The Parish

Martyn Percy (Editorial, Modern Believing, Volume 43:2, April 2002)

One of the pleasures of editing Modern Believing is being able to draw together a diverse range of articles and begin to develop a theme. The idea of a 'parish' may seem to be obvious to many: still part of the cultural furniture, and sufficiently resonant to command attention and respect. For many established churches world-wide, the parish is the fundamental unit of organisation, the 'place' where the church is located. It is odd, then, that so little attention is given to identifying what a parish is and means, particularly in relation to theology, ministry and ecclesiology.

In this edition of MB, four writers bring a fresh perspective to a subject that will become increasingly important for the churches as they face their futures. In the first article, Keith Trivasse offers a novel and original reflection on the new baptism liturgy in Common Worship. Robert Wiggs - a welcome newcomer to the pages of MB - explores stories and scapegoats in parish life, with reference to the work of Girard. Geoffrey Walker examines folk religion and churchmanship, an article based on his recent D.Phil. thesis. Finally, Frances Eccleston (no relation) contributes a critique of Alan Ecclestone's Yes to God, and in so doing explores the shape and nature of parish ministry in dialogue with (arguably) one of the finest exponents and practitioners of parish ministry in the latter part of the twentieth century.

As readers of MB will already know, the shape and content of parish ministry has changed radically over the last century. An increasingly professionalised clergy, coupled to an uneasy mutation in public perceptions of parochial identity, have led to some profound and subtle shifts. Whilst clergy are still all curates - with the 'cure of souls' for the whole parish - it is becoming less and less clear in our mobile, transient, globalised and compressed world what we might mean by terms such as 'community', 'local' and 'place'.

I have recently been enjoying the work of Doreen Massey, a geographer with interests in cultural theory, feminist theory, philosophy and sociology. In her book Space, Place and Gender (Polity, 1994, pp. 146ff), she makes a number of pertinent and illuminating points. First, places are only defined in relation to or over and against other places. Second, places have many identities - they are not flat or static. Third, place and community do not necessarily correlate. Whilst there may be a longing for such coherence, it is important to grasp that communities are often at odds with their environments.

Massey also points out some of the ironies of modernity and locality. Air travel has led to a decline in passenger shipping, which has isolated many remote island communities. Thus, whilst for some the world is more compressed and globalised, for others it is increasingly lonely and fractious. Technology also reduces spatial distances - fax, e-mail and video-phone - yet many still travel many miles just to collect water. The city may be alive and well, with everything 'within easy reach'; yet the pensioner can still be living in a bed-sit, their presence or absence going undetected for many months. In other words, the mobility of some, whilst destroying the identity of the 'local' for many, can equally leave many others depending even more heavily on their immediate environment and community for support. Once again, we can see here that 'the local' has an ethical dimension to it - the global threatens the local at many levels (supermarket versus local corner shop), making it impossible for the prophetic and pastoral ministry to be limited to the local - because many ethical problems will have to be fought on a broader canvas.

Take, for example, my own locality - Millhouses, a small suburb nestling in the city of Sheffield. The place name comes from a ruined abbey a few miles down the road, which was built in 1178 by a penitent knight who was implicated in the assassination of Thomas a Becket. So Millhouses owes its origins to a Frenchman, who built the abbey on the furthest extent of the archepiscopal province of Canterbury. Over the centuries, Millhouses moved away from agrarian dependency to water-powered mills making metals and machines. The area prospered. Today the area mostly comprises post-Edwardian housing, whose residents are either retired or youngish-middle-aged people who are working in professions or middle-management - the 'posher' parishes lies on its borders. Today, the parish numbers 4000, but with over a third of the area still covered in protected woodland.

But that is only one way of describing the 'local'. In terms of education, the infant and junior schools are amongst the most sought-after in the city, which has pushed up the house prices; education by postcode. The parish also falls in the right catchment area for the best secondary schools. Yet in the parish itself, there is a struggling comprehensive school, which draws all its pupils from the poorer parts of the city, including those from the ethnically diverse neighbouring parish. So, every day, there are bus loads of children of every ethnic colour and hue coming to school at the bottom of Millhouses Lane, whilst there are car loads of children, mostly white, who leave the top of Millhouses Lane for other schools.

For whom is Millhouses local? The answer is 'many more than its 4000 residents - but they are all experiencing the same shared space very differently. Commercially, the ethnic shops just outside the parish depend on custom from within the parish. But those shops face stiff competition from three large supermarkets, which are fairly 'upmarket'. So for many, either as a shop owner or shop worker, Millhouses is a place of work, and perhaps of economic struggle. Then there are the pubs competing for more than local business, and the restaurants that depend more on passing trade than residents. And we've only just begun . . . .

Clearly, to minister in such a community would require one's attention being constantly drawn out of the parish, because the identity of the parish can never itself be settled. It is an arbitrary space that is experienced in many different ways by several different types of community. Whatever Millhouses is, it is not static; it is a contested place, an ambivalent locality. The 'cure of souls' for the parish necessarily extends across the boundaries of residency.

Now in saying all this, there are some obvious theological points to be made. First, the ambiguity of the local did not stop God entering the world in Jesus Christ in particular, concrete, specific and bounded contexts. A Palestinian Jew of the first century is a very particular and local form of incarnation, yet this particularity has a universality about it. God, in being committed to some humanity in a window of time, demonstrates a commitment for all time and for all people. 'The Word became flesh and dwelt among us' is a cipher for God remaining with us. And correspondingly, Christian ministry mirrors that remaining by offering a constant presence in as many localities as possible.

However, a focus on the particularity of God's presence - God's selfconscious limitation in Jesus, as much as it is a revelation; a fullness only partly revealed - must be balanced with God's ultimate universality. God will not be constrained by boundaries or the localised, for he is beyond them, and he calls all of us beyond them too. As the first century Epistle to Diognetus puts it: 'every Christian is a foreigner in their land - we live in the city, but wait for a city that is to come'. This latter point is important, since although 'the Jesus event' shows a loving commitment to any present place, it also comes with a prophetic judgement that seeks the transformation of all places. The resurrected one is a disturber of our identities as much as an affirmation of them. So none can claim that their rationale is a universal priesthood committed to 'being' local for the local - for we are always called out of the local and into new vistas of Christian community that disturb and transform the present.

Christianity is an incarnational religion, and its early apostolic ecclesiology developed a close relationship between the universal and the particular, the local and the catholic, the finite and the infinite. Holding these things together were the person of Christ, who although the timeless Word of God, nonetheless lived in Nazareth and got busy with carpentry. A God, who, in Christ, was willing to be located, and identified with a particular time and place, yet was catholic and universal. The paradox for Christians is that everything particular Christ does has to be local, and yet it always has a meaning, significance and resonance that are beyond the local. Or, put another way, the places to which we belong must be linked to the Gospel that brings hope, redemption and change. Only otherness fused with the here and now, or the local working in and within the universal can achieve that task of 'reconciling all things together in Christ'.

Modern Believing, MCU, October Vol. 43, No.2, April 2002