Straws in the wind for the Church of England

                                                  Photo: cropped from Auntie P Creative Commons

A flurry of self examination from the C of E this week.  Maybe it’s taken a while to digest Linda Woodhead’s Religion & Society research (& to wake up to the popularity of her Westminster Faith Debates) or maybe the new Archbishop’s honeymoon period is coming to an end.

• Diarmaid MacCulloch in the London Review of Books on Bart Ehrman’s challenge to scriptural authority in Christianity (& similar from Candida Moss and Timothy Michael Law)

• Guardian journalist Andrew Brown’s episode of BBC Radio 4’s Analysis Last Rites for the Church of England?

• The Church Times’ four-week investigation – Church Health Check – looking at the parish system, belief, declining attendance, atheist church, young people.

Much of it centres on the (needless) disconnection between the church and ordinary people, and between mainstream church thinking and the rather more interesting ideas in the academy and on the fringes of church life.  None of this is new; extra-curricular activities have, for the most part, and for most of my adult life, been where the energy is.

I’d go with Diamaid McCulloch’s “.. the future of a faith that is currently experiencing one of its most interesting and fruitful phases of transformation” and leave “it’s not all gloom and doom” (Peter Brierley in the Church Times) to those who think a tweak here and there will do the trick.