Parish

Andrew Rumsey

Description

This book examines the distinctive form of social and communal life created by the Anglican parish, applying and advancing the emerging discipline of place theology by filling a conspicuous gap in contemporary scholarship.

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 12 juillet 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334054863
• Langue: English

Extrait

Parish





‘All things are done in some place; but if we consider place to be no more but the next hollow superficies of the air, alas!’
John Donne, Devotions





Parish
An Anglican Theology of Place
Andrew Rumsey






© Andrew Rumsey, 2017
First published in 2017 by SCM Press
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
978 0 334 05484 9
Typeset by Regent Typesetting
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon





For my father,
the Revd Canon P. C. Rumsey (1921–97),
and grandfather, the Revd Canon H. H. Rumsey (1876–1940), parish priests



Contents
Acknowledgements
Part One Christ in Our Place: The Anglican Parish in Theoretical Perspective
Introduction
1. Steadying Jacob’s Ladder: A Place-Formation Cycle
2. The Lord is Here: Towards a Christology of Place
3. Sheer Geography: Spatial Theory and Parochial Practice
Part Two Common Ground: The Anglican Parish in History and Practice
4. Another Country: Parish and the National Myth
5. Good Fences: Parish as Neighbourhood
6. A Handful of Earth: Parish, Landscape and Nostalgia
Conclusion: A Kind of Belonging

Bibliography




Acknowledgements
‘Consult the genius of place in all’, the poet Alexander Pope once urged a correspondent. This book would not have been possible without consulting the genius of place in many different people, especially those of my parishes here in Oxted and Tandridge, who have been so supportive of my research.
‘Parish’ is the fruit of many years’ study and thanks are particularly due to my doctoral supervisors, Luke Bretherton, Ben Quash and Sam Wells, for their wisdom, warmth and encouragement. Along the way, I have benefited greatly from the insight of numerous others, among them Andrew Davison, Jeremy Morris, Malcolm Guite, Paula Gooder, Jenny Taylor, David Perry, Johnny Sertin and Mark Brend. At each stage I have been affirmed in my conviction that there is a theological and cultural case for the English parish that has yet to be made. On completing the book, however, I am only too aware of all that is left unsaid, and how many questions my own position raises. Further work is required, most urgently into the parish’s future form: this book looks forward to that developing conversation.
I’m grateful to Christine Smith and David Shervington at SCM Press and to Stuart Brett for his valued assistance in the final stages. Sincere thanks, finally, to my wife, Rebecca, and to our children, Grace, Jonah and Talitha, who make every place a home.



Part one: Christ in Our Place: The Anglican Parish in Theoretical Perspective



Introduction
At the dimming of Easter Day, a stranger draws alongside two companions, dragging their feet down the Emmaus Road. Followers of Christ, they seem entirely unaware that they are now walking next to their Lord. The outsider asks to hear the news from Jerusalem, so they respond: ‘are you the only stranger who doesn’t know the things that have happened here?’ ‘What things?’ he persists – and the story unrolls.
Amid this familiar mystery from Luke’s Gospel is hidden a radical vision for the local church. The risen Christ, it suggests, is not only found in the living word and broken bread, but also grounded in a definite kind of local encounter. The Greek term Luke uses here for ‘stranger’ – paroikeis – appears in several forms in the New Testament and from this stem grows our English word ‘parish’. An alternative rendering of the conversation might then be, ‘Are you a parishioner that you don’t know what has happened here?’ In Graeco-Roman society, paroikia described the community of people either living physically beyond the city boundaries (literally ‘those beside the house’) or as non-citizens within the walls. They were those who lived nearby, but didn’t belong. That the early Church – much as it did with ecclesia – adopted this civil term for their organization abounds with contemporary significance. The Church was the fellowship of strangers, the community of non-belongers, who had found their place in Christ. 1
This book is a description of that place as it took root in this country. The parish system was not the first or only form of ecclesiastical network in Britain, but, once established, it became the pre-eminent model of communal ‘belonging’ for close on a thousand years: ‘the basic territorial unit in the organization of this country’, as one historian has labelled it. 2 Nevertheless, it remains an enigmatic theme, especially in an era when ‘parochial’ is commonly used as a byword for blinkered insularity. With the parish system strained to breaking point and its relevance to society increasingly questioned, there is a pressing need to rediscover the principles that shaped it – not least because of an ever-growing political and environmental momentum to find resilient and fertile kinds of common life. The parish has always reinvented itself: no place could be so influential, for so long, without doing so. And while by no means the only description of English locality – parish has always vied and overlapped with towns, wards, ‘vills’ and various other forms – it has been an unrivalled building block of neighbourhood, uniquely combining religious meaning with local identity. As Oliver Rackham puts it in his History of the Countryside , parish is singular in being ‘the smallest unit of spiritual and secular geography’.
This blend has always intrigued me. Raised in a rectory, I have instinctively viewed places in this way – as both spiritual and secular – and it has long been my vocation to live as though they were. For places are, I suggest, imagined first and then enacted: how we behave in a particular locale depends largely on what kind of place we believe it to be. Undergirding this book is faith in a spiritual tradition that exists as one among many currently practised in this country, each exerting a distinctive influence upon the social landscape. However, in both historical and geographical terms, the Church of England is not just another stakeholder, even as it rightly adjusts to a new and humbler role in national life. Any accurate realignment of its contemporary ‘place’ is not served by ignorance about the Church’s remarkable formative influence, over many centuries.
As the source for much of that influence, the parish’s standing is in a sense plain – one author going so far as to call it ‘the bedrock of European civilization as a whole’. 3 But while the English, specifically Anglican, parish (varying types of parochial organization having spanned Christendom) is uniquely embedded in national culture, by virtue both of its antiquity and close allegiance with secular governance, its social and theological significance has hitherto been given remarkably scant consideration. 4 This is partly because, while ecclesiastical history has long formed a pillar of academic training for ordained ministry, ecclesiastical geography has not – even though parish ministry is, by definition, geographical. Unsurprising, then, that contemporary church debate about locality tends to be geographically denuded: a shortcoming, which in turn ‘thins out’ a theological appreciation of parochial ministry. 5 If geography is seen as theologically neutral, the parish system clearly risks being similarly undervalued. At a time when its viability is increasingly questioned within the Church of England and with plans progressing for the Church in Wales’ dismantling of parochial (though not local) ministry, there is considerable and urgent need for redress.
This book has, therefore, a particular and pressing purpose, which is to explain the pastoral or theological geography of the Anglican parish – in effect, to begin answering the question what kind of place is it? In doing so, one is struck immediately by the diversity of the subject: each parish being as unique as its grid reference. Some are almost as large as dioceses, covering huge tracts of moorland; some have boundaries as arbitrary and baffling as in an imperial land grab; others are self-contained and perfectly circle their communities. This has always been the case – and, clearly, the parish ‘took’ in some places more than in others, because of the natural terrain, or the vitality of other communal forms.
Nevertheless, there is much common ground – indeed, this phrase recurs as a way of describing the effect of the parish system in general, even