The Revd Canon Alan Billings, who used to be a parish priest — and taught me theology at Vicar’s training college — is now the Police and Crime Commissioner for South Yorkshire. He recently wrote a piece, in which he suggested that the Church could learn a valuable lesson from the mistakes made by the police.

Both organisations, for example, require visibility in the community. But the police, under financial pressure, have closed one local station after another, and replaced “bobbies on the beat” with hubs covering increasingly large areas that serve multiple communities. The Church, he argued, is about to try something similar. And it will end in tears.

In response, Michael Mulqueen, Professor of Policing and National Security at the University of Lancaster, wrote a letter to the paper, accusing Dr Billings of being “unfair”. He praised the way the “officers and staff [have] creatively formulated new, good-quality, high-value solutions to police increasingly complex communities”. For example, Professor Mulqueen thinks it perfectly acceptable that “digital neighbourhood policing services” can be used to compensate for reduced officer headcount. In his view, ordinary citizens find face-to-face discussions with officers “too daunting or dangerous a task”.

This latter comment echoes the language used following the murder of Sarah Everard by police officer Wayne Couzens, a few miles from my parish. If women don’t trust the police, perhaps then it is safer to engage with the police online. But there are safety issues here too. Only this week, one of the women who was arrested at the vigil for Sarah Everard described her discomfort after 50 police officers contacted her on Tinder.

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The case for digital policing, according to Professor Mulqueen, is that it enables the police to “reach more people than we otherwise could, while reducing cost and carbon footprint”. Yet for Professor Billings, this strategy has opened up “a gulf between public and police, as trust and confidence in police ebbed away”.

The two boroughs of London with the highest gun and knife crime are Southwark and Lambeth. I live on the border of the two. But the only time I ever see a police officer is in a car going sixty with its lights and sirens flashing. I never see an officer walking around my parish, still less get the opportunity to speak to one, except when I report a crime to a call centre or when they come when called — which, I have to say, they do.

Isn’t this all we should reasonably expect, some might argue? Why waste valuable police resources on chat and public relations? We should free them up to chase the baddies. “Bobbies on the beat” is just sentimental nostalgia.

This is where the comparison between the police and the Church of England is instructive. There are 45 territorial police forces in the UK. There are 42 dioceses in the Church of England. Both are cash-strapped. Both seek universal service provision. Both are expected to have a presence on the ground across the country.

The so-called “British way of policing” — growing out of community consent — and the Church of England are the building blocks of localism. And localism is still being lauded as the answer to our problems: “Localism is the key to levelling up Britain,” wrote William Hague in The Times this week.

But for all the high-profile public defence of localism — and the PM was at it in his speech to the Tory Conference, defending the broken windows theory of crime prevention — experientially, localism seems on the decline. I have no idea what the name of my GP is anymore. I never see the same person twice. Getting into the surgery is a bureaucratic nightmare. Meanwhile, the police whizz by. And now the Church — most recently in the Diocese of Leicester — is proposing to relocate vicars to regional hubs.

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Rationally and perhaps economically, all this makes a certain sense if these jobs are understood in purely instrumental terms. But as well as being crime fighters, the police exist to reassure the public. And here there is no substitute for presence, for the face-to-face encounter. In church terms, it is the Ministry of Just Wandering Around, of being seen and available.

I recently bought one of those fancy new electric bikes with a box on the front so that we can take the children to school. It’s something of a godsend in the Mad Max dystopian world of petrol-less south London. But the best thing about it is that I have rediscovered the joys of community vicaring. “Morning!” I shout out breezily to Mrs so-and-so as she pops out to the shops. Sometimes I pass by with a wave. Sometimes I stop for a chat. It is in these chance encounters that you really find out what’s going on in the parish, who has upset who (often me), who has gone into hospital and so on. It is the basis of establishing trust.

Is this a waste of time and money? Should the Church be paying me and should the police be paying its officers to wander around my neighbourhood with a vague sense of semi-purposeless benevolence? The bean-counters in head office think this can be achieved more efficiently. But the problem here is that so much of what we do does not fit into a strict job description.

The doctor isn’t just a glorified drug dispenser. She listens to the concerned; she gives people time to express their hidden fears. Things often emerge in conversation that reveal where the real issue lies. There is no substitute to giving people time. Efficiency directives from head office rob people of this opportunity. And defending all this is not simply some reactionary nostalgia for the 1950’s — bobbies on the beat, vicars out in the parishes, GP’s chatting with their patients. It is defending the human scale of things.

