‘There is always hope’

The Rev Neil Glover outlines the premise of his new book ‘Finding Our Voice’.

WE all know the story, we’ve been living it for almost seventy years: the “Story of the Empty Pews”.

The front pews which once were filled by a thriving Sunday School, the pews which were weekly occupied by the same dependable stalwarts, the pews which are crammed for large parish funerals but empty on a Sunday morning, the pews which were sold when the church was closed, the pews which were turned into comfortable chairs and seemed to keep the numbers for a while but, more recently, have also been empty.

Over the last seventy years, we in the Church of Scotland have not been short of initiatives and plans to refill the pews, but nothing, it seems, has reversed the tide. Is this because we lacked courage to make the most important changes? Is it because we are too in love with our past and resistant to change? Is it because the Church of Scotland loves its bureaucracy and our committees will always suffocate our best ideas? Is it because we have too many buildings and not enough youth pastors or ministers? There is some truth in all of these, but none of them are, I believe, the root cause of our loss.

It is vital that we understand the root cause, because otherwise we will always be drawn to solutions which address the surface but not the root; and such medicines not only fail to resolve the underlying condition, they also have a tendency to make things even worse.

I believe that the root problem is this: for too long, too often and in too many places, our churches were not places where the people of Scotland (and beyond) met with God. Yes there were many times that we did. That’s why most of us are still here. But too often, people did not. The history of this goes back not just seventy years, but something closer to five hundred years. Out of a well-founded desire to avoid the conflicts of religious wars, the vagaries of superstition and a deep-rooted fear that we could never be good enough to meet with God, we in our churches too often sang our hymns and prayed our prayers to a respectable, pre-shrunk, timid and lifeless deity. We might have told stories of a God who met with Moses in a fiery bush, with Elijah in a still-small voice, with the blind-man in the touch of his eyes, with questioning disciples in bread and wine, with the early Church in strange tongues: but these experiences were for other people. The God we learned to believe in was far away, emotionally distant, morally foreboding, thin in love, and reluctant to truly forgive.

Too often we stripped our faith of its awe, its intimacy and its magic. We acted out our religion but it did not touch the heart. And so our pews became places where people got bored: during sermons they counted the organ pipes, during prayers they began to think about their shopping and they yearned for the closing benediction to arrive. And after too many Sundays of being bored, they stopped coming, they didn’t bring their children, and the pews got emptier and emptier.

And as the pews got emptier, another deeper fear took hold. Perhaps God has abandoned us? Perhaps God has taken God’s glory to the thriving Baptist or Pentecostal church that our last remaining young family have moved to? And with that fear, if we are honest, we search for scapegoats, become rigid, angry and suspicious, give up on the God who gives abundance even in deserts. Abandoning hope, we await our final demise.

So what do we do? We must not divert our energies towards surface cures (which, I very tentatively suggest, may have been what has too often cost us with presbytery mission planning), nor can we slavishly import models from elsewhere (be that North American churches, or the world of entrepreneurial leadership), nor do we panic in the face of our deficits (neither do we ignore them). Perhaps God is using this moment to teach us something. Perhaps we are to learn to become ourselves in a contemporary age, to appreciate our gifts, to work out, with faith and fear and trembling, our own salvation, to trust that Christ is still at work within us. In this we

are not far from the mottos of our two most recent Moderators: “Remember who you are” and “Building together”. During the writing of Finding our Voice I spoke with people from across the Church of Scotland and from mainstream (or “mainline” as they are sometimes known) churches across the world. During this, I began to notice four movements in mainline churches which are experiencing renewal:

• Seeking and experiencing the presence of God, the God who told Moses “I am who I am”, the God we meet in Jesus Christ. Resisting our fondness for respectability and safety, we must seek the God who is God; that our worship would be a place of such transformative power that, in the words of American writer Annie Dillard, we should be issued with crash helmets, life-preservers and signal flares, and ushers should “lash us to our pews”. Let us pray for such encounter in our Sunday morning worship, let us walk like our Celtic ancestors on wild trails and beaches, let us learn to spot the presence of God in every hedge and stairwell of our parish.

• Discipling and growing. Too often Presbyterianism has, in the words of G D Henderson, “taken too much and given too little.” We ask our people to sign up for our rotas, but how often do we actually enable them to flourish as human beings? We are suspicious of the secular “turn to the self” but understood properly, loving self and loving neighbour inform on another, they are not in competition. In our churches this may mean offering spiritual direction for all our members (annual “Spiritual MOTs” as one church called it), being given confidence in prayer and the scriptures (how often do people ask me for help with this), to be given support and training in facing the great challenges of life, to have gatherings in which we enjoy each other’s company and in which we grow.

• Celebrating our unity and diversity. It has been suggested that mainline churches are too diverse and lack brand identity. Better to be “very conservative” or “very liberal”: being “moderate” will attract no one. However, we will always be a broad church, this is who we are. The challenge is to own this, to be unafraid to name our differences and discover our mutual belonging, so that being “one in Christ” is not a bland platitude but a song we sing.

• Reclaiming and nurturing our gifts.

I believe there are seven of these which are particularly abundant in the mainline church: connection, community, scripture, parish, justice, song and stillness.

These may be challenging times, but I do not believe that our pews are truly empty. I believe in God who is still present in them and in us, and so, there is always hope. ¤

Finding Our Voice is published by Saint Andrew Press and available to purchase at https://standrewpress.hymnsam.co.uk/