Fifty three years ago having completed my degree in architecture I moved to Basingstoke, becoming assistant architect to Peter Toleman in an office next to the mediaeval parish church of St Michael’s. I soon became involved in the life of St Michael’s and the newly-formed Basingstoke Team Ministry. Two years later I was asked by the Rector, Nigel Harley, whether I had considered ordination. He advised that if I didn’t make a decision now, I’d become immersed in an architectural career and never make the move. Having reflected overnight, I asked him the next day to put my name forward to the bishop. And thus it was that after an interview with the bishop, another with a diocesan panel and a ACCM selection conference, a year later I arrived at Westcott House, Cambridge. I’ve been returning to Basingstoke ever since r to have lunch with friends from fifty years ago and thus it was that I took an earlier train from Waterloo to Basingstoke last Sunday, 19th October, because I wanted to attend the 11.00 service at St Michael’s, knowing it had been taken over by an HTB (Holy Trinity Brompton) plant from Reading three years ago and that my friends had given up going to church.
I walked from the station through the shopping centre to St Michaels. Two young women were standing on the pavement at the end of the footpath leading to the church holding boards saying “Welcome to church”. I paused to say how unusual it was to be welcomed to church by people holding placards. We had a somewhat strange conversation, me not wanting to explain why I found their presence unusual, except that fifty years ago they wpild have looked very strange. I walked on to the porch. Two more “welcomers” were waiting there and I engaged them in a similar conversation before entering the church where two more “welcomers” were waiting to greet me. The church was already buzzing with people gathering for the service. I wandered around and was engaged in several more conversations, one with the church’s newly-ordained curate, trained at St Mellitus and another with an older woman priest, a late ordinand also trained at St Mellitus. I introduced myself, explained my history, why I was there, and asked what the attitude to LGBTQIA+ people was in the church. I was told, as I have been elsewhere, that gay people are welcome and that a number of gay couples come to the church. I also was assured that I was very welcome.
The Sermon
By the time I joined the congregation the opening loudly accompanied praise session had finished and the sermon was in full flow. It was Vision Sunday (which back in the day was probably called Stewardship Sunday). The preacher talked about how he was seeing this generation become fully alive with the power of the Holy Spirit as they encountered the presence of God. He said 1,400 people had come across the threshold of the five churches in the Basingstoke group in the past weeks, some in the young people’s café, experiencing what God has done in their lives. They’ve recently held the biggest Alpha course they’ve ever done. Theirs was a Gospel of success, making space for people to come into the presence of God. Thousands of young people are being led in worship through their involvement in local schools. The preacher said he’d met more people for the first time in our churches in the past week than in his whole life. Come and see who God is! he’d been telling them. We are going public with this! I was finding the whole experience very uncomfortable. “Their” God was clearly only to be found once they’d got people into church.
It was slowly dawning on me that the woman priest I had been talking with before moving to a seat wanted to end the conversation so that I could join in the worship in order that that God could meet and transform me.
The preacher turned to what is going on financially in the life of the Church. He said: To give money is to give financially to the work God is doing through all of us. The work costs money, buildings, heating, and we need to give financially to the Church to resource this. It’s only people who are part of the Church who want to give; only you and me. So no pressure! There is an envelope on every seat for you to set up a direct debit or standing order. My wife and I do. At the moment 138 individual church members give in this way. On average, each person gives £133 per month to the church. [That’s £18,350 a month or £220,250 annually] Have you reviewed your giving if you started a year ago? We see so many people encountering Jesus. Even if you are not making a commitment, fill in a card. If everyone fills in a card and brings it up then no one will feel left out. Scan the QR code on the back of the envelope , this makes it much easier for us to process.” He then said, verbatim: “The Bible teaches more on money than any other subject”. “So we can put this city of God, this holy people, on a mountain top. The Lord loves a cheerful giver.” The band had by now returned to their instruments and microphones and praise resumed with invitations to an altar call - a conversation with a pastor in the north chapel.