Localism isn’t regionalisation. It is the presence of people, over time, and geographically rooted, committed to a collection of streets, building up relationships layered by years of daily encounter.

All this has been collapsing for years, but Covid has accelerated the change. The pubs are closing — we no longer speak of going to the “local’ for a pint. The village church is empty, so too, soon, the local vicarage. The GP hasn’t time to see you. The police fly by, always in a hurry.

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My own instinct is that, one day, some of this will have to return. A regionalised church will collapse for want of local support and new forms of local church will spring up, hopefully reclaiming the ancient buildings that have been abandoned.

But for now it is time to hunker down, and sit out this social and emotional winter. Those of us who want a return to what we had will have to keep the memory of it alive. Innovations will have to be survived and endured.

Forty years ago, the great moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote that “what matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us”. He wrote those prophetic words two years before the official invention of the Internet and decades before the dreaded Zoom.

These have superficially brought us together, yet also fundamentally separated us in ways that he hardly could have imagined. Fractured and disconnected as we are, with social solidarity continually fraying through lack of real face-to-face contact, the new dark ages are indeed already upon us.

“The current trajectory of our church is a huge mistake and the leadership is out of touch with ordinary churchgoers,” George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote yesterday. “It is time to rally the troops.”

He was writing in support of the newly formed Save the Parish movement — a group I have been plotting with from its creation. And yes, that is a staggering thing for a former Archbishop to say about the current leadership.

However, it is not former Archbishops that are at the core of this new movement, but ordinary parishioners and parish priests who believe that the church itself has turned against them. They have witnessed how the centre of gravity in church affairs — as well as the funding — has shifted from the local parish towards an increasingly bureaucratic and centralised church structure.

It is ordinary churchgoers and faithful church wardens who have looked after their churches for years, as well as clergy padding about in their parish, visiting the sick, burying the dead and administering the sacraments, who are most angry about this betrayal. It feels like we are in the middle of an aggressive corporate takeover.

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The Church is abandoning its flock

By Giles Fraser

If you flick through the jobs section of the Church Times, you can see this effect almost straight away. It used to be full of jobs for the Rector of This and the Vicar of That. But such vacancies have increasingly been replaced by people with unrecognisable and convoluted job descriptions. Now they advertise areas of responsibility that have little to do with parish ministry, answerable directly to a line manager somewhere in Church House.

Jobs that began as a way of supporting the mission of the parish are now being regarded as its cheaper replacement. The parish clergy are “limiting factors” and the people in the pews merely “passengers”, as one senior Anglican clergyman put it last month.

No need for priests, or expensive theological education and the like. 10,000 new churches are imagined, led by lay people, not clergy. Many will not have a building, just a website. Many will meet on Zoom. It’s not really what most of us would call a church. But if “the church is the people not the building”, as goes the oft-heard mantra, then why not? There is certainly no need to worry about a leaky roof when you’re only online.

Of course, there have been times when I have fantasised about my job not involving the maintenance of a crumbing church tower. Even ten years ago, at St Paul’s, when the Occupy movement gathered around the Cathedral, I felt the building had become more important to some than the message it was built to proclaim.

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St Paul was a tentmaker, after all. And few parish clergy who have done the job as long as I have can be unfamiliar with the frustration that comes with looking after a large building. But the idea that we would be more entrepreneurial and light of foot if we were to hand the keys over to the National Trust is an absolute fantasy.

“Pioneers” is what the Church’s Head of Evangelism, Canon Dave Male, wants more of. Pioneers must be “freed up”, he says. But the problem here is that the weight of parish commitments, even the building, is what keeps us from floating off into some abstract theological space. The parish is grounded, rooted in place and time.

Yes, the pandemic has left the church feeling the pinch financially — and there is much need for belt-tightening. But we have far too many Bishops for the number of churchgoers that we now have. Probably far too many Dioceses as well, each with its own set of managers and advisors. Save the Parish believes that in times when finances are hard, it is the front-line parishes that should be supported as a priority rather than directing funds away towards another new top-down initiative.

It used to be the case that the parish owned its own vicarages and paid its own clergy. It was almost the very definition of an anti-fragile, localised organisational structure. But those who proclaim subsidiarity as a principle — and it was originally a theological idea — are often the first to betray it.

