PLAIN SPEAKING TO CHURCHMEN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 137, 6 February 1942, Page 7

PLAIN SPEAKING TO CHURCHMEN

The Task of Christian Leadership

HE resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury was due primarily to old age. The Archbishop is 77, and "the times," he said, for those who have the responsibility of leadership, demand "ardour, vigour, and more decisiveness of mind and spirit than can be expected of a man in his seventyeighth year." Then he added that " perhaps the chief reason for the decision was that when the war was over great tasks of reconstruction must await the Church. Preparation for these tasks must begin now." It was clear that preparation should be the work of those who would have the responsibility of undertaking the tasks. He deemed it his duty to hand over the charge to somebody who would be better able to prepare those post-war plans. Next, there was the Lambeth Conference, which would have to meet as soon as the war ended. That conference would meet in a new world. It might have a momentous influence in determining the place of the Church iin that new world. The man who presided over the conference should make preparations for it. He could not be that man because if the conference met as early as 1944 he would then be eighty years old. "Offence to the Many" It is interesting therefore to find the late editor of the Church Times (Sidney Dark) writing in the most recent issue to hand of The New Statesman: "There is a common admission that the Church might play a valuable part in the moulding of the new society, which all decent men hope will follow the war. Francis Williams, for example, has declared that, in a world necessarily dominated by materialistic considerations, it is of vital importance that there should be a voice to remind men that they have souls as well as appetites, and Williams added that, from its established place in the pattern of the community, the Church could fulfil that duty better than any other body. : "But there is, outside its ranks, reasonable doubt whether the Church will use its still considerable influence on the right side in the struggle against social evils and in the attempt to secure a decent life for ~the commonplace majority. With my years of experience within the Church, I share this doubt. In a review of my book, The Church Impotent or Triumphant? the Bishop of Bristol said that my plea for a united Christian effort to establish righteousness on earth would have an eager response from a few and would be a rock of offence to the many. And the Bishop of Bradford, another courageous Leftwing prelate, has declared that the Church is sadly handicapped by its dependence on the well-to-do who make up the majority of the congregations. "As editor of the Church Times, I tried, week after week for years, to emphasise the social implications of the faith. But my readers, for the most part earnest Anglo-Catholics, were far more

interested in ecclesiastical minutiae than in social reform. ". .. The average churchgoer has an adequate income and some savings, and he is in mortal terror of losing them both. ... Small savings make cowards of us all. The rich man in his castle is more likely to be moved unselfishly to join the crusade for the new society than the comparatively poor man in his ‘semi-detached villa, bought on the instalment principle at considerable personal sacrifice."

"Now | Can Speak" But to realise how disturbed some churchmen are about the future of the church and the world it is necessary. to read the book to which Mr. Dark refers; and, although it is impossible within the limits of our space to quote much of it, the following extracts from a Time review will convey some idea of the sensation it caused: "Tf the editor of the Christian Science Monitor retired to denounce Mary Baker Glover Eddy and all her works, the U.S. would be no more surprised than England was when the editor emeritus of the Empire’s No. 1 religious weekly told what he really thinks of the Church in Britain," said Time. "For 17 years Sidney Dark quietly edited the Church Times. He was known as an AngloCatholic and a mild socialist, but no one expected him to celebrate his resignation this year with a jeremiad like The Church Impotent or Triumphant? ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I (can) say exactly what I believe with no polite reservations.’ So he denounced his own established Church of England for living off taxes paid largely by non-members and off income from slum property (‘money extracted from the half-fed for . . . bug-infested attics is paid to men whose business it is to preach the Gospel’). The

Anglicans, he says, have strong support only from the middle class. ‘The once crowded slum churches in London... are now for the most part almost empty. The fashionable churches are emptier.’ Only 18 per cent. of the population attend any church regularly (U.S. estimate, 23 per cent.). Temporised With Hitler? "Roman Catholics fare no better in his book. He assails the Vatican for temporising with Hitler and for ditching Catholicism’s Popular Party in Italy

to come to terms with Mussolini in the Lateran Treaty. ‘With its Right definitely Fascist and its Left timorously sentimental,’ says he, ‘the Christian reformer can expect nothing of any constructive value from the Roman Catholic communion in England.’ "Nonconformists are handled equally harshly as ‘the Sunday edition of the Liberal Party ’-and, like the Liberals, Non-conformity ‘has lost both its spiritual fervour and its political influence. ... The young people of the class to which Bunyan belonged (the class which produced the Wesleyan local preachers and the Salvation Army) to-day have no understanding of the possible dignity and beauty of life which Bible-reading teaches, and no appreciation of moral values.’ "His chief criticism of British churchmen is that ‘Protestantism and Catholicism have both urged the patient acceptance of injustice in the sure and certain hope that things will be put right one of these days ’-i.e., kept the poor in line by promising them future bliss. This, he finds, plays right into the dictators’ hands, since they promise the poor something much more immediate. The Church must stop being ‘woolly and wordy,’. grab ‘the last chance that it can have for generations to affect the course

of history. ... Christianity is a revolue tionary religion or it is nothing.... The Church (must) enthuse the young as Bolshevism has enthused them in Russia and Nazism ... in Germany.’ One reason why he considers Christian leadership particularly necessary in Britain is that political power has passed largely into the hands of ‘ unimaginative’ tradeunion heads who ‘have little interest in anything but hours and wages.’ Specific Reforms "Specific reforms which Sidney Dark favours are: "1, Dis-establish the Church of England. ‘When the Church of Wales was disestablished, it lost the tithe and has done very well without it.... Since a crusade cannot possibly be led by gentlemen who live in palaces, the Church needs hedge priests and hedge bishops.’ "2. Merge parishes and close the extra churches. ‘ Hitler has helped towards this end, for it is almost certain that a considerable proportion of the bombed churches will never be rebuilt.’ "3. Send out preaching friars ‘intent not only on the saving of individual souls, but on the salvation of society.’ "4, Emphasise the Church’s duty to the poor. "5, Christianise the nation by training boys and girls as ‘an eager young army ready and equipped to fight the devil of greed and all his works. ...’ But .if children are merely to be taught to mumble that their duty is (in the words of the Anglican catechism) ‘to submit myself to all my governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters; to order myself, lowly and reverently to all my betters ... and to do my duty in that state of life into which it shall please God to call me,’ then the sooner the Church schools are shut and religious teaching is forbidden the better it will be both for the nation and the Church, "6.Get better sermons. (‘Ninety per cent. of the sermons I have heard during the past 15 years have been deplorable.’ ) "7, Put much less emphasis on sexual sin and much more emphasis on the social sins that make for injustice, since thorough-going religion ‘is impossible in a society where there is gross inequality of possession. and opportunity.’ "