Roughed up by the HTB Basingstoke God squad
When I got back to St Saviour’s Priory in Haggerston later that evening I felt totally exhausted, roughed up by the Basingstoke God squad, my body somatising all the fake, manipulative, stressful pressure of Christian HTB crap that I’d been subjected to in the service. Three times in church different people had come up to me and asked if I wanted them to pray for me. I was taken aback and at first said yes, of course, you are free to do what you wish; but I soon realised that what they meant was, can I pray for you right now, as if you had responded to the altar call, because (as I processed later) you are new here and you are deficient in some way in the experience of God or you haven’t given yourself or abandoned yourself wholly to God yet, you are still withholding yourself (and I was indeed, at that moment, withholding myself) and you need to let go and allow God’s Spirit to enter you. No, I said, I absolutely do not want you to pray for me. The mature woman priest was one of these people. I had told her I was a priest and a psychotherapist. She told she was also a psychotherapist and had a degree in psychotherapy and theology. Where did you train? I asked. At what I think had been the London Bible College, she said. I wondered what kind of psychotherapeutic training had been on offer there. Not person-centred, for sure. I argued with her for a while about the dynamic of her approach to me, which didn’t feel at all authentically psychotherapeutic but was in contrast, pushy and manipulative.
Depth and Mystery get blocked
St Michael’s is a mediaeval building with a nave and aisles, a central tower and a long chancel. Fifty years ago the church was being reordered with a nave altar introduced. The chancel was emptied creating a beautiful, expansive open space beyond the altar. For the past year the church has been closed while being renovated to suit the new regime – video monitors, sound system, control desk, etc. The floor has been re-laid using the original wood blocks, a new radiator system installed and a platform created under the tower space. A projection screen hangs in the chancel arch above an enclosure for the drum kit, totally blocking the view through to the now-redundant chancel. The beautiful, expansive space beyond is no longer visible. This is characteristic of all the HTB plants I’ve visited. The view to the chancel is blocked. Visually, spiritually and emotionally, space around and beyond the altar is really important for me. Space beyond opens my heart and soul centres creating room for my imagination to explore mystery and complexity, the beyond, the holy, sacred, divine unknown – the Mystery. By blocking the space off, something absolutely fundamental goes missing - depth. Spatial depth, spiritual depth, emotional depth. Depth and complexity; uncertainty; mystery.
HTB churches and worship are founded on mechanisms of control; the digital clock, timed services, pre-programmed services, people programmed to greet worshippers, offering to pray for them, welcomers everywhere asking if I minded that they prayed for me, the annual sermon manipulating people’s giving, the proclamation of size and success, the same mechanisms everywhere. I don’t object to some of these things. They works; it’s a successful Trumpian mechanism. Numbers grow. Money grows. The capital of the Church Revitalisation Trust grows. The congregation expands to the point where they can send off a group to replicate the process in another ‘failing’ church: and then another . . . and another . . . a new gathered congregation ready to be programmed through an Alpha course by a well-trained church-planting team.
The Alliance Action Plan and the failure of LLF progress
I don’t want to return to what life was like 50 years ago, healthier though it was for me, spiritually. That was then, this is now, a world of climate crisis, natural events causing disasters, floods and earthquakes, famine, brutality, refuges and mass movements of people, right wing, fascist regimes, depression, neuroses, addictions – but no mention of any of this in their worship of God the Solution. Fifty years ago the Basingstoke team ministry and the five congregations had an aliveness, an adventurous, exploring spirit, a genuine welcome, a spirituality of depth and truth and love, creative, exploring, playful, theological, open to otherness and mystery.
On Sunday night my physical and emotional equilibrium was also being affected by the hostile, abusive GAFCON reaction to the appointment of Sarah Mullally as Archbishop of Canterbury. In England, the Alliance has issued a Campaign Manual advising conservative clergy and people on how to manipulate their PCC and work around progressive people in their congregation. They seek to block progress towards a radical new Christian vision inclusive of LGBTQIA+ people by “Onboarding” church leaders and their PCCs to take three possible actions leading to the establishment of a new and temporary de facto parallel province within the Church of England:
To seek alternative episcopal oversight
To reroute their diocesan financial contributions, and
To encourage ordinands to participate in an orthodox vocations programme
The failure of the House of Bishops to make any progress in the Living and Love and Faith process towards validating equal marriages in church and recognising married clergy is deeply disappointing and frustrating. In the next blog I will describe what happened at the SAINT Shoreditch Black History Month events and the wisdom I received from Robert Beckford, one of the speakers, about how we, LGBTQIA+ equality campaigners, need to organise ourselves.