Holy Saturday is here, the most chaotic day of a vicar’s year. After the frenzied busyness of the past week, and the momentous ceremony of Easter Sunday yet to come, I shall count it a success if I manage not to set myself on fire.
Yes, I mean that literally. But it would also be a vivid metaphor for a disastrous few months endured by the clergy, following a succession of blunders by the senior managers of Church of England PLC.
We’ve seen deeply distressing headlines, the reluctant resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and a serious loss of trust in our leadership among ordinary churchgoers.
And yet, as I will explain, there’s more reason for optimism about the future of Christianity in the UK than at just about any other moment in my lifetime. If we get this right, we can light a fire that will be a beacon of hope for the whole country.
As a newly ordained cleric, I did nearly set myself alight once, as I joined a group of worshippers outside a parish church for the lighting of the Paschal candles.
Traditionally the first ceremony of Easter Sunday, this involves carrying a burning candle into a darkened church, while the deacon chants, ‘The Light of Christ’.
It’s a moving and dramatic moment, and of course a potential fire hazard, since it means lighting a candle without accidentally setting your robes ablaze. The first time I carried the candle, I had to fight the urge to roll my sleeves up to my elbows – convinced I was about to be engulfed in flames.
And that’s not just a vivid imagination. I’ve actually seen it happen. As we gathered outside on that occasion, the heap of kindling in the churchyard from which the candle would be lit was quite an inferno, helped by a combination of a brisk wind and a vicar who confessed he was ‘fond of a good bonfire’ – so much so that he’d tucked a packet of firelighters among the sticks.
The individual whose role it was to light the Paschal leant in too close. In an instant, flames leapt up his arm, and panic ensued as the assembled company switched their priorities from saluting the Resurrection morn to preventing an immolation. Luckily, he was able to remove his raiment before suffering serious burns, though his dignity was badly singed.
In Liverpool, where I ministered for several years, they do Holy Saturday differently. The Church of England and Roman Catholic communities come together on a ‘walk of witness’ through the city centre, stopping at various points to pray and, with the assistance of a very large megaphone, remind shoppers of the Easter story.
My role was to shepherd the thousand or so people along the mile-long route. I tried to cultivate an air of detached authority, aided by my hi-vis jacket and black sunglasses. As I stood surveying the crowd, a kindly older lady came up and took me by the arm.
‘Is someone looking after you, love?’ she asked sweetly. It transpired she thought I was blind.
I can’t help having some sympathy with the elderly priest who once confessed to me that, on Holy Saturday, he takes his phone off the hook and refuses to answer the door. After all, Christ lay dead in his tomb in the interval between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. As he pointed out: ‘It is the one day of the year when Nietzsche was right – God is dead.’
With the steep decline in church-going over the past 60 years or so, you might imagine that God is dead all the year round. But during this decade and especially since the end of the pandemic, many clergy are reporting that congregations are growing again.
It’s being called the ‘Quiet Revival’. Church attendances have risen by around two million in the past six years, a 50 per cent increase. This is being seen most strongly in Roman Catholic and pentecostal churches, but it’s also visible in CofE congregations such as my own in Charlbury, Oxfordshire.
According to a YouGov survey commissioned by the Bible Society, the number of 18-to-24-year-olds who say they attend church at least once a month has risen from 4 per cent in 2019 to 16 per cent today. Nearly two-thirds of them are male.
The Church is also more ethnically diverse than ever before: a fifth of churchgoers come from black or Asian backgrounds, and 47 per cent of black people aged 18-34 now attend at least once a month.
In my own rural parish and among my colleagues across the country, whenever we compare notes, a spirit of optimism is spreading about the future of Christianity in Britain. And before you ask, the survey is concerned chiefly with ordinary services – not just weddings, funerals and Christmases. Nonetheless, last Christmas in Charlbury was a bumper one, with more than 1,000 people in our village church.
Whether that surge will be repeated tomorrow, I almost don’t dare to guess.
My reticence echoes that moment outside the Garden Tomb on Easter morning, when Mary Magdalene was greeted by the risen Christ, and didn’t quite dare to believe it was really Him, brought back to life. She thought He was the gardener at first.
But I have good reason to hope. After that tremendous Christmas, with many young families among the new faces, I told myself that these parents weren’t likely to bring their children to church on wet, cold February Sundays.
But I’m delighted to say I was wrong. They’ve been turning up religiously, so to speak, which is heartening both for me and for my older, regular parishioners.
The median age in this part of rural Oxfordshire is around 50. If this trend keeps up, the average age of my congregation might soon be less than that – emphasising that this revival is very much happening among younger people.
