Beyond Empire III - How to save the parish?...
Place, space and a renewal of the vocation of parish.
The more I think about this theme of a shift in empires the more I sense that is a rich way of reflecting on the question of how we might orient ourselves and adapt our practice as Christian community in our times. To recap I’m arguing that our challenge is to both respond well to the lessons that leaving Christendom is surfacing for us, and at the same time give deep attention and discernment to the question of how to live faithfully in the empires of late modernity. So this is a complex task. And one which must be done as we journey, looking both backwards and forwards.
Last time I reflected a little on the theme of time, which is I think a theme which gets less attention than others in this conversation (though the likes of Andrew Root, Hartmut Rosa and John Swinton have made significant contributions here). This time I want to explore the theme of place. This is a theme which has had a great deal more attention in all sorts of disciplines including ecclesiology.
In ecclesiology, certainly in Anglican ecclesiology, this probably as a lot to do with the our tradition and with the resilience of the parish system. Hard wired into the DNA of the Church of England’s tradition is a commitment to place which is expressed in structured terms in a pastoral commitment to every inch of ground in England. However, what debates about the nature of the church and the significance of the parish system reveal, is that there is no longer a consensus on the value of place. These debates, whether you are card-carrying member of Save the Parish, or a passionate advocate for online worship, go deeper than debates about the form of church however. They are debates about what it means to be human. They are disagreements about the extent to which embodiment and particularity are not a question of personal choice, but fundamental principles for a fully human life.
The parish as an idea, as a ‘vocation’ for the church (as Will Foulger helpfully expresses it),1 is saying a definite ‘yes’ to the importance of place. Parish is then, not so much about buildings and numbers of clergy, but about a structure and practice for Christian community life which stakes a high value on the importance of place in a fully human life. Its a shame that these debates about the parish get trapped in sideshows about money and clergy - these are the practical parameters of the debate perhaps, but fundamentally this is a debate about the kind of expression of Christian community that we seek in order to faithfully express our call to be a prophetic society of disciples in this cultural context.
And the fact that this debate is really about deeper issues of anthropology points to the reality that place has been systematically devalued by the empires of modernity. As Elizabeth Oldfield has argued, our culture is wired for disconnection.2 And as Paul Kingsnorth has argued the pernicious power and strategy of the modernity machine is to uproot and lay waste to the deep and complex patterns and practices of human life in a place.3
In so doing it renders place into space. Turning place into space turns diverse communities, with their stories and particularities, into bland, two-dimensional depositories of resource for the needs of the machine. Land enclosures; the intensification of farming; the franchisation of retail such that most high streets look much like another; the creeping colonisation of online retail and next day delivery - all erode place, disconnect us from the land and from one another.
One of Rowan William’s poem asks ‘Why are places not neutral?’.4 A later stanza states:
Grace, yes, but damnation too dissolves in place, so it is not the future but the past we know to be incredible.
Modernity’s assault on place is also an assault on story, tradition - a de-storying of place and a fixation on the future (future gain, future growth) as the sole reason for place. All of which uproots communities from the narratives and wells of life that give meaning and hope.
Parish, as an idea, as a vocation, is then of immense importance for the church in our age. The parish vocation is, as Andrew Rumsey beautiful expressed, to practice a ‘school for belonging’ within the particularities of place.5 The parish idea invites a kind of belonging which is local, embodied and particular. However, that this has been expressed in certain ways for centuries need not mean that it is the only way to express it and so the only way to preserve it. Saving the parish need not be reduced only to a rear-guard action in defence of clergy numbers and Sunday eucharists in the village church. I am saying it could be this - and perhaps should be this - there is no doubt that well-resourced local church leaders are key to the future well-being of Christian presence in every place. But not only this. There are other ways of nurturing and sustaining Christian communal presence which honours place.
So it is here that we find another way in which intentional community is perhaps offering a faithful response to the challenges of our time. Drawing on the deep resources of monasticism’s commitment to stability, to the land and to place, intentional communities are offering a different kind of expression of the vocation of parish. Networks of small missional communities in rural locations are emerging in all sorts of places. Very often they have a strong relationship with the existing parish church and are concerned not to replicate or compete with its mission. On the whole they are more likely to collaborate, communicate with and complement the ministry of the parish church or other local churches.
In researching for my book In the Fullness of Time I saw a number of these communities. What struck me again and again was their commitment to place, to listening to context, to understanding the deep stories of God’s dealing with a place, and to stepping carefully and faithfully into those stories as bearers of the call to be God’s mission there. This was not a takeover, or a recolonisation. It seemed to me that these communities are discerning both backwards and forwards, valuing the past, but also creatively expressing Christian communal presence in ways that are perhaps offering prophetic alternatives within the desolate spaces of late modernity.
In a world where the parish concept is being stretched to its very limit, merging parishes to create ever large benefices within which the vocation of parish priest becomes virtually untenable, the missional community offers a simpler, lighter expression of the parish concept that can operate within a mixed ecology of Christian communal life across a wider sense of place. Saving the parish must involve less attention to the defence of one system and more attention to the emergence of a new one, in which a renaissance of monastic communal commitment to presence and place is growing on the old trellis of the parish structure.
Will Foulger (2023) Present in Every Place (London:SCM)
Elizabeth Oldfield (2024) Fully Alive (London: Hodder & Stoughton)
Paul Kingsnorth (2025) Against the Machine (London: Penguin)
Rowan Williams ‘Return Journey’ in Collected Poem (Manchester:Carcanet)
Andrew Rumsey (2017) Parish (London:SCM)
Great read it got me thinking https://www.sundaypapers.org.uk/?p=4365
I don’t think the monastic orders were as committed to place as you suggest. The Benedictines installed themselves in monasteries, but the later mendicant orders had itinerant lifestyles. There were expeditionary Celtic monks such as Columba, Columbanus and the legendary Brendan the Navigator.
These are the ones that inspire me with their ‘white martyrdom’ of chosen exile. They were peregrinati, committed to the pilgrimage with a focus on learning and evangelism. Parishes did not exist and they weren’t trying to establish them.
People have a natural yearning for peaceful, settled and connected life. But maybe that stability need not come from the fixity of place, but from solid gospel truths embraced and loving human relationships.