Letters

Dear Editor,

The church in Reach.

Jen Holmwood’s letter raises fundamental questions about the church in Reach. She reports that whilst people like to use it for baptisms weddings and funerals it is supported on a week by week basis only by a few aging residents. This, I believe, is nothing to do with the people who go to the church who are uniformly pleasant and friendly. Rather, I suspect, it is to do with the fact that through years of cataclysmic decline the church has, unlike, say Marks and Spencer, singularly failed to think about its fundamental ethos and product range.

Yet everyone thinks about ‘spiritual’ matters - who they are, why they are here, how they should live, how they should relate to friends and colleagues, what will happen after they die. And it is everyone’s right – some would say, duty - to come up with the solutions that are right for them. How is it, then, that the church so singularly fails to engage with these concerns? I suggest that it is because the church will not recognize the validity of those individual solutions. Rather, it requires people to adopt its ethos, its solutions. This involves subscribing to the view that people are miserable sinners who can only be brought to salvation when they have ‘found’ God. But the terms and concepts mean little or nothing to them.

We have to add to that the fact that the church’s technique is staggeringly unproductive! For whilst psychotherapists have long recognized the need to start where people are at, the church by contrast requires people to sing of sin and salvation a hundred times per service in the hope that they will somehow come to believe in it all. It is little wonder that they stay away in droves.

If therefore the church in Reach is to survive it had better review its direction and start with the people. Suppose, for example, it just scrapped services since so few attend. Suppose, instead, it asked people from other religions to talk. Suppose it invited people to a time of reflection without presupposing that they either believed in, or were searching, after God. Suppose it started trying to share in other people’s experiences rather than devaluing them by pretending to have the answers itself. What a support that might be! Then, indeed the church might really have a future. Otherwise, do not ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Yours sincerely,

Philip Lewis.