shin’ichiro-sensei (1881-1988). It’s interesting to observe, and I think very significant, that our denomination’s Chief Officer, Liz Slade, is now referring to a free and inquiring religion as being our liberal religious movement’s “yeast”.
Anyway, by the time we eventually came back together face-to-face as a congregation in September 2021, we clearly had to begin to address all these matters, and a few more besides.
This was, indeed still is, all very difficult stuff to deal with. But, from my point of view, although the five-year period between 2019 and today has been, at times, utterly exhausting and has felt almost terminally difficult, during this time I have also experienced some of the most encouraging moments of my 24-year-long ministry with you. Perhaps the most important extended high-point has been to be able to work with various iterations of a church committee that has been willing to begin to explore how we might make some of the necessary, but long overdue, changes to our structures of governance, buildings and religious/spiritual centre of gravity.
And so, here we are, just about to have our AGM for 2024. All of us charged with the running of this community come to today’s meeting knowing, with utter clarity, that we must simply seize the positive opportunity gifted to us by becoming a CIO (Charitable Incorporated Organization), radically to change the way we organise ourselves so we can begin to concentrate what visions, energies and passions we still individually and collectively have, more effectively and joyously towards ensuring that our free and inquiring religious and spiritual yeast can be nurtured and shared with a world that is so very different from the one known by the founders of our local church in 1904.
It is a plan to begin to address all this that you will hear about in the AGM which follows and which you will be asked to consider and, I hope, support.
And it is powerfully symbolic, to me anyway, that, by law, at the AGM, around this, our communion table, everyone from the old legal body must resign in order to allow the old structure to die. Like the loaf in the communion service, at that moment, our institution’s old, broken and dead body will lie there before us as a profound symbol of all that it has gifted to us during its 120-year-long life of service.
But then there will come a moment of communion, traditionally marked in Christian settings, of course, with words from 1 Cor. 11:24, “Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.” This will be the moment when, in remembrance and gratitude, we can choose, if we wish, to pick up the broken pieces of the old loaf — that is to say, all the old structures, roles and duties — and ingest and then digest them in new and creative ways so as to begin to form a new corporate body which can move beyond the limits of the liberal Christianity and Unitarianism of our forebears, and bring into being the more expansive and inclusive free-religious and spiritual community we know it is possible for us to become, the spirit of which our divided world so desperately needs.
Of course, for some, this act of communion and consequent metamorphosis will, if it takes place, be a scary moment; but then radical transformations like this always are.
“We receive fragments of holiness, glimpses of eternity, brief moments of insight. Let us gather them up for the precious gifts that they are and, renewed by their grace, begin to walk a path that is safer than the known way.”
May it be so. Amen.
Comments