I write this only two days after we buried my wife’s cousin. He was 66. He died of a rare form of cancer about which the medics and their treatments knew little. It was a painful way to die. The loss for the great many people who knew and loved him is hard and heavy, especially for his wife, two children, and grandchildren.
I had a small walk-on part at his burial, choosing and reading a biblical passage, and then I led the prayers at the thanksgiving service that followed. The officiating priest was friendly to all, and related well to the whole congregation, first the family and close friends at the graveside and then the 700 or more people who came to the thanksgiving afterward. The church overflowed into the church hall and the church hall overflowed into the churchyard, where people followed the service on their mobile phones together with others across the world.
Everyone, I am sure, would have appreciated the ministry of the church. They were welcomed and affirmed. There was nothing that would have alienated them. To hear hundreds of people, a good many of them, I am sure, distanced from the regular practices of the church, say the 23rd Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer, and listen to some of John 14 and a sermon extolling the love of God in Christ, was heartening.
I came away, though, feeling strangely dissatisfied. I am still trying to understand why and, in so doing, I’m asking all sorts of questions about what sort of ministry people of England need from the Church of England in our day. I hope that my reflections will resonate in some way with other churches in other contexts.
My initial concern was that the burial was to take place first and that a service celebrating the life of the deceased was to follow shortly afterward. Over recent years this has become a common pattern in the United Kingdom, even among Christian people. I suspect that this novel ordering is a way of minimizing the confrontation with the full bodily reality of death. It is a method of getting “it” out of the way before the focus returns to the life that has been lived and away from the death that has been died—the coffin and the body neatly disposed of earlier and out of sight to most people. There were various other adaptations to the usual order of burial service that reinforced my suspicions, including, for example, lowering the body into the grave before the liturgy began.
However, the thanksgiving service with its hundreds of people gathered set my liturgical, theological. and missional thoughts running most. As I’ve described, there was much to warm the Christian heart. That it was all taking place in church is not to be taken for granted. The presence of a priest who showed genuine love and care for all who were there and could communicate in a natural way to the congregation brought its benefits. People were at ease. There was laughter aplenty as the eulogizers recounted their adventures, sometimes with tears.
The congregation heard of God’s unconditional love. Liturgy and Bible were woven into the service with a creativity that seemed to make them entirely palatable to everyone. A lot of damage could have been done to the ministry of the church in this small town in the English Midlands if these hundreds of people had been berated by a priest exploiting the opportunity of a full-to-bursting church, demanding immediate repentance in the face of coming judgment.
As time went on, though, as glad as I was that even on this sad occasion people seemed to be comfortable in church, I began to feel an absence. It was what was being left out of the liturgy, and the alternatives within the chosen liturgical provision, that caught the attention of my liturgical antennae. My theological sensibility was alerted by the way Jesus’ words in John 14 about being the only way to the Father were interpreted as meaning no more than living a loving life. My missional convictions were perturbed in the way there seemed to be no sign of the gospel’s invitation, the challenge of Christian living, the call to follow Christ.
I do not mean to be critical of the liturgical, theological, and missional choices that were made on this occasion. I certainly do not want to deny that much good will have been done for the ministry of the church among the strong friendship groups of the people who were present. But I do find myself asking questions about tendencies in my church culture to reduce the otherness of the church’s life in an effort to relate the church to the culture around us, and to blunt the edge of the gospel so that we do not alienate those who have come within hearing distance and whom we want to see again. Why, for example, did I, in one of the few liturgical choices that were mine to take, opt to read the end of Romans 8 with its message about nothing separating us from the love of God?
There are indications in the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe that we are witnessing what the Bible Society calls “a quiet revival.” I have spent a lot of my life hearing rumors about revival here and revival there, and they soon seem to fade. So, I am very cautious about any such claims.
Nevertheless, something does seem to be happening. As I now live behind the walls of a castle, serving in a rather unusual place—St. George’s Chapel, Windsor—I am somewhat dependent on what I hear from others, and what I hear is becoming increasingly interesting. A number of bishops told me recently that they are seeing a rise in young people—especially young men—turning to Christian faith. I hear the same from parish clergy—young people arriving at church each week, often with a newly bought Bible in hand, eager to understand more.
A French Roman Catholic monk told me that he doesn’t know what to do with a new influx of young men turning to his community—and the million strong gathering of young people in Rome recently was quite a sight. I have read of it in academic analyses and news reports. I have seen evidence of it in surveys by Christian organizations and in statistics by polling organizations and other secular bodies. “We’re seeing many more young people—especially men—at our Greek Orthodox parish in London,” my dental assistant told me recently.
Secularism in many ways is a reflection of affluence and its assurance of wealth into the future, with each generation better off than the one before. With pressures on the cost of living, instability in the economy, home ownership becoming increasingly out of reach, younger people face the prospect of not only being poorer than their parents but also supporting an aging population. The promise of unstoppable progress is looking hollow.
The cost-of-living crisis in one among several. There is the after-effect of COVID, and risks of something worse in the future. There is degradation of the environment and changes in climate, with the existential threats they present. There is the insecurity of geopolitics and the breakdown of the post-war structures that have held some sort of peace, at least in Europe, until now, with calls to return to a war footing, a war in which the risk of nuclear escalation is very real. Sometimes all this is called a permacrisis—a permanent state of multiple crises that hang heaviest over the future of the young.
Alongside all of this is a dawning recognition of the absurdity of moral relativism, the loss of historical and cultural roots, the signs of renewed respect among some shapers of opinion for the intellectual inheritance of Christian faith and its deep vision for human beings and their common life.
This is only a cursory analysis. But if there is any substance to this turn to faith, it will require the church to be true to itself and the gospel. All the indications are that those making this turn will not be satisfied with religion that provides only a veneer of spirituality over the secular culture that they find so wanting. They are looking for depth of well-tested thought and practice that is a reliable basis on which to build their futures—a tradition, if you will. They are looking for a height of reality that is not found in the normal course of human affairs but lures them into a new world of beauty, wonder, and truth—a liturgical aesthetic, if you will. They are looking for a width of understanding that enables them to make sense of the whole of life in coherent and credible beliefs that have both the stability and the agility to enable believers to navigate life in the world as it is and as it is becoming—a theology, if you will.
They are looking for Christ, foretold by the prophets, proclaimed by the apostles, and celebrated in the witness of the church in our preaching, prayer, sacraments, hymns, creeds, and common life – Jesus, the way, the truth, and the life as God wills it.
The love of which we will speak joyfully and confidently in funerals and other ministries of the church remains, of course, extravagantly unconditional. Yet to make use of the helpful delineation John Barclay makes in his seminal study of St. Paul’s understanding of grace, our speech needs to be tuned to tell, again with joy and confidence, of how Christian identity is conditioned by certain characteristics of community, commitment, and charity. As well as not being true to the fulness of the gospel, cheap grace is unlikely to be convincing to those who are yearning for a vision of human life that transcends the empty promises of materialism, consumerism, and hedonism and, at the same time, provides God-given means of personal and societal transformation. The signs are that they may be ready to hear Christ’s call ‘to deny themselves, take up their cross and follow him’ (Matthew 16.24).
The Rt. Rev. Dr. Christopher Cocksworth is Dean of Windsor, having been previously Bishop of Coventry and Principal of Ridley Hall Cambridge after serving in parochial and chaplaincy ministry. He is also a member of the Foundation and Board of Directors of TLC.
