By Adrian Worsfold
I found the recent address to the Church of England General Synod by “David and Richard”, clerical President and lay Vice President of the Methodist Conference, bizarrely childish. It was a presentation, one to the other and back again, much about basics of Methodism that many a Synod member should be aware, that is reminiscent of one of the awful methods of delivery given to trainee teachers in the manner that this is how it should be done to children in the classroom.
Beyond that was a basic message that Methodism in Britain would self destruct for higher ecumenical purposes, and not simply because of thoroughgoing decline.
I know about thoroughgoing decline in British religion, if only because I have returned to a denomination that started small and now has undergone structural faults at its central serving institutions. It has had to become more sparing and flexible, whilst interesting aspects are noted about how congregations hitting the floor do actually recover, over short periods, some even going on to prosper in comparative terms. When congregations decline that have continued on as doggedly sub-cultural, as sort-of-Protestants full of rules of process and cliques, they suddenly at a point of desperation learn to value the visitor, find flexibility, distribute roles and contributions, cut the little hierarchies, and use the unpredicted Internet to advertise an unconditional liberal unique selling point that relates to today’s issues of new denominational identity. A congregation that sets its mind to the task can, with some luck and geographical fortune, turn itself around even in the tough environment of British non-involvement in churches. Well, if it doesn’t it closes, and that’s that.
Other denominations are much larger, and have always been so. The Methodists are one of the largest after the Church of England. The problem is that its attending population is top-heavy, and populations collapse in percentage terms. It has had an active policy of closing and disposing of unwanted chapels, but proportionately it can end up with one chapel per town (or less) as easily as the smallest denomination. Once the percentage decline hits the bottom, it hits the bottom. People die pretty much at once, no matter what the number.
Religious Trends used a survey in 2005 that demonstrated that a 4 million at least monthly attendance then would drop to under a million by 2050, a figure just about reached by Hindus (doubling in number) with nearly three times as many Muslim attenders as Christians. The reality of such a decline (should it come about) is that denominations will simply structurally collapse.
It is interesting how in Scotland there are continuous mergers taking place among so called mainline or reasonably moderate Protestant groups (‘mainline’ is a nonsense term these days – they are all tiny minorities) so that there will be the United Reformed Church (URC) and Church of Scotland there, but the URC is imploding already and establishment doesn’t do a great deal for the Church of Scotland. The Scottish Episcopal Church is already quite tiny.
The decline is not helped by a few successful and somewhat deluded media churches, dotted here and there, nor even by the odd successful suburban church. Go to Bradford where evangelical churches struggle, because there is one media church that acts as a kind of vacuum cleaner over what’s left.
One has to ask what is the unique selling point of Methodism, or the URC for that matter. Well, British Methodism has the uniqueness that its missing bishops are in its Conference. Whoopee, that’ll attract them in. It does have an increased lay involvement, and rotates ministers on short contracts for little pay and increasing stress. Or take the URC, which preserves the notion that there are two rather than three orders of ministry. I bet that makes a difference. The URC is the merging of Scottish Presbyterians sent into England (most once Calvinist English Presbyterians became Unitarian) and Congregationalists (many of whom credally had resisted the liberal drift) that has since carried out more mergers, including into Scotland. The fact is that all these denominations were set up according to old arguments at the time, many of which have ceased to be relevant, many of which are now mergers waiting to merge again. The collapse of the Sunday school movement, or connections between church choirs and schools, has meant that there is no basic Christian memory across the population, never mind debate on the finer points of dividing up denominations.
Suggested figures by 2050 are just 3,600 churchgoing Methodists left, Anglicans at 87,800, Catholics at 101,700, Presbyterians (URC etc.)diminshed to 4,400, Baptists to 123,000 and independents to 168,000. Whilst big pinches of salt are needed for all such predictions (the Catholic figures included many Polish immigrants who have already gone home!), nevertheless the question has to be asked about what these denominations are for.
The Catholic Church knows what to do regarding Europe and the West. It is going on a mop-up operation to find and bring across remnants and others in different denominations sympathetic to itself, that can also bolster its conservative identity. It wants to be purer, if smaller, but it will take the Anglicans available and whatever other small groups exist. It makes sense – it also tackles its chronic clergy training shortage. It is amazing how rapidly Catholicism collapses after liberations as in Poland and, before it, Spain. Protestantism in East Germany, that allowed at least some popular democratic training under communism, is rapidly vanishing too.
It is because Methodists came from the Church of England and have ‘missing bishops’ that they can contemplate coming back into the Church from which they were ejected. On the other hand, as High Methodism (as in the Wesleyan denomination) is now pretty much defunct, some of the Anglican hierarchical and (even) liberal-Catholic tendencies might be too much of a cuture shock. A local group to which I present papers diverted its discussion to this issue recently, and no matter which way around the ecumenism would go, it all came down to adding a Methodist style extra service in the local Anglican church until it died out. Indeed, up and down the land, ecumenism would add up to one denomination’s building hosting the other’s service until one or the other approach died out with a bigger council and clergy numbers for the time being. And despite the five minutes extra walk, we said that the beginning of the ecumenical arrangement would involve a proprtion of the people using the transition as the moment to stop their attendance altogether.
But there is another point. Which Methodists would join with which Anglicans? The Anglicans are undergoing a kind of internal war, with the inheritors of the Oxford Movement leaving and the evangelicals taking on the liberal-Catholics for legitimacy. Liberal Methodists already get on with liberal Anglicans, and the same happens with evangelicals. Where there is a division in a town, as between, say, an evangelical Methodist church and a liberal-Catholic Anglican church, the ecumenism tends to be rather light and occasional at best – a sort of good wishes and a once a year dutiful mixing. The same divisions are within the URC and Baptists.
No matter which way one looks at it, the denominations will find their bureaucracies starting to cave in – too expensive and bloated for what is below. Perhaps with the traditionalist Anglo-Catholic wing bust and exported, the Anglicans will be able to absorb the Methodists. Perhaps, instead of a takeover, Methodists might merge with the URC and continue to sell-off plant and machinery more rigorously. Whatever may be the theological justification for structural ecumenism, or may be the resistances from old purist points of view, the fact is that the elephant in the room is the chronic decline going on now – and obvious just by looking around – and therefore effectively the ending of many once important but now unimportant traditions in the religious life of the United Kingdom.
Adrian Worsfold (Pluralist), has a doctorate in sociology and a masters degree in contemporary theology. He lives near Hull, in northeast England and keeps the blog Pluralist Speaks.