For the Parish: A Critique of Fresh Expressions

Introduction

This book is written in the belief that an important choice is offered to the Church of England: to embrace her historic mission to evangelize and serve the whole people of this country, or to decline into a sect. We are responding to the most significant development in the Church of England in recent years: the 2004 report, Mission-shaped Church, and the subsequent encouragement of extra-parochial congregations, called ‘Fresh Expressions of Church’.[1] The report and the initiatives launched at its prompting are an attempt to respond to what is perceived to be the near-complete secularization of Britain and the hegemony of market values. While the aim of engaging with our contemporary context is admirable, it is done, we argue, on the basis of a defective methodology, an inadequate theology, and by accepting the very choice-led individualism from which Christianity should seek to liberate us. It is a capitulation to market values rather than a critique where it is most needed or a counter-cultural vision of the kingdom.

What is new about these Fresh Expressions initiatives as officially conceived is that they are not intended to be out-workings of the mission of the local church but independent entities without any relation to the parish in which they operate. They are not the sorts of Christian communities modelled by the parish, open to all. They are special interest groups: ‘church’ whether of bikers, book-group members or participants in any other leisure activity or demographic that defines the consumerist criterion for membership. On the frail foundation of only nineteen pages devoted to theology in the Mission-shaped Church report, a massive redirection of mission and ecclesiology has been effected. A new orthodoxy, with cultural, financial and legal implications for the whole Church, has taken hold, but with little discussion about the biblical and theological foundations on which it is based. On the surface, it may appear that the inherited parochial system can carry on as before, but if it does, the older understanding no longer defines the Church of England’s ecclesiology. If Fresh Expressions is as equally valid a form of life for the Anglican Church as the parish, then what is common to both forms, the defining minimum of our identity, is greatly contracted. Since one is forbidden from suggesting that there is anything lacking from the vision of the Church embodied in Fresh Expressions, its attenuated ecclesiology thereby becomes the new contracted norm. This has implications not only for the Church’s self-understanding but also our conception of salvation, as we explore in Chapter 3 of the present volume.

In what follows, we offer a thoroughgoing critique of Fresh Expressions on theological and philosophical grounds. In particular, we deprecate the way in which the movement seeks to separate form and content, with the assumption that the essence of the Church exists separately from its living forms of expression. On the basis of this assumption: adherents of Fresh Expressions believe that the Church can be divested of her inherited practices, structures and disciplines and go on to be ‘re-expressed’ in new ways, with little or no sense of loss. In Chapter 1 we draw upon a wide range of theological and philosophical sources to argue for the inextricability of form and content, Wittgenstein among them–for whom values, meanings and convictions do not so much lie beneath our communal behaviour and ‘forms of life’ as in them. The separation of form and content is one aspect of a further theological error: a profound unease with mediation. Chapter 2 demonstrates the centrality of mediation to any Christian account of redemption, and Chapter 3 uses St Paul’s Epistles to show how unbiblical the Mission-shaped Church account of the Church has become in its desire to underplay the corporeal and participatory aspects of ecclesiology.

The Fresh Expressions model of the sector, choice-led worshipping group represents a flight away from the mixed community of the parish and towards segregation, as we argue in Chapter 4. The network of consumer choice is privileged over the parish as a site of difference and reconciliation, following the ‘Homogeneous Unit Principle’ of American Protestantism. It is also a flight from the value of tradition, common worship and the embodied self. The abandonment of stability for novelty and given liturgy for ‘choice’, results in banality and pastiche, as well as a frail and atomized subjectivity, as we demonstrate in Chapter 5.

In Chapters 6–9, we turn to a defence of the inherited parish system, which is routinely belittled and cast as unhelpful and irrelevant in Fresh Expressions writing. We argue the opposite: that the parish, nested in deanery and diocese, is poised to be a vital resource for mission in the future. We begin by sketching the theology of mission implicit in the parish vision of salvation in Chapter 6, with an examination of the value of locality, placement and inclusiveness represented by the parish church in Chapter 7. In Chapter 8 the task of rebuilding the Christian imaginary of time, place and narrative is described in detail, while Chapter 9 shows how our engagement in liturgy as a form of life develops the Christian virtues as much by gesture, space and movement as by what we say. These practical chapters aim to show how form and content work together to our human flourishing within the mediating structure of the local church.

