On the Church of England

What’s gone wrong with the Church of England? We read a Spectator article by Marcus Walker about the process of becoming a bishop, which has become highly bureaucratic and secular - you are put on a management fast track and then hilariously have to apply for a Bishop job when it comes up.

And this is what the Church of England has become - the way it is run is basically nothing to do with Christianity. An imperialistic and expanding bureaucracy infected with secular notions of management seems to sit badly with… faith. There is a major philosophical conflict between this bureaucracy and the people who actually go to church, and that’s before you get into the Church’s politics.

There’s an additional tension in the Church of England between those who want to focus on the individual’s direct relationship with God and build it into their everyday life, and those who want to set aside an hour of their week in a beautiful space to refresh their souls in a curated manner and send them back out into the world to do their best.

Perhaps this latter conflict is built into what religion is - is religion a revolutionary force, or a conservative one? Is it unstable or stable, informal or formal? Should our spiritual energy be untamed, or channeled? Within the Church of England, this conflict is instantiated by its two most vigorous branches - Holy Trinity Brompton-led evangelicalism and beautiful, formal Anglo-Catholicism. Basically, should we focus on the Holy Spirit or on God the Father? Well, the Trinity provides an answer: God the Son, Jesus Christ, the force that resolves this conflict and transcends the two opposites. He’s both Dionysus and Apollo, female and male, subversion and maintenance, life and death. This is Christianity’s secret sauce.

So in fact we need both wings of the church - having just one will lead to its own species of error. What we don’t need is the bureaucracy, and in the conflict between Christ and the scribes/pharisees/Romans we can even see Him as an anti-bureaucratic force.

We can take this lesson out into the secular world. Politics and corporate life have become bureaucratised, and while this does in its own way solve the messy conflict between revolution and conservatism, it does so in a way that destroys the benefits of both.

We also wrestle with the nature of the soul, how blacksmithing works, and awkward pauses.