Parish: An Anglican Theology of Place

Andrew Rumsey

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780334054849
• eBook ISBN: 9780334054863
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematische Theologie & Ethik

This book examines the distinctive form of social and communal life created by the Anglican parish, applying and advancing the emerging discipline of place theology by filling a conspicuous gap in contemporary scholarship.

Part one: Christ in Our Place: The Anglican Parish in Theoretical Perspective

Introduction

At the dimming of Easter Day, a stranger draws alongside two companions, dragging their feet down the Emmaus Road. Followers of Christ, they seem entirely unaware that they are now walking next to their Lord. The outsider asks to hear the news from Jerusalem, so they respond: ‘are you the only stranger who doesn’t know the things that have happened here?’ ‘What things?’ he persists – and the story unrolls.

Amid this familiar mystery from Luke’s Gospel is hidden a radical vision for the local church. The risen Christ, it suggests, is not only found in the living word and broken bread, but also grounded in a definite kind of local encounter. The Greek term Luke uses here for ‘stranger’ – paroikeis – appears in several forms in the New Testament and from this stem grows our English word ‘parish’. An alternative rendering of the conversation might then be, ‘Are you a parishioner that you don’t know what has happened here?’ In Graeco-Roman society, paroikia described the community of people either living physically beyond the city boundaries (literally ‘those beside the house’) or as non-citizens within the walls. They were those who lived nearby, but didn’t belong. That the early Church – much as it did with ecclesia – adopted this civil term for their organization abounds with contemporary significance. The Church was the fellowship of strangers, the community of non-belongers, who had found their place in Christ.1

This book is a description of that place as it took root in this country. The parish system was not the first or only form of ecclesiastical network in Britain, but, once established, it became the pre-eminent model of communal ‘belonging’ for close on a thousand years: ‘the basic territorial unit in the organization of this country’, as one historian has labelled it.2 Nevertheless, it remains an enigmatic theme, especially in an era when ‘parochial’ is commonly used as a byword for blinkered insularity. With the parish system strained to breaking point and its relevance to society increasingly questioned, there is a pressing need to rediscover the principles that shaped it – not least because of an ever-growing political and environmental momentum to find resilient and fertile kinds of common life. The parish has always reinvented itself: no place could be so influential, for so long, without doing so. And while by no means the only description of English locality – parish has always vied and overlapped with towns, wards, ‘vills’ and various other forms – it has been an unrivalled building block of neighbourhood, uniquely combining religious meaning with local identity. As Oliver Rackham puts it in his History of the Countryside, parish is singular in being ‘the smallest unit of spiritual and secular geography’.

This blend has always intrigued me. Raised in a rectory, I have instinctively viewed places in this way – as both spiritual and secular – and it has long been my vocation to live as though they were. For places are, I suggest, imagined first and then enacted: how we behave in a particular locale depends largely on what kind of place we believe it to be. Undergirding this book is faith in a spiritual tradition that exists as one among many currently practised in this country, each exerting a distinctive influence upon the social landscape. However, in both historical and geographical terms, the Church of England is not just another stakeholder, even as it rightly adjusts to a new and humbler role in national life. Any accurate realignment of its contemporary ‘place’ is not served by ignorance about the Church’s remarkable formative influence, over many centuries.

As the source for much of that influence, the parish’s standing is in a sense plain – one author going so far as to call it ‘the bedrock of European civilization as a whole’.3 But while the English, specifically Anglican, parish (varying types of parochial organization having spanned Christendom) is uniquely embedded in national culture, by virtue both of its antiquity and close allegiance with secular governance, its social and theological significance has hitherto been given remarkably scant consideration.4 This is partly because, while ecclesiastical history has long formed a pillar of academic training for ordained ministry, ecclesiastical geography has not – even though parish ministry is, by definition, geographical. Unsurprising, then, that contemporary church debate about locality tends to be geographically denuded: a shortcoming, which in turn ‘thins out’ a theological appreciation of parochial ministry.5 If geography is seen as theologically neutral, the parish system clearly risks being similarly undervalued. At a time when its viability is increasingly questioned within the Church of England and with plans progressing for the Church in Wales’ dismantling of parochial (though not local) ministry, there is considerable and urgent need for redress.