Why is that? People born in the past 30 years or so have had it tough in all sorts of ways.
Not only has the economic climate been punishing, but they are bombarded with frightening news from every direction, especially online. Climate change, international conflicts, political chaos, on top of intense pressure about sexuality, health and identity, and that’s before you even think about the impact of Covid and lockdown.
When I was a student, an elderly priest told me that he felt much of the Book of Common Prayer was no longer relevant. ‘It’s all that stuff about wars and plagues,’ he said. ‘We don’t need that any more.’
Well, it’s relevant now. And I believe young people are looking for comfort and guidance in it. They have been forced to grow up more quickly than any other generation since the Second World War. They’ve had to do a lot of heavy thinking.
When they come to church, they are not simply going through the motions. They are looking for God. That might be why the biggest increase in attendance is being seen at Roman Catholic and pentecostal churches, opposite ends of the Christian spectrum but both offering something more authentic that reflects the intensity of the modern world.
What they don’t want is a repeat of school assemblies, with a vicar going through the motions.
Why would young people bother getting out of bed for that, when they have a hundred other claims on their time?
I once saw the perfect demonstration of how to hold a congregation’s attention by a priest who had been a missionary in southern Africa. His audience was a group of young children, his subject the love of God. You might imagine he’d struggle to keep them interested. You’d be wrong. ‘Children,’ he announced, ‘St Paul tells us that God’s love is sharp. Do you know what else is sharp? This!’
And from out of his robes, he produced an enormous machete. A teacher gasped. The children sat totally unfazed. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘to show you how sharp it is, I need a volunteer.’
Little hands shot up. Was I about to witness an appalling act of clerical infanticide? Thankfully, no. The children were given a bowlful of soft fruits and encouraged to lob them towards the priest, who sliced them in half in mid-air.
Was it a conventional assembly? No. Did it conform to any health and safety rulings? Certainly not. Will those children ever forget the sharpness of the love of God? I don’t think so.
For the first time in my lifetime, going to church can seem radical. The decline in the CofE has been going on so long that in many families, these young people are the first in three generations to come to worship. Neither their parents nor their grandparents ever bothered.
That’s not so true in my rural parish where Christianity is still deeply ingrained in the community. But it’s certainly the case in many cities, especially with the multicultural shift away from using any Christian terminology at all. When Christmas is the ‘winterval’ and Easter is just an excuse for eating chocolate, it can feel rebellious to discover the deeper meaning of the Gospels.
And we certainly need that meaning because Christian values still underpin British society, regardless of how many people think of themselves as atheist or agnostic.
Qualities such as tolerance and fairness don’t come from nowhere, and I’m afraid they are not hard-wired into human behaviour as fortuitous factory settings. If civilisation is to survive, we need to nurture those values. They have been laid down over centuries of Christian faith and it’s essential that we keep them alive.
To do that requires engagement. Young people are thinking seriously about these matters, looking for ways to strengthen their world, and they come to church in search of that. The challenge for us is to give them meaning that they can’t find elsewhere, on YouTube or Netflix or Instagram.
All of this is happening at a time when the Church has a disastrous image crisis. Author GK Chesterton once remarked that the best proof of God’s existence is that people keep looking for Him despite the vigorous efforts of the Church to deter them, and that’s certainly true at the moment.
Following the resignation of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, amid an ongoing abuse scandal, the opinion many people have of the institution itself is pretty low. The Church has the opposite problem to the NHS, which is held in great affection nationally despite the frustrations people have about their local GP surgeries.
With us, it’s the other way around. My parishioners, like millions of others across Britain, have a deep fondness for their local church… but not the Church-with-a-capital-C.
One of my fellow vicars claims he has doubled the contents of his Sunday collection plate by assuring the congregation: ‘Don’t worry, not one penny of this will be going to Canterbury.’
I still don’t think the people at the top are getting it. They’re hoping the bad publicity will blow over if they ignore it hard enough. The Archbishop of York, for instance, has been on social media this week, telling us what he’s been doing at the United Nations. He doesn’t seem to realise that this is effectively announcing how out of touch he is.
There doesn’t seem to be any understanding of the anger and pain caused by Church cover-ups, and no real sense of contrition. It will be extremely annoying if the bishops start claiming the credit for the Quiet Revival, slapping each other on the back and congratulating themselves for weathering the storm.
The reality is that this revolution, just like the birth of Christianity itself, is happening among ordinary people reaching out to God for support and meaning in their lives.
That gives me huge hope. And Easter is, above all, a time for hope.
