CHURCHES FOR ALL Paddy Smith The April Sea of Faith editorial posed the question ‘“‘What should the Network do?’’ As an agnostic humanist I would like the Network to promote and encourage the use of churches, not only for Christian worship, but also as places of fellowship with the whole community where feelings, attitudes and values are shared in talk, music, literature and the arts generally.
There are many centres of fellowship in a village or neighbourhood, including shop, school, village hall and pub, and there are many people who put a high value on being part of a real community with neighbourly help and mutual support. In earlier centuries when we could be described, perhaps cuphemistically, as a Christian country, the Church was automatically a centre of the whole community and so its teaching of Christian values, or those that members of the Network would now accept as such, was indeed a powerful promotion of human fellowship. But that time has long since passed and the Church now speaks mainly to its congregation, not to the whole community.
Nevertheless, the need for a centre specifically to promote fellowship, and the spiritual or ethical values which underlie it, is as great as ever. The attitude is expressed in slogans such as Planet Earth, One World One Human Race, Citizen of the World, Justice and Compassion, Community Spirit. It gives rise to organisations such as the United Nations Association, Amnesty International, Greenpeace and all manner of charities. It is reflected in the United Nations Special Agencies and in the provisions of central and local government for the welfare state. It continues to be expressed in the lives of many ordinary people who create a friendly and co-operative atmosphere at home, at work and in the neighbourhood.
I would expect to find committed Christians in the forefront of most of these activities and the organised Church itself participates directly in many of them. After all, a fellowship of the human race seems to follow directly from the Christian teaching of peace and goodwill to all with an emphasis on being generous, friendly, compassionate and forgiving. Also many Christian churches are good at fostering a spirit of friendly and supportive fellowship amongst the diverse elements of their own congregations. What docs not yet seem to be general is the public commitment to the use of churches as centres of fellowship with the rest of us, whatever our religion or lack of it.
I quite understand that for many Christians the church is regarded primarily as God’s house and that this is still the case even if you say that God is a symbol for the mystery that underlies our spiritual selves, our consciousness and our values and deepest feelings. I see that Christian congregations maintain their churches as places for the worship of God, for awe and wonder, for losing oneself in imagination and symbolism, or, as Richard Smith puts it in the April issue, for putting a little smoke between the world and ourselves. What I ask is that on separate occasions they are also used for implementing Jesus’s second commandment, to love our neighbour as ourselves. If the occasions are quite separate then I hope that secular words and music, even if quite robust and drawing on a wide range of images and symbolism, will not seem sacrilegious.
I ask because we all need help in finding a way of life that is personally satisfying and that helps to create and maintain a world and social order that it seems good to be part of. We find ourselves with a human nature that needs affection and some willing co-operation from those around us, but a nature that is also apt to be selfish and demanding. We find ourselves clannish, tribal and territorial but also wanting to feel at ease in the wider human society. Ethics or morality, enlightened by the social sciences, helps us to reconcile our conflicting needs and drives.
Christian and humanist ethics will put the emphasis on deeper feelings, wider horizons and the effect of our actions in the long as well as the short term. They call us to do our best to be in friendly fellowship with all our fellow humans. But it can be very difficult. We will not feel in friendly fellowship if we allow ourselves to be trodden on too often or prevented to an intolerable extent from living our own lives. But also we will fail if we allow ourselves to be seduced into hardening our hearts against others so that we can live our own comfortable but blinkered lives. It is much harder to remain blinkered if we meet people from other groups in a setting where feelings may be expressed freely and reaching friendly fellowship is the avowed aim. We may well then learn what price has to be paid to achieve genuine fellowship.
As well as seeking direct fellowship there are times when we have to confront others who are seeking to destroy it.
Moral support and group action can make all the difference. Also, if we are not to live by the law of the jungle, where might is right and oppression goes unchecked, we must support the rule of law, national and international, as a necessary framework. But the rule of law itself needs constant monitoring to ensure that it is applied sympathetically and amended when it is found to be unfair or unjust. Clarifying the ethical criteria and their application can be very helpful.
Fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell. Fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death. And the deeds we do in this world, it is for fellowship’s sake that we do them. ; William Morris, ‘A Dream of John Ball’ A friendly fellowship of humans, or Jesus’s spiritual kingdom on earth, however you look at it, is an inspiring vision which we should not lose sight of. We may never get there but we can get a lot nearer than we are if enough people make it their goal. We know this from history and our own experience, simply because we are aware of families, friends, workplaces and societies which have made a considerable success of it. We also know how easy it is to make a mess of it and how powerless an individual can feel, so we join others in the sorts of political and humanitarian activities mentioned in the April editorial. But I want more. I want to have access to an all-encompassing ethical movement which can act as a focal point for all those individuals and organisations which seck to promote the friendly fellowship of the human race. It seems to me that the Church of England is ideally placed, with a presence in every parish, buildings resonant with atmosphere, appropriate Christian values and skills in teaching and pastoral care.
I would like parish churches to organise suitable occasions on which to invite the rest of us who share this ideal, however we express it, to share feelings and sce what common action can be taken. Reaching out to other groups across the religious divide is itself a helpful lead and example in how to break out of the small group boundaries which so often confine us. Promoting clubs and societies is often done. Organising programmes of words and music in church which appeal to different groups in the parish is, perhaps, not so common.
Organising concerts in church is not unusual and could be expanded to include music of all sorts, from pop to classical. I feel confident that once the intention is expressed and the doors thrown open there will be no end to the ideas that will come forward. It would be very exciting and inspiring if churches really became symbols of peace and goodwill to all in our multifaith and multirace world, spreading a spirit of human fellowship to all, or, as some might say, expressing the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.
Paddy Smith is a retired solicitor living near Guildford, Surrey, and author of Of Human Fellowship and Optional Gods.