The Beheading of John the Baptist

I have for a long time, probably since I was an ordinand myself, thought that the role of clergy contained an element of the ministry of John the Baptist. This has been traditionally crushed out of the role because the priority has been placed on a certain pastoral model of ministry in which notions of care and politeness have tended to trump any sense of being prophetic or radical. The danger for the church is that it so seeks to appease society that its message lacks anything that is uniquely of God, and so it becomes bland and irrelevant.

In the post-Christian context of the modern Western world there is a need for us, as the church of Christ, to again discover a prophetic voice that speaks out into our society. John the Baptist provides a model of one who is a fierce critic of the abuses within a society, and one who also points to Christ as the one who is the solution to the ills of that society. Today, in modern Britain, we live in a society that is utterly confused about what it believes to be important to the extent that as a national community we seem to be politically dysfunctional.

The root of our problem is that our nation no longer has a meaningful narrative. During the world wars we portrayed ourselves as a Christian nation fighting the forces of neo-paganism, and it was this Christianity that marked the setting up of the NHS and the educational reforms of 1944. Today no such narrative is advanced by government, and so it is unclear what undergirds our national thought process beyond materialism, consumerism and self-interest, with political parties competing to sell us an infantile and unrealistic vision of ever more provision at ever decreasing cost. The results of such a vision are clear: outsourcing, and a race to the bottom in terms of a wage structure that exploits the poor.

The church has a real role in reminding our society of another narrative in which society, community and mutual concern matter. 

Anglicanism and Orthodoxy

I am always slightly amazed by my encounters with the Greek church and cannot help but reflect on what the Church of England and Anglicans more generally might gain from offering a similar rich form of spiritual life. One cannot help but notice the way in which Greek society, across the generations, is able to engage with the life of the church: icons are venerated and candles are lit throughout the day.

The post-Reformation settlement in England transferred our popular religious culture to Prayer Book and knowledge of the English Bible, and in due course an English tradition of hymnody was added to this. The difficulty that the church now faces is that much of this cultural inheritance is in decline, and that its very cerebral nature does not appeal to a post-modern world of signs and symbols.

A challenge for the church to think about is how we could offer something similar to the Greek church. Too often churches are only open for services, and sometimes when they are open there is little left for the visitor to provide an accessible form of prayer and engagement with God, unless they are habitual church attenders and communicants. We do not have a traditions of the veneration of icons in the same way, but making sure that each church is open during the day with candles and prayer stations might provide some way in which we could similarly engage with our society.

We have been too focused on a modern tendency to learn by hearing and reading, and it is time that we revisited the idea of learning by seeing and doing. It therefore may also be time for the church to rethink its default position for whitewashed church interiors, which communicate only an empty space, in favour of decorating churches with art that depicts the story of the Christian faith.