In 1976, the central Church decided that the parish was an inefficient way of running things and brought the ownership of parish assets under the control of the Diocese, introducing a whole new layer of management to look after the parish’s assets. From here on in, the Diocese began to have its own ideas about how best to spend a parish’s assets. Vicarages were sold off. The clergy were paid from a central pot. And power shifted from the parishes to the Diocesan structures.

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Last week, we gathered as Save the Parish for the first time in the ancient St Bartholomew’s church in Smithfield. Alison Millbank, Canon Theologian from Southwell Cathedral, put the matter plainly: “the Church of England has totally capitulated to market values and managerialism… There has been a tendency to view the parish like some inherited embarrassing knick-knack from a great-aunt that you wish were in the attic.”

The fightback, it’s safe to say, has started. At the end of the event, Fr Marcus Walker, the Rector of St Bartholomew’s, described Save the Parish as “the last chance to save the system that has defined Christianity in this country for 1000 years”. He may not have been exaggerating.

These days, our senior clergy do MBAs and spend their lives in committees, devising desk-generated grand plans for the revitalisation of the Church. On the receiving end of these continual initiatives are the poor bloody infantry, the clergy and people of the parishes, slagged off as an impediment to growth and rubbished as some antique hangover from a bygone age.

The senior clergy say they value the parish. And some do. But many on the ground are just not feeling the love.

It didn’t happen by design. And a horrendous religious civil war was to follow, an extension, in many ways, of the wars of religious that had disfigured Europe with Protestants and Catholics all slaughtering each other in the name of God. But, in this country, a place of healing was eventually discovered. In this place, faith began to be separated from violence.

That place was the parish church of the Church of England. Here, both the catholic and the protestant instincts could be partially accommodated. This was somewhere people could worship in the same church without reaching for the pitchforks. Divisions could be managed without necessarily being overcome. With a book of common prayer — the common bit being crucial — and an emphasis on prayer and pastoral care, the established church, and the parish church in particular, became the site of national healing.

Not for everyone — non-conformists, for instance, were side-lined. But what held a great many people together was a loyalty to the local, to place. And more than any other institution, the parish church symbolised this renewal of local solidarity. Former enemies could sit alongside each other in church and pray to the same God, bracketing out their ideological differences, suspicious of enthusiasm, both catholic and reformed, singing over the cracks.

Lulled by sandy stone architecture, the gentle lullabies of “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, forgive our foolish ways”, and an irenic, softly spoken Vicar, the parish church did its job almost too well. The English church fell asleep.

But for all its many dangers, enthusiasm also has its uses — not least when the church urgently needs to rally its forces in the face of a growing lack of interest, as it does right now. For all its many virtues, the gentle sleepy spirit of the parish church doesn’t always feel like a bridgehead for the re-conversion of England. Passion needs to be re-kindled. Forces need to be concentrated. The Christian church within England has to return to missionary mode. And it is, therefore, perhaps inevitable that some of us parish clergy are feeling a little bit of whiplash. Times they are a changing.

But many of the problems we now face are as much the consequence of missionary over-reach as of sleepy church complacency. The year I was ordained, the sociologist Robin Gill published his famous The Myth of the Empty Church, which should have probably been titled The Myth of the Full Church. The Victorians built too many churches, he argued, thus burdening and bankrupting future generations with the upkeep of impressive but expensive God boxes. It was the boom-and-bust theory of church growth.

The history of my ancient parish bears this out: Newington dates back to 1212, perhaps even earlier. Geographically, it was huge by modern standards, covering an area now served by a dozen or so parishes, most of what we now call Southwark. When London expanded during the 19th century — from a population of 1.9 million 1810 to 6.2 million in 1897 — the Church of England responded with a massive programme of church building. In the middle of that century, a new church was consecrated every four or five days. My own parish was split into ten between 1826 and 1877. And there were more later, carved from parts of my old parish and slices of neighbouring ones.

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These were the boom times, built at the height of imperial confidence. But bust is now upon us. This week we had to go cap in hand to the Diocese to ask them for a loan. Our old Victorian church hall collapsed back in December and the bill for demolition is around £150,000. We have nothing like that.

This week we also learned that the Church is concerned about “the sustainability of many local churches” — a problem floated in a leaked document. The Covid crisis has cost the church something in the region of £150 million and counting. And there are those who say that many of our congregations will never come back. As the report detailed: “Church attendance has reduced by around 40% over the last thirty years; the number of church buildings has fallen by 6%, which means a higher cost burden for the remaining attendees.” Something has to give. I cannot keep on asking my parishioners for money they don’t have. And the Diocese is no longer able to keep on subsidising all those churches that do not pay their own way.

