Baroness Sherlock
Main Page: Baroness Sherlock (Labour - Life peer)
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, this weekend I am going to bake some scones—probably fruit scones. I am then going to bring them in to St John’s church in Neville’s Cross in Durham, of which I am a member, to serve to the people of Durham. On Sunday we are having our annual gathering in the field behind our church, when the neighbours collect and people come from across the city. Once again I am in charge of the tea tent—or, to be more precise, the tea and coffee bit of the scout hut. I have to confess that my scones are not very good, at least not by the competitive baking standards of the Church of England. However, as the tea monitor, when I looked down the list showing me the promised baked goods, I found all kinds being offered—rock cakes, flapjacks and sponge cakes, but no scones. I normally make a chocolate cake. However, I am also aware that somewhere there is a piece of canon law in the Church of England requiring that if 50 or more Anglicans gather outside in public then they must be given scones with their tea—so it was Sherlock to the rescue.
So far, so Barbara Pym. But what in fact is going on next Sunday is not a church fête but what we call our EcoFest. About seven years ago we gathered for our regular church parish weekend away in Whitby and two members of our congregation challenged our church to think about what we were doing about the environment. We discussed it a lot that weekend and made a number of changes to our own homes and to our church, including putting solar panels on the roof, but we also began to think about what we should do for the city. As a result, we now have an annual gathering in which we bring together people from across the city who are interested in the subject.
The result is a huge mix of campaign groups, green campaigners, alternative energy providers, people who do vegetable boxes, beekeepers, fair trade stalls, bicycle repair workshops and a car-sharing club. There is also a toy swap-shop for the kids so that you can swap the toys you are bored with for those that you have yet to get bored with. The Durham Foodbank will be there because many of our church members are involved in running it. At the end, our rector, Barney Huish, will lead us all in beer and hymns accompanied by a brass band, this being the north-east. A special addition this year will be hustings so that the local political parties can come along and talk to us. When we first did this we were amazed to find that many of the people and groups who are interested in the same subject did not know each other. They met for the first time when they came to our EcoFest, in the little field behind our little church.
I am not going to talk about the wonderful buildings of the Church of England—partly because although my church has much to commend it, having been set up as a mission church at the end of the 19th century by our mother church, which is 800 years old, its charms have yet to trouble greatly either the bat community or English Heritage. I want to talk instead about what happens inside it.
I have been a regular attendee at just three churches, having acquired the churchgoing habit rather late in middle age. The first one that I went to was very different. It was St Mary’s Islington, which is famous for many things. My noble friend Lord Griffiths might be familiar with it because it is notorious for having ejected Charles Wesley at least once from its premises. The church is at the heart of Islington, a borough which is polarised between conspicuous wealth and mostly hidden but profound deprivation. It is a neighbourhood of incredible diversity but one in which people live parallel lives. Their thoughtful and very impressive current vicar, Simon Harvey, put it like this:
“The people who share the 43 bus share little else. Parochial ministry in this context is about offering opportunities for encounter, understanding and fostering commitment to a common good, as well as worshipping God”.
They do indeed pursue the common good.
The facilities at St Mary’s are used by 2,000 people a week, meeting in more than 100 groups that range from 12-step drug recovery programmes through to a stroke club, a project on childhood obesity and an annual “Soul in the City” community festival that serves thousands of people. They have been working to keep the church open every day, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, described, so that people who work and play in Islington today can find this space of sanctuary, as people have done on the same site for the past thousand years. The church also runs an open youth club, which I chaired for a bit while I was there—although that is now being done much more ably—as well as a preschool, both of which bring together council funding with church time and investment.
My church when I am in Westminster is St Martin-in-the-Fields. Many noble Lords will know that church well. They may well have been to concerts there; the church has one of the foremost chamber ensembles. Dick Sheppard, the vicar of St Martin’s during the First World War, used the church to give refuge to soldiers on their way to France. He saw it as what he called “the church of the ever open door”, and its doors have remained open ever since. It offers ministry to homeless people both directly and through the Connection at St Martin-in-the-Fields, which cares for around 7,500 individuals each year. St Martin’s was involved in the anti-apartheid movement and the founding of many charitable and campaigning bodies, including Amnesty International, Shelter and the Big Issue. It is an inclusive, welcoming church to this day, a place where people of different faiths regularly pray together.