This book is the fruit of a conference, ‘Returning to the Church’, held by St Stephen’s House in Oxford in collaboration with the Centre of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham in January 2009, at which a fruitful mixture of lay people, students, bishops, curates and academics came together to explore the traditions and future mission of the Church of England. Our two papers, on the importance of the parish and on the value of mediation struck such a chord with the delegates that we were commissioned to go away and unite them into a pamphlet, which has become this book. The conference was energetic and positive, and people visibly unfurled as we were able to speak about and value the ordinary practices, disciplines and ministries of Anglican life. There was also, however, a strong feeling of disenfranchisement, of a disconnect between classic Anglicanism and the growing orthodoxy of Fresh Expressions, and, in particular, of the way in which the ‘mixed economy’ idea sanctions part of the Church floating free from Anglican norms.

In what follows, we have no desire to criticize the valuable work of reaching out to the unchurched in mission and service. As priests ourselves, we see this as part of our own vocation and the natural outflowing of the parochial system’s cure of souls. Lynda Barley reported to the General Synod in 2007 that over 50 percent of parishes had launched or were about to embark on a Fresh Expression.[2] Where we take issue is the way in which first, the group centred around the extra-liturgical activity of football or the book-group is to stand on its own as a church, and second, in the marketing model of the Faith as a commodity, which is cheerfully embraced by synod members such as Michael Streeter, for whom the church ‘is a consumer product’, and which is implicit in the terminology of Fresh Expressions (which as we discovered, is already a commodity in the American supermarket: a brand of scented cat litter)[3].

This is unapologetically a work of theology, which is the subject least valued in recent reallocation of resources and in the literature surrounding the Fresh Expressions developments. It is wholly Anglican in seeing a direct link between the lex orandi and the lex credendi: how we pray expresses the manner in which we conceive God and the world. We wish to offer a theology that will restore the flagging morale of parish clergy, who often feel undervalued and unresourced, and that will allow us confidently to re-engage with our own tradition in the broadest sense of the term. We also hope that our critique might change the hearts of those who still seek the separation of what are often highly estimable outreach initiatives from the parishes in which they are based, and signal the end of the segregation of the ‘mixed economy’ approach to ecclesiology. Our country is crying out for a rebirth of locality, of counter-cultural values that resist the market, and for the restoration of social bonds. We know that these goods are only fully realized ‘in Christ’, through his body the Church, into which we were baptized. Let us then pursue all that makes for peace and builds up our common life.

[1]Mission-shaped Church: Church Planting and Fresh Expressions of Church in a Changing Context, 2004, London: Church House Publishing. All other references are to this edition and are noted in the text.

[2] Report to General Synod, February 2007, p. 43.

[3] ‘Fresh Expressions Lavender Valley Scoopable Cat Litter’ is available at www.petco.com.

1

The Union of Form and Content

Mission-shaped Church is a flawed document. Yet, at present, it determines the shape of ecclesiology in the Church of England. The flaws of the report are both theological and philosophical. We will highlight some of the theological concerns. Behind many of them lies a philosophical mistake that is too significant to pass over. Theology is the fulfilment of philosophy. All the same, theology needs philosophy if it is to expound the Christian revelation with clarity and consistency. The underlying philosophical mistake is that the forms of the Church are one thing and its inner reality is another. This is the mistake of attempting to disentangle ‘form’ from ‘content’.

As the report sees it, the Church can take an endless number of forms. In each case it is the same Church, but expressed in different ways. We can change the practices of the Church, her forms of life, as and when we like, to fit in with the surrounding culture. This treats the disciplines and practices of the Church as so much outward clothing.

The argument of Fresh Expressions would make no sense unless the ‘outward forms’ of the Church were one thing and the inner message or essence of the Church another. It allows for radical changes in the way the Church lives without – as they assure us – reinventing the Church of England in the process. We argue that this is a mistake. Form and content are much more closely bound up with one another. The theoretical basis for Fresh Expressions rests on a mistake about ‘expression’.

