The Pensive Pilgrim

"Church of England weighs up cull of bishops "  screamed the headline in today's Sunday Times. The article went on to say " T he Church of England is to begin a rethink of its role which is expected to lead to a 'massive shrinkage' in the number of dioceses and parish churches that it runs - and could even mean that it had dozens fewer bishops."   This shouldn't come as any surprise. It has been blindingly obvious to many people for some time that the Church of England currently has far too many churches, many of them unsustainable, and that it would make sense to merge some dioceses, to slim down the administrative infra-structure and to move towards a majority of parochial clergy being self-supporting. The famous hymn parody says " Like a mighty tortoise moves the church of God"  and it is certainly true that the Church of England moves slowly on many things, especially those issues that are contentious. The economic fallout of the ...

The Bishop of London, The Rt Revd Sarah Mullally has been tasked with advising the Church of England on how best to respond to the potential easing of the Covid-19   ‘lockdown’, and has warned that it’s unlikely that things will be be back to normal by the end of the year. This statement should come as no surprise. The reality of Covid-19 is that it’s going to be with us for some considerable time and that it may be years before an effective vaccine is available.   In any event, as a result of the social and economic disruption that Covid-19 has caused - to say nothing of the need to be much more hygiene conscious and better prepared for any future pandemics - life is going to be very different for all of us. To quote that much overused phrase, ‘We shall have to adapt to a new normal’. Even if we were sufficiently naive to attempt to pick up where we left off, I suspect the church would inevitably look rather different. First, some of its members will have been l...

In the mid 1970s, although brought up as an Anglican, at the age of sixteen I was acting as organist of a Methodist Church in my hometown of Harrogate. There I met a group of young Christians - most of whom were in their early to mid-twenties - who called themselves ‘Charismatics’. I didn’t really know what this name meant, but I realised that they had something I didn’t have - a strong sense of living in relationship to Jesus Christ and knowing his love and presence in a special way in the power of the Holy Spirit. As I got to know these people better, they invited me to join a study group that was meeting on Sunday evenings in the Methodist manse. They were studying a book that was hugely popular at the time, ‘When the Spirit Comes’ by Colin Urquhart – an Anglican Priest who had had a profound experience of the Holy Spirit and then led his church into renewal.   If I’m honest, I was as fascinated by the book’s cover as I was by its contents. The first edition (published...