These three churches, united only by the rather random fact that I have had the privilege to worship at them, show me some really important things about the English parish church. First, English parish churches are places of meeting, gathering and connection. The theologian Luke Bretherton talks of the early church as having been what he calls a third space. In those days there were two clear spaces: the public space, the polis, and the household, the oikos. The church, the ekklesia, was a third space, and a very unusual one where men and women, Greek and Roman, slave and free all mixed together, which simply would not have happened elsewhere. The first time that I walked into St Mary Islington, I realised that this was the one place in Islington where I had seen such a huge variety of people gathered together under one roof. The first time that I attended morning prayer at St Martin-in-the-Fields and heard the sounds of people who had spent the night all across the streets of London coming inside the church as we prayed at the centre of it, I realised how rarely our lives intersect in a great city like this—but they do in church.
Secondly, like many church and other faith groups, these English parish churches are doing so much for their local communities—in fact, they are focusing lots of their time and money on those who are outside the church. As well as all the events that so many noble Lords have described, we all know of the unsung heroes, those who visit the sick and the housebound, who volunteer in prisons and food banks and who run holiday clubs for local children and lunch clubs for older people.
Thirdly, without any disrespect to my nonconformist friends, both noble and otherwise, there is something unique about the established church. On a practical level, it is a body whose churches are maintained from its own resources, as we have heard, yet, as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich have pointed out, is by definition open to anyone who lives within its boundaries.
I was chatting this week to Father Richard Carter, the inspiring associate vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields. He described having received a call to tell him that someone in his parish was dying, so of course he immediately went to the hospital to be with them. When the person had died, he went to visit the family more than once, organised and conducted the funeral and went to the crematorium. The point is that he would, and does, do this for anyone who lives in his parish boundaries, whether or not they or their family have ever set foot in church, and so do vicars up and down the country.
As we know, any English person can be baptised or married and have their funeral in their parish church. We often joke about the “hatch, match and dispatch” role of the church but these things really matter; they are the crucial life stages, the rites of passage that secular society increasingly does very badly, especially the first and the last of those. This is a huge challenge for a cash-strapped Church of England but it is very important, and I am proud that so many churches work hard to maintain it.
The interesting thing is that that same priest used to serve in the Solomon Islands. He described an occasion on which charities had gathered there in the wake of a crisis to ask the local people how they wanted the aid money they had brought to be spent. The response was pretty surprising: people said that they wanted the money to go to their local churches. The reason was that the local church knew the community intimately and, literally, knew the lie of the land; it understood the needs and challenges facing the local people. This priest, Richard, and his fellow clergy minister with the same understanding and care to their new congregations here in the centre of London, with all their diversity.
One of the most unusual things that I find about the English parish church is that it spans a huge range of theological views, often indeed in the same church. The Prime Minister talked recently of a,
“perceived wooliness when it comes to belief”,
on the part of the Church of England. Actually, I think it is slightly more complicated than that. When I first started going to a Church of England church, I likewise assumed that its members did not believe things very strongly. I then realised that they actually do—just not in the same things. That is actually really important; it is an aspect of the Church of England that tells us quite a lot about its history.
I heard a well known priest give a talk a few years ago at the Greenbelt Festival about the lessons of the English Civil War. He talked about comparing experiences with an American about the same thing. His view was that the overriding lesson for the Americans from their civil war was that it was important to be right and to win, but that what the English learnt from their civil war was that it was very dangerous to fall out over religion.
Actually, that means that there is a very strong historical and pragmatic reason for the theological diversity of the Church of England. But there is also something very impressive about it. The capacity to hold together in one body people who have radically different understandings of the meanings of central beliefs, not to mention religious practices, is hugely significant. It is really countercultural to those of us who live in the world of politics, where the slightest hint of disagreement or division is leapt upon and held up as a sign of weakness. I find it a very attractive characteristic, but in practice a very challenging one, because it means being in fellowship with people with whom I disagree, sometimes profoundly, over things that matter to all of us a great deal. It also means that I am forced continually to come back to working out what it is that matters most. It is also a constant reminder to me of the possibility, however slight, that I may on occasion be wrong. For that alone I am profoundly grateful to each and every English parish church, and also to the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, for giving us the opportunity to celebrate them today.