It is certainly possible to make a distinction between form and content. The distinction is a useful one. By ‘content’ we mean what the Church is about: its message, purpose and identity. By ‘form’ we mean the way this is lived and embodied. Form relates to what we call practices and disciplines of the Church. It is obvious that we can distinguish these two ideas; the mistake is to suppose that we can separate them. They are bound together: the content is in the form; the meaning is in the practices. Change the form and we change how we understand the content; change the practices and we at least risk changing the meaning. That is what we argue in this chapter.

For an excellent example of the interweaving of inward ‘meaning’ (or message) and outward ‘form’ (or practice), we have only to turn to Mission-shaped Church itself. The authors describe the pioneering work of Vincent Donovan among the Masai in East Africa:

Significant cultural challenges arose. A notable example was that Masai men and women do not eat meals together. Communion then raised very basic issues. But the converted Masai understood that the change of their beliefs included that Christ made different kinds of people one, because they were equally loved, and this pattern would have to change. So men and women of the Masai ‘brotherhood of God’ (their name for church) ate together for the first time – ever. (pp. 92–3)

The association of Christians across old divisions and differences is an important way in which the forms of the Church embody its Faith. This example is all the more striking since the report itself endorses segregated communities and the idea of the ‘homogeneous unit principle’, as we will discuss in Chapter 4.

The language of fashion and fusion

To see the extent to which form and content are dissociated in Fresh Expressions we need only notice how fond these authors are of metaphors of fabric, fashion and clothing. ‘The gospel’, they say, ‘may have many clothes, but there is only one gospel’ (p. 97). According to our analysis in terms of form and content, the gospel here is the content; its ‘clothes’ are the forms. In another passage the report describes the attitude of young people towards ‘denominations’[1] in terms of shopping for clothes. The various traditions of the Churches amount to no more than ‘different types of clothing, most of which are not thought cool’ (p. 25). Whether or not this is what young people think about the Church, the report does nothing to challenge it. The authors might wish that the denominations were held in higher esteem than they are, but they do not fault the terms of the analysis. For them, as for the putative ‘young people’, the forms of the Church really are so many fashion options. Our inherited ways of ‘being church’ are simply outward forms that clothe, this way or that, some inner essence of the Church.

The clothing metaphor comes into its own towards the end of the report, in a headline recommendation: ‘there is a fabric of the old way of being society and being church. We are not about patching the fabric of that old garment but seeking to set up a new loom to weave the new fabric for tomorrow’s society of the kingdom’ (p. 126). The authors leave us in no doubt. They want a radical upheaval, a disjunction between the old garment and the new, between old ways of ‘being church’ and new ones. This disjunction works only on the basis of the prior conceptual disjunction: between body and clothes, form and content.

Alongside fabric metaphors, the authors also write a great deal about ‘style’. On the one hand, there is the underlying essence of the Church and the simple message of the gospel. On the other hand, there is the outward ‘style’ taken by any particular ‘expression of church’. For Mission-shaped Church the practices and disciplines of the inherited church are just one of many potential ‘styles of doing and being church’ (p. 80). In this world of ‘style’, everything is up for change. The authors are quite clear that we must welcome any number of new styles into the Church of England. They are also quite clear that there is no reason why these new styles should bear any resemblance to what has gone before. Even more than that, it would be wrong to expect that sort of resemblance. The inner meaning of the church and its outward forms are so entirely separable that when a group ‘plants’ a new church it cannot possibly ‘begin with a clear understanding of what form of expression the resultant church may take’ (p. 30). The shape or form of the church floats free, this time from anything that has gone before.

The theory behind all of this comes to the surface in words that the authors borrow[2] from the Lausanne Haslev Consultation.[3] ‘There are many’, they lament, ‘who still fuse the meaning and forms of the gospel’ (p. 91).[4] We should note the tone of exasperation at this point: some people fuse meaning and forms; how foolish they are! The enlightened reader is supposed to recognize that the ‘meaning’ and ‘forms’ of the gospel are very different things. Upon this everything else rests.