But if the Church of England is to be precisely that – a church for the whole of the country, rich and poor — it cannot retreat into the wealthy suburbs, leaving the inner-city churches to become repurposed as designer flats with pointy ceilings. Nor can it fool itself that Zoom is the magical answer – a way of providing church without the need to worry about the leaky roof or whether or not we can afford to turn on the heating. Zoom has its advantages, not least that it offers to the housebound a window into the worshiping life of the church they are no longer able to attend. And indeed, over the last year, my own congregation has grown by about 20%, with new people joining us from all over the world. But for those churches in the more Catholic tradition, where church life centres around the offering of bread and wine, zoom is no substitute.

Transubstantiation may be an unexplainable miracle, but there is no way to convert the body of Christ into a digital offering that can be passed into the hands of the congregation via the camera on my laptop. You can no more offer the body and blood of Christ over zoom as you can go to the dentist over zoom. Catholic Christianity is inescapably physical, incarnational. And Zoom is, so to speak, an inherently Protestant medium, a genius technology for the promulgation of the word (much as the printing press did so much to accelerate the Reformation) but incapable of carrying the full weight of a more catholic sensibility, with its emphasis on place and presence. An evangelical church can function more like Boohoo than Debenhams, but a catholic one cannot.

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It is not the fault of the more successful parts of the church that the poorer parts of it are struggling. And it is a mistake to look at the growth of the more missionary minded evangelical parishes and regard them as some sort of threat to parishes like mine. Nonetheless, the idea that precious resources should be redirected towards growing, successful parishes does nothing to address the question of how the Church of England survives within the inner city. Such an approach would transform the Church of England into a middle-class broadly Protestant offering, and thus constitute a retreat from the core Church of England raison d’etre of, as it were, universal service provision. The only good justification for an established church is that it has a presence within every community in the land. Without this, disestablishment would be morally unavoidable.

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One way to both save the parish and allow the release of missionary energy would be to cut the layers of middle management that Dioceses haves built up over time. The Henry VIII shaped problem that the Church of England has is that of the bloated middle, with the continual invention of administrative jobs located at Church House. Some of us who are struggling to keep our parishes going unkindly wonder whether there are too many people employed by the church to sit behind a desk rather than stand behind an altar. We may also need to cut the number of Dioceses and expensive talking shops like the General Synod. But the truth is that without the central structures of the church, parishes like mine would no longer exist. After all, from where else would we get a loan from to pay for the demolition of our church hall? Indeed, how else could the parish afford to have a priest here, and a Rectory, if not for the subsidy administered by Church House.

But do these central structures really need to be so big? Church house for the Oxford diocese now employs more than 100 people. These are jobs that are replicated in many of our 42 dioceses. The Roman Catholic church, for example, seems to be able to manage (just as successfully) with a few office staff and an old filing cabinet. The problem within the Church of England appears to be the employment of a whole middle management class of communication officers and compliance professionals generating reams of forms and paperwork. In normal times there may be a case for such work. But when the church is busy cutting frontline staff — the parish clergy — the existence of this bloated middle has to be seriously challenged.

But if we’re talking about greater subsidiarity, this inevitably means parishes taking greater responsibility for their own financial affairs. At the moment, and however much I explain otherwise, many in my parish still believe that we pay some sort of tax to the diocese just for existing. In truth we are heavily subsidised. It is the worst of both worlds.

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Why my church doors are staying open

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So yes, the church must change. There will be much pain in those changes for many. But what, for me, is absolutely non-negotiable is the parish system. Parishes like mine covered a much larger geographical area before and they can do so again. Some churches will close. Some of that hubristic Victorian over expansion will have to be reversed. Resources must be concentrated. But the idea of a priest in a parish must be defended. The transformation that is needed will not take place successfully if the parish clergy fear that the central church regards its poorer parishes as little more than failing cost centres.

This is a crucial moment for the C of E. But churches have survived much worse. And events of the 21st century have demonstrated that the old narrative of slow religious decline is as much a myth as that of that of the Victorian church triumphant. Globally, Christianity continues to grow in the most unexpected places. China, for instance. But on these shores, we are called to be faithful in dark and difficult times. The Christian faith contains a genius for reinvention. And if we are right that God is in his heaven, then there is ultimately nothing to worry about. And if we are wrong, then it doesn’t matter anyway.