“There’s also something extremely counter cultural in the fact of finding what we need on our doorstep. While our bodies can be fed in vast, soulless out of town shopping centres, our souls not only can be fed locally but are often best fed there. Even when we’re a guest in a community, joining the wonderful, warm, half-sozzled mass of humanity for Midnight Mass is an entrance ticket like little else.”
Alison Millbank points out that an oversight minister will not ‘increase the cure of souls’. Alan Stanley points out that Launde will cause a haemorrhage of good will, people and…
How can one oversight minister grow 35 churches in one minster; even with the help of lay staff?
This has been a tough year for everyone. Death, mental collapse, grief, unemployment. In my church we’ve lost people to Covid — one of the earliest victims was a regular…
Managing religion’s decline is now a self-defeating loop.
“[The archbishops] must also follow up on their commitment to consider what I think is fundamentally wrong with the parish system: there are too many dioceses. It is impossible to justify the present 42 when, 200 years ago, in the Church’s heyday, there were 26.”
“All cultures, as far as I know, have holy places. Our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, by their very nature nomadic, and seem to have carried out ceremonies at holy places like Lascaux and Chauvet caves. When people settled in the Neolithic, starting twelve thousand years ago, they were building ceremonial structures, including standing stones and stone circles. Some were built before settled agriculture began. Even in atheist regimes where there’s an explicit denial of the sacred and of the holy, the need for holy places persists, like the mausoleum of Lenin in Red Square, in Moscow, to which people went on pilgrimages, rather in the same way Christians visit the relics of saints.”