The two authors of this book are among those who still ‘fuse the meaning and forms of the gospel’, and with them, the meaning and forms of the Church. We are supposed to be on the back foot here. With this book we wish to prove that we are not. The mistake is not associating the form and content of the Church, but rather to disassociate them. The message and purpose of the Church are to be found in the way she lives and worship. When it comes to the union of form and content, it is the Fresh Expressions writers who are out of date. It is difficult to imagine that a philosophically informed writer of any age would prise form and content apart so glibly. It is all the more remarkable for Mission-shaped Church to argue in these terms in 2004, coming after a century when Western thought became all the more aware how closely form and content are entwined. In this chapter we will establish this point from a number of philosophical sources. First, however, for an exercise in common sense.

The meaning is in the form

Imagine I tell you that my best feature is my boundless hospitality. I want to be like nothing so much as a Benedictine monk, giving food and shelter to all who come my way. Imagine also that my house is surrounded by a tall fence, with barbed wire and a guard- dog. You would not believe my claims. The form of my life would belie my message. As another example, think how much we say about ourselves by the way we dress. It would be incongruous for a headmistress famed for her strictness to wear a tracksuit to school. It would be incongruous for a headmaster known for his low-key approach to discipline to wear a three-piece suit. We would expect them to dress in a way that lines up with the way they exercise their authority. The image they create for themselves is an important part of how they get their job done. We make use of these ‘cultural symbolics’ all the time: those complex cultural codes to which we are all finely attuned.

The best example that Christian theology provides of the relation of form and content is in the theology of the sacraments. Here there is the most intimate link between the outward elements and the inner reality, between bread, wine and water on the one hand and the grace they convey on the other. The Church is herself a kind of sacrament – an outward sign of an inward and invisible grace. Many of the principles that apply to the sacraments also apply to the Church.

It is no quirk that we use bread and wine for Holy Communion or that we use water for baptism. The sign used in the sacrament is consistent with what the sacrament promises and bestows. Here form and content belong together, for all the ‘form’ is natural and the ‘content’ is supernatural. For instance, when Christ chose bread and wine, he identified himself with both the ordinary and the joyful. Bread shows that the life we receive from God is not a supplement or luxury. Without it, we cannot properly live. Christ is not a gourmet dish but our ‘daily bread’. At the same time, the life of Christ is ‘abundant life’, not just more of the humdrum same. Because of that, he offers himself to us in wine, not water. None of this is captured by pizza and a Coca-Cola. That is why the Church of England insists that we celebrate Holy Communion with bread and wine: ‘the bread, whether leavened or unleavened, shall be of the best and purest wheat flour that conveniently may be gotten, and the wine the fermented juice of the grape, good and wholesome.’[5] Similarly, the material element for baptism is water. As the common practice from the earliest times it is ‘living’ or flowing water. This is because baptism washes away sin and brings eternal life.

The sacraments were instituted wisely. In each one many different aspects of symbolism come together. The water of baptism, for instance, is primarily an indication of washing, but it also evokes refreshment and sustenance. For that reason we could not baptize someone in detergent. It would express only one part of what baptism is. Baptism is washing but not only washing. Water, and baptism, has nothing of the harshness of soap. The Church has a sacramental function. In her ‘outward and visible’ life we encounter the ‘inward and invisible’ grace of the life of Christ. That invites us to show a little more caution in changing those outward forms – a little more caution than the Church of England has, of late, been willing to admit.

Lessons from aesthetics: what is lost in translation?

Fresh Expressions are presented to us as a sort of translation. They take the Christian tradition, supposedly encumbered by the practices of the inherited church (as the parishes are now often called), and present it in the language of our times. They translate the Church into expressions fit for the twenty-first century. Invocation of translation brings us to the area of philosophy known as aesthetics, which is a good place to examine in relation of form and content.[6]

Roger Scruton covers this ground in his recent book entitled Beauty.[7] He argues that form and content are so closely bound together in a work of art that the content is precisely in the form. This accounts for one of the more uncanny features of art: we know that a particular work of art means something but we cannot say what it is. This is because the meaning is in the form of the work itself. Any translation of that meaning into another form would be a loss. We cannot describe in words what we encounter with our eyes. This also means that whatever a particular painting communicates or ‘has to say’ cannot be represented by another painting or photograph of the same subject.[8] As Scruton puts it, ‘the real meaning of the painting is bound up with, inseparable from, the image . . . and cannot be translated completely into another idiom.’[9]

Over the second half of the twentieth century, this language and these ideas have found currency in Christian theology, not least because of the pioneering work of the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar and his seven-volume work The Glory of the Lord. Here, among many other ideas of great value, we find an exploration of Christology in terms of the inseparability of form and content.[10] In Christ, all the elements of his life and person come together in his form. His person, actions and preaching are inseparable within this whole, as are his divinity and his humanity.[11] Here the Church imitates the Head of which she is the Body. For her also, her identity and her forms of life, her actions and her message are all of a piece.

