Renewal in the
Rural Areas
An
address given by the Revd Peter Bement, Vicar of Llandeilo,
at
the Extra General Meeting on 26th April, 2001.
Peter
started inauspiciously by claiming that he knew least of all about renewal in
rural areas. There are many
problems for Christians working in rural areas, but the main one is: how do we
communicate with the outside world? - how do we become Church?
And what do we mean by renewal?
He invited us to think about our own church. What would we like it to be like as a renewed church?
We may think that this has a lot to do with style, and that renewal is to
replicate the style of church that we were in previously - the style of worship
and preaching and doctrinal emphasis. But
it is a big mistake to think of renewal thus.
God is not interested in such things - he sees the heart.
So
what is renewal? You can think of
it this way. What would happen if
Christ turned up in this local, rural church?
Think of a church in Revelation chapter 3: packed with people - preaching
and worship good - suddenly there’s a knock on the door - it’s Jesus: ”I
would like to come in and share in this meal!”
This church has everything except Jesus.
Consider
Luke’s Sermon on the Plain, (Luke 6:17ff).
This happened in the countryside, but most of the people had come from
towns. Jesus is the fountain of
power and healing. People press in
on him because the closer they get to Jesus the more likely they are to be
healed. There are two groups
of people: those who have come for healing, and the disciples to whom Jesus
speaks the Beatitudes. This
inner group are being taught by Jesus; they have submitted to him and are
committed to him. There is outreach to the wider group - they are being touched
and healed. Or consider the
situation described in Acts 2:42ff. This
is an example of outreach by the apostles, and the point is you cannot separate
renewal from evangelism - this is the experience of renewal.
Welsh
Christianity is institutionally rural. According
to figures collected in 1995, we have a place of Christian worship for every 580
people in the Principality. Most of
the buildings are in the countryside and most of the people are in towns, where
they are hardly touched. In the
nineteenth century there was a great wave of church building; but despite that,
our parish system still reflects the state of the country in the Middle Ages.
But bad as the situation in the rural areas, it is worse in the cities.
In 1999, of the 583 benefices in the Church in Wales, the largest 25
served 566,000 people, and between them they mustered 8,056 Christmas
communicants. At the bottom of the
list you need 330 rural benefices to get anywhere near the population of the 25
urban ones. But in the smallest 330
there were 36,308 Christmas communicants.
The point of all these numbers is that we have all these resources in the
rural areas, where we are doing best, but we are under-resourced in the urban
areas. Twenty percent of the
inhabitants of St Davids diocese are Christians - the most successful mission in
Great Britain! So our most urgent
need is for urban mission; like in the retail trade, the more outlets the more
sales.
Rural
congregations are diminishing and ageing; there is no potential for mission or
renewal - we are on the brink of a wave of closures.
What has gone wrong? The
answer is that our structures commit us to maintenance and to manage decline.
There was a time when the community was stable - nothing ever changed.
Now the existence of clerics etc. is not certain.
Mission and outreach don’t stem from institutional structures but from
faith. What kind of faith have we
been maintaining?
When
a country church closes, the congregation doesn’t transfer to another, it
generally stops going to church. What
have we been maintaining? A shrine?
Superstition? God goes when the church goes?
Or nostalgia for the rural church? Often
people travel large distances to worship where their ancestors worshipped.
Or is it a graveyard cult? Worshippers
are often attracted to a church because people they knew are buried there; this
is close to paganism.
Peter
said he knew of two churches which meet for 45 minutes, twice a month, under the
leadership of a flying cleric. Are
such congregations functioning as Church?
On the other hand, renewal does sometimes knock on the door of such a
church. There are people who form
renewal groups. But those in the
rural church are usually in the hands of the oldest members of the
congregations. It is difficult for
a village church to absorb a new renewal group, especially if it is
Welsh-speaking.
From
early times the Church’s mission strategy has been based on cities.
Take for example Mark 2:21ff., Jesus goes to a town and then to the
synagogue. In Mark 1:38 Jesus goes
rural, launching his mission from the town of Capernaum.
The Church has continued to do this down the ages.
An example of the founding of a church is given in Acts 2:41ff.
This takes place in Jerusalem, with the Eucharist, Bible study and
healing, and with sufficient people to sustain numbers.
In Acts 16 Paul goes to the chief towns where the Jews are living and
starts preaching. His mission started Jewish and became trans-cultural,
bringing in Greeks and others. Missions
are initially cosmopolitan (from all over) and become metropolitan (urban).
The Toronto Blessing, Alpha and New Wine all came
from cities. In rural communities
it is incomers who respond best to renewal and are disappointed at the local
response.
At
one time Peter and his wife Anna were in a very small village in a rural part of
east Wales. The Wesleyan chapel was
now a private house and the Baptist church had recently been abandoned. As for the parish church - its most recent heyday, going by
the graveyard, had been the nineteenth century, when there was prosperity and
activity, but not much else since. The
church was grouped with three others, and it had a classic, tiny, dwindling
congregation. But there was a group
looking for renewal who wanted to be fed, and tried to stay with the
church. They met in a house
monthly. The previous incumbent
warily agreed with them; the new incumbent also agreed to let the group go on,
and also wanted high church worship. The
village school had 36 children from young families who were never seen in
church. Will the newcomers form a
separate fellowship and will the priest reach out to families with
school-children?
A
bigger question is: do we need to rethink structures - drop the parish system?
It is a tremendous ideal but it doesn’t work. You could have 72,000 people in a town parish with two
clergy. Peter’s parish is a
market town of 1200 people. He has
to work in the town to get the critical mass necessary to sustain a
properly functioning fellowship at the centre before he can think about starting
mission. But are we maintaining
what God has long abandoned? Maybe
the lamp stands have gone. In
John 15 God cuts off the withered branches.
Maybe we need to change how we are Church. We may also need to change our renewal strategy, there has
been too much revivalism in the Welsh language.
Peter has just started a Welsh language, Bible study class.
Welsh people are demolished by competition with the English - it makes
them defensive, and makes Welsh chapels more interested in keeping the Welsh
language.
In
John 20:19-23 we have the first resurrection moment.
The disciples were locked in, inward-looking and afraid.
When Jesus enters they are filled with joy and he fills them with power
and gives them a mission. A
community is being called into being which has a mission to go out, apostolic
and evangelistic. We must believe
God is going to have his Church until Jesus comes again. But is it going to be our church, or will ours be cut away?
Some
members of the audience then shared their experiences:
There
was a strong feeling that the parish system is dead, and that we should work at
the deanery level and let the people run their own parish church.
To this end, the clergy should be used to equip the saints, that
is the laity, to take over.
Also, we must break the insistence on keeping church buildings which are
unsuitable for their present-day purpose; these were seen as a burden which the
Church in Wales could well do without.
If the state took over the running of the buildings then the Church could
fulfill its role as a servant people, and stop worrying about the quota,
which was a distraction from mission.
Finally
the Chairman thanked Peter for a very entertaining and thought-provoking
address.
Brian Newsom