Church Going Gone: A biography of religion, doubt, and faith by Brian Mountford. Christian Alternative Books (Winchester 2021). Pbk. 328 pages. £14.99.
I enjoyed this book enormously. Brian Mountford is a good raconteur and many of his anecdotes had me laughing out loud.
Ignore the title for the moment which is more the work of the publisher than the author. This is an autobiography and like all good memoirs reflects upon the time, beliefs and institutions with which the writer has been involved.
As such it’s a brave book. After all, who is Brian Mountford? He isn’t an archbishop or even a bishop (though by his own admission he’d liked to have been), he isn’t a celebratory priest or a martyr of the faith. Who’s heard of him? That isn’t to belittle his many achievements. He’s an MBE, as is his wife. He’s been vicar of the University Church in Oxford for 30 years and forged an open liberal church in the midst of two highly conservative and critical institutions. He’s published a number of popular books including Christian Atheism and Christianity in Ten Minutes. He is an ordinary hard-working priest. Yet to quote (in a totally different context) one of the three sermons included at the end of the book, ‘in the gospel vignettes Jesus sees the ordinary person to be as good as the best of us’. Any life is revealing of the source of life and this book exposes what is to be human and to live by a faith.
It’s also a brave book because it does something many of us want, or promise to do, for our children and grandchildren: answer the questions we wish we’d asked our parents. Yet how many of us balk at the thought of writing about our early misdemeanours, our youthful arrogance, and clumsy insensitivities?
For those who’ve lived through the fifties or sixties, and were a part of the church of the seventies and eighties, witnessing the turning of the tide of faith, this book will not only evoke happy and sometimes painful memories but also help our understanding of those times.
There’s some shameless name-dropping – on one page Tom Hollander, Rowan Atkinson, Peter Hitchens, Joanna Trollope and Her Majesty the Queen. Turn over and John Simpson, David Sheppard, Derek Worlock, Richard Dawkins, John Hapgood, Mervyn Stockwood, Thom Yorke and George Martin appear as unlikely bedfellows. This should not necessarily be interpreted as self-aggrandizement, since, of course, the University Church ought to be attracting and inviting big names.
But back to the title. When asked why he wrote the book, Brian replied: ‘My life has spanned a period of immense social change. I became a priest in the “Swinging Sixties” when the Church was enjoying the back-end of a post-war revival in religion; now, fifty years later, 52% of people in secular Britain say they have “no religion”. I wanted to describe how this fascinating story evolved.’
Asked about the title, he replied: ‘I really struggled to find a title. I could have called it “The Life of Brian”, I suppose, but it is so much more than my life. Initially, I called it simply “Church Going”, after Philip Larkin’s 1954 poem of that name, with the intended play on the ideas of church attendance versus the demise of organised religion in Britain. But those who read my first draft said no one’s going to want to read a book about going to church, so I tried to spice it up with the addition of “Gone?” You notice I added a question mark. I was accused of timidity and cluttering the page so I removed it. And there we are. Provocation is a good thing, and, in the book, it is something I argue the Church should go in for more enthusiastically.’
For me the question mark should have remained. Yes church attendance has declined. Yes, the high Anglican church of the fifties and sixties, in which he began his ministry, has all but disappeared. The church, like all institutions has changed, but for me, this book demonstrates that it is still possible for an open liberal church to exist welcoming people of all faiths and cultures.
Stephen Mitchell is a retired priest and former chair of the SOF Steering Committee. His book God in the Bath was published by O Books (Winchester, 2006) and his Past Perfect by Christian Alternative (Winchester, 2018).