Returning to aesthetics, the same dynamic that we noticed in the visual arts is at work in poetry. We know that we are dealing with a poem when what we have in front of us could not be paraphrased without missing the point. Any attempt to extract the meaning and express it prosaically would do violence to the poem. Scruton makes this point in Beauty.[12] The poet Robert Frost had already said the same thing: ‘poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.’[13] The Italians have a pleasing and accurate proverb, tradurre e tradire: translation is treason.[14]

We do not mean to suggest that the form of the Church has not evolved, slowly and over time. Nor are we saying that all ‘translation’ of the Church into new situations is wrong or futile. We are saying, throughout the first half of this book, that form and content are more closely bound together than the Fresh Expressions writers suppose or are willing to admit.

In the Church as in the poem, the message is in the form. In neither case can we simply extract the meaning and rearticulate it in a new form without loss. One reason for this is that so many things count – in both the life of the Church and in the poem – and in so many ways. The traditional patterns and disciplines of the life in the Church embody the Faith and they do so on many different levels. To extend our literary parallel, this is like the levels of meaning and invocation in a poem. To use a word of Scruton’s, the potential meanings of the poem are ‘polysemous’[15] (meaning many things), and so are the multifaceted practices of the Church.

This suggests a fruitful line of analysis when it comes to Fresh Expressions. Any particular Fresh Expression may well embody one aspect of the Church’s life and mission extremely well. It is unlikely that it will embody them all, or even very many of them. It may be that a Fresh Expression lives out one element of the Church’s life more clearly than the forms of the inherited church were able. It might embody accessibility, or creativity, or work with the old, or the young. This has its advantages, but it also has its disadvantages.

For one thing, a Fresh Expression is tailored to one situation, so when the situation changes it will lack wider resources. In contrast, the deeply layered life of the inherited church allows it to face the widest variety of situations. In this way, parish churches maintain their witness over centuries. It is the parish church, in the end, that is able to change and adapt. The Fresh Expression will simply fold when it has run its relatively brief course – or turn into something much more like a parish church.

In contrast to the Fresh Expression, the parish church is committed to the longest possible time-scale. It intends to be in the community as long as the community exists. In this way, parish churches can gain enormous standing in a community. Through their deep-rooted commitment to people and place, they have the resources to minister in good times and in bad, in war and peace, prosperity and adversity, and to adapt as the locality changes. During his curacy, one of us was profoundly aware that the warmth of the community towards the parish church and its priests was the fruit of eighty years of faithful ministry by those who had been there before: ‘others have laboured, and you have entered into their labour’ (John 4.38).[16] Our purpose with this book is to call for a reflection upon dynamics at work here, and a greater degree of awareness that there are losses when old forms are lightly discarded.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The most significant consideration of form and content in the last century came from the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Born in Vienna in 1889, he spent much of his adult life in England. His work could not be more pertinent for understanding the systematic error that lies at the heart of Mission-shaped Church.

A great many theologians have recognized the significance of Wittgenstein for Christian thought. We are particularly in debt to the Dominican Fergus Kerr and his Theology after Wittgenstein.[17] When the history of theology in the late-twentieth century is written, his book will be seen to have caused a minor sea change all of its own.

Wittgenstein’s work falls into two halves. We will be concerned with the latter portion.[18] It represents one of the most revolutionary, white-hot outpourings of ideas in the history of philosophy. It is summed up in the Philosophical Investigations, published only after his death.[19] The principle insight we will take from Wittgenstein is that we cannot understand how language works without recognizing just how much speaking is bound up with acting and belonging together to a community. In particular, for Wittgenstein, we have a common understanding of what words mean – which is what language is about – because we also share common practices.

Wittgenstein insisted