This book has, therefore, a particular and pressing purpose, which is to explain the pastoral or theological geography of the Anglican parish – in effect, to begin answering the question what kind of place is it? In doing so, one is struck immediately by the diversity of the subject: each parish being as unique as its grid reference. Some are almost as large as dioceses, covering huge tracts of moorland; some have boundaries as arbitrary and baffling as in an imperial land grab; others are self-contained and perfectly circle their communities. This has always been the case – and, clearly, the parish ‘took’ in some places more than in others, because of the natural terrain, or the vitality of other communal forms.

Nevertheless, there is much common ground – indeed, this phrase recurs as a way of describing the effect of the parish system in general, even when its specific features vary greatly. It must be acknowledged from the outset that the English parish has by no means had only a benign impact: often compromised – cruel, even – as an arm of the nascent nation state; ponderous and resistant to change, a straitjacket for church growth in some places. Any assessment of its past and future value must face these failings evenly. It is by no means the only way for Christians to view social space: neither, given her global Communion, need it be Anglicanism’s pre-eminent parochial mode. But it is one expression – and, I shall suggest, the local form that has had the most enduring effect upon this nation’s self-understanding.

Just as the nineteenth-century radical William Cobbett confessed, I am committed to the Church of England partly because ‘it bears the name of my country’. ‘England’ is of course a heavily freighted word and groans with a burden of associations, some of which are as troublesome as those evoked by ‘parish’. This is unavoidable, but it is vital that the Church reckons with its English calling, not least so that the idea of England may be reclaimed for all who live there and that fruitful relations may be grown with neighbours who do not. The Churches of Scotland and Ireland maintain a parish system and, although it is hoped that the insights gained here are applicable in other provinces, nations and denominations, this book is intentionally English in its scope and concerns.

It must also be admitted that the Church – especially the worshipping congregation – can seem oddly absent in what follows. Little space is given to liturgy, the sacraments, evangelism or many other familiar ingredients of parish ministry. All this has consciously been avoided, partly because it is the common theme of pastoral studies, the theological (and, to a degree, spatial) dynamics of which have been ably considered elsewhere,6 but mainly these are blurred because my focus is fixed on the geographical parish, which is somewhat harder to see. That said, the mission of the local church – especially its symbolic tokens of parish priest and parish church – is conspicuously, if implicitly, present in what follows. The book is an attempt to describe how ‘place’ looks when viewed from the parish church and not vice versa: if the Church is obscured from where I am standing, this is only because I have my back to its door.

Nor, it may be added, is this study a direct engagement in the importunate questions regarding the future of the parish system. These form its horizon and will be surveyed in outline in the concluding chapter, but the foreground to be covered here is the territory on which Anglican ministry has long been practised, but rarely delved into. To some extent, this marks a response to the question of ‘what’s in a word?’ What are the distinctive connotations and associations of ‘parish’ – what does it mean? As such, this must be acknowledged to be a highly personal description. Coming from a long family line of parish priests, stretching back nearly 200 years, the parochial inheritance is of more than professional or academic interest: I am seeking definition for a place that is, at heart, intuitively perceived. While my priestly forebears all practised from within the Anglo-Catholic tradition, my own formation has largely been within the evangelical wing of the Church. Recognizing that the greater part of contemporary theological scholarship about place follows a more sacramental path, it was also curiously apparent that many of the more interesting doctrinal considerations of space and time came, by contrast, from theologians in the reformed tradition. The doctrinal sections in Part One of the book reflect this, being an attempt to employ their thought as a lens through which to view the parish. In order to develop an Anglican theology of place, then, I shall be enlisting ...

Table of contents

• Epilogue
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part one: Christ in Our Place: The Anglican Parish in Theoretical Perspective
• Introduction
• 1. Steadying Jacob’s Ladder: A Place-Formation Cycle
• 2. The Lord is Here: Towards a Christology of Place
• 3. Sheer Geography: Spatial Theory and Parochial Practice
• Part two: Common Ground: The Anglican Parish in History and Practice
• 4. Another Country: Parish and the National Myth
• 5. Good Fences: Parish as Neighbourhood
• 6. A Handful of Earth: Parish, Landscape and Nostalgia
• Conclusion: A Kind of Belonging
• Bibliography