Dear friends on the way,
I have been rummaging through the digital equivalent of my attic lately, and I found something that stung. Sixteen years ago, I sat down to write out of a sense of profound frustration at the limitations of my own and our ecclesiastical vocabulary. (see HERE) Looking back at that post now, I recognise the voice of someone sensing a widening chasm between the language we were speaking and the life we were actually inhabiting.
We spoke then, as we still do now, with a polished, professional confidence. We talked then and now of mission, renewal, strategy, and “participation in the missio Dei.” Yet, beneath the surface there is the low hum of a quiet, desperate anxiety. We feared then and now that if we stop talking long enough to truly listen, the entire edifice would reveal itself to be less secure than we had imagined.
But as I read my own words from 2010, I realise I was hiding and complict. I was critiquing the “Church” while exempting myself. I was using sophisticated theology to mask a simple, ugly truth: I, too, am seduced by power. I am addicted to the feeling of being “right,” of having a “strategy,” and of belonging to an institution that still matters.
This post has sat in my drafts for months. I needed the blunt, prophetic nudges of two amazing women pioneers one Anglican from the south, one Methodist from the north, to finally pull this into the light. Our conversations about the nature of power forced me to write not just about my own complicity but to call for light to be cast more fully on all our complicity in the fallacy that we are in control.
What I could only dimly perceive sixteen years ago, I can now see with the terrifying clarity of an ending. The unease was apocalyptic in the truest sense: an unveiling. The walls we trusted, our social standing, our institutional weight, our assumed right to be heard, were already beginning to crumble. This became a recurring theme and even a category of posts (walls to dust) and 16 years on have we really changed.
The category arose not because God had abandoned the Church, but because God refuses to be contained by the structures we mistake for faithfulness. But for sixteen years, I have watched us (and I include myself in this “us”) try to reinforce those walls. We have drafted vision documents, commissioned reviews, and rebranded decline as “strategic repositioning.” We have spent a fortune on scaffolding while the foundations were returning to dust.
Consequently, we have failed to ask the most vital question: Is the Spirit actually the one reducing these walls to powder? And if so, why are we so desperate to rebuild them?
There is a profound difference between reform and relinquishment. Reform assumes the architecture is sound but needs a new boiler. Relinquishment recognises that some structures were provisional all along, and instead of taking these temporary cultural accommodations we baptised them as though they were the Gospel itself.
In Susan Howatch’s Starbridge novels, we see this played out in the clerical ego. Whether it’s the “Practical” ambition of Neville Aysgarth or the “Mystical” pride of Jon Darrow, the temptation is always the same: to use God to secure one’s own place in the world. After 10 years serving the Diocese of Carlisle, I have to face the fact that the “middle way” has often been more a “a way of retaining power”, a way of maintaining a seat at the table of the establishment under the guise of “influence.”
Now, as the cultural conditions that sustained that influence dissolve, we oscillate between nostalgia and panic. We act as though the erosion of our social privilege is equivalent to the erosion of God. It is not. What is being exposed is not the weakness of the Gospel, but the fragility of our frameworks and the depth of our own vanity.
For too long, we have operated with industrial metaphors that have shaped our very souls. We speak of “pipelines” of discipleship and “measurable outputs” of growth, as though the Kingdom of God were a production line and the Church its managerial arm. We have trained leaders to optimise systems rather than to discern seasons.
In doing so, we have absorbed a mechanistic imagination that is fundamentally at odds with the organic, interdependent, and cruciform life revealed in Christ. This is not just a strategic error; it is an ecological disaster of the spirit. We have lost the sense that the Church exists within a living, breathing web of relationships, with culture, with place, and with the “more-than-human” creation.
Ecosystems do not survive through self-perpetuation. They survive through mutuality, adaptation, decay, and regeneration. They survive because nothing lives unto itself. If we want to live, we have to learn how to die.
“Remember that you are dust” is not just an Ash Wednesday sentiment; it is a reorientation of the will. It reminds us that we are creatures, not curators of eternity; participants, not proprietors.
The ecological crisis of our planet has made this painfully visible, yet we often respond as though the “environment” were a peripheral ethical concern rather than a theological revelation. The groaning of creation is the drama of redemption. To persist with a spirituality that floats above the soil, detached from the material conditions of life, is to preach a diminished and false gospel.
For the Church, and for me, to undergo an “ecological conversion” means relinquishing the fantasy of control. It means accepting that some of our cherished institutions must die. Not because they were evil, but because their season is over. We must trust that in the ecology of God, nothing offered in faith is wasted, but becomes the compost for future growth.
The future Church will not be secured by better branding or more sophisticated leadership pipelines. It will emerge, if at all, from communities willing to be small, local, porous, and attentive to pain. It will be led by women and men who understand that authority in the Kingdom is inseparable from surrender. It will be a Church that measures fruit not in numbers, but in reconciliation, in ecological responsibility, and in justice enacted from the ground up, certainly not merely proclaimed from the House of Lords.
Sixteen years on, I am less convinced that the Church needs “rescuing” and more convinced that we need releasing form our addition to power and control and so be
What is required of us is not more frantic activity, and alignment of the existing active with the true nature of servanthood and courageous relinquishment. If the walls fall to dust, let them fall. The God who formed humanity from dust has never required masonry to accomplish divine purposes. Our task is not to preserve every structure we have inherited, but to discern what the Spirit is animating in this season and to align ourselves with that movement, however unsettling it may be for our careers or our egos. The question is not whether we can rebuild what has been lost, but whether we are willing to be re-formed by the One who makes all things new. Starting with me.
Grace and peace on the journey,
Richard
