RICHARD COC KETT

Necessary restructuring for a 'national' Church
IN THE WEEK following the revelation that the assets of the Church of England have fallen by some £800 million after a disastrous speculation in the falling property market of the late 1980s, much has been written of the crisis facing the Anglican establishment and the threat of closure that now hangs over many parish churches. In this past week, Frank Field MP warned that the bungling Church commissioners might have succeeded where Oliver Cromwell and the puritans had failed in breaking the parish system, the institutional and spiritual backbone of Anglicanism. However, if anything the current financial debacle will probably only encourage and hasten trends that many in the Church of England will welcome.
Like other "public services' and the Church of England falls squarely into this character by virtue of its claims to being a "national" church and its public finding the Church of England can no longer avoid the sort of restructuring and "rationalisation' (to use that horrible word from lexicon of management consultants) that the National Heath Service, for one, has recently been subjected to. The problem is quite simple: there are too many churches for a falling national congregation. Only a month ago it was announced that many of the historic churches in the City of London will have to close because the population that they were built to serve long ago decamped to the suburbs. The Church has not kept up with the demographic changes in the country, and now finds itself with too many churches in areas where less and less people actually live the City of London being only the most extreme example of this phenomenon.
The last great re-assessment of its church provision occurred in the 1830s and 1840s, when the Church of England embarked on a building spree
in the rapidly expanding urban districts of the new industrial cities; the decaying inner cities of today. That was done only after much agonising, and probably about thirty years too late to have much of an impact on what Victorians liked to call the "labouring classes" of those districts. A similar re-assessment in the contact of the rapidly changing living patterns of the late 20th century is already long overdue; the Church has to come to terms with the fact that attempting to maintain its traditional system of pastoral care in hundreds of nearempty parish churches is no longer feasible.
The NHS has been forced to reconcile itself to exactly the same demographic problems, hence the recent blood-letting over the merging or closure of most of London's historic teaching hospitals, many of them even older than the Church of England. The recent 'merger' of St Thomas's and Guy's is a case in point; there was no longer a local population big enough to support two world-class hospitals five minutes ambulance ride away from each other. In a metaphor that should strike a chord with the Church commissioners, it was like having two Cathedrals at either end of the village green.
The current cash crisis in the Church should, if the Church commissioners have any sense, focus their minds on the need to re-evaluate the relevance of a comprehensive parish structure and to concentrate their shrinking resources in those areas where it is really needed. Such changes will undoubtedly be painful, but the Church might just emerge stronger and better equipped to meet the spiritual needs of a population that has changed out of all recognition to that which the present crumbling parochial system was created to serve many hundreds of years ago.