My first appointment after my ordination in 1966 was to a wealthy Nottingham parish, wealthy that is, except for an enclave that was hurriedly created to house people making bombs and bullets for the war that followed the War To End All Wars. The main parish had just built a beautiful new church to serve the exciting inclusive liturgy given us by Pope John’s Vatican Council. The poor of the parish had to trudge a good mile or more: there were no buses on their route to the splendid new church. I was blessed in that regard: I had a bicycle.
The curate was commissioned to look after the poor end. Due to illness, I lasted only two months in that bit of a parish. But I kept in touch. I was astonished by the determination to have their own church, their own parish, their own priest. Fifty-six years later I still remember the two women who led the campaign: Sadie Goode and Mary Sullivan. They organized raffles, jumble sales, bazaars, knitting circles and dances. They got their church, small in size, beautiful beyond words, and eventually became a parish, with their own priest. I loved those people, their church, and, above all, their faith. The FOR SALE sign is now on the front door. It breaks your heart.
The reasons for closing churches and reducing small communities to be no more than extensions of larger neighbouring churches are twofold: a shortage of priests and financial pressures. These are essentially manageable issues. What is not understood is that closing a church, obliging a community to worship elsewhere, is essentially a theological matter. It is to work against the Holy Spirit.
A parish is not a geographical entity; nor is it a human construction. It is a work of the Holy Spirit. The very earliest Christian communities were house churches. How many people can you squeeze into your front room? That is, of course, if you have a front room. Our Christian story began small, in house churches and in hired rooms.
When St Paul wrote his letter to Christians in Rome, he was writing to little house churches in that city, probably about five of them:
Greet Prisca and Aquila (a wife and husband couple) …,
and also the church in their house.
Romans 16:3-3-4
Sending his greetings to these little communities in Rome, he adds a final note:
All the churches of Christ greet you.
Romans 16:16
Women often opened their homes to a little bundle of Christians. In the letter to the faithful brothers and sisters in Colossae we read,
Give my greetings to the brothers and sisters in Laodicea,
and to Nympha and the church in her house.
Colossians 4:15
What is surprising and astonishing is that these little house churches, the church that fits into your front room, is the fulness of the Church. Paul writes,
To the churches of Galatia.
Galatians 1:2
Imagine St Paul writing to your little parish. Do you think he would be proposing closure? Here is a quotation from his first letter to survive, the very earliest document that we find in our New Testament:
We give thanks to God always for all of you, constantly mentioning you in our prayers, remembering before our God and Father your work of faith, your labour of love, and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. For we know, brothers and sisters, loved by God, that he has chosen you, because our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction.
First Thessalonians 1: 2-5
Pau’s little letter is full of kindly advice, of loving concern, of praise, of gentle encouragement:
Encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.
First Thessalonians 5:11
And build one another up! Not close down the work of the Holy Spirit.
Rejoice always!
Pray without ceasing!
Give thanks in every circumstance,
for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
Do not quench the Spirit.
First Thessalonians 5:16-19
That church is, of course, still there, in northern Greece. Its existence is a lesson to everyone who know that mighty oaks grow from little acorns.
A Problem
The first problem that leads to closing parishes and selling off churches is the shortage of priests. When I walked through the gates of Maynooth in September 1959 to begin seven years of preparation for priesthood, there were over 700 like-minded young men there. It was the largest seminary in the world. Last year there were 25 students there preparing for priesthood. That may be taken as an indication of our present concerns in these islands. That is the chief reason why we are closing parishes everywhere in this green and pleasant land – and everywhere else in Europe and America.
We need to move beyond platitudes and listen to our story, the story of a pile of little churches on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea that became the Church. Leaving to one side the priests who served in the Temple of Jerusalem, there is but one priest in our New Testament and that is Jesus of Nazareth. The nature of his priesthood is explained in the long homily we find in the Letter to Hebrew Christians, probably the most beautiful book of all the little books that make up our New Testament. It is certainly the most theologically rich.
Here’s a thought. St Gregory the Great, (brother of St Basil the Great) was bishop of Nyssa in Cappadocia (eastern Turkey these days) from 372-394 A.D. In his famous five homilies on the LORD’S PRAYER, he began from the conviction that “every Christian is a priest, vested in graces of the virtue that qualifies one to name God as Father in full assurance”. There are still Cappadocian Christians existing today. It was our Cappadocian fathers and mothers in faith who gave us our Gloria in excelsis Deo (and they did not give it to us in Latin). When you sing it (in English or in Latin), try to remember that it came from 2nd century Christians in the mountains of eastern Turkey. I mention this so that we might grasp the fact that not everything is down to numbers, as St Paul and Pope Francis constantly remind us. Read my quotation above from 1 Thessalonians 1:2-5. It is a description of, perhaps, ten or twenty people, a people transformed by the Holy Spirit into the glory Paul loved to bits. Read Paul’s words as a description of a small group of saintly people in our midst who are trying to keep their doors open to the world around them. And give thanks to God for them! Always, for all of you!
What I want to say is that there is much to debate. There is the priesthood of Jesus Christ, there is the priesthood of the Church, there is, as Gregory taught us, the priesthood of individuals wh0 are thus privileged to pray the LORD’S PRAYER. And there are priests ordained for particular ministries.
Our Anglican brothers and sisters spent a hundred years examining all the issues relevant to the debate on whether women may be ordained to serve those particular ministries, sometimes tearing each other apart in searching for the truth. They examined every sentence relevant to the matter and they came to the conclusion that women could and should be ordained.
I was in Canterbury Cathedral when 22 women were ordained in 1994, in the company of the Catholic theologian, the late Edward Schillebeeckx O.P. One of his doctoral students, a C-of-E deacon in a church in Canterbury, was being ordained priest that day. She invited me to her ordination. I can report that the roof did not fall in or even catch fire.
I want to stress that we must not accept glib statements like one I hear day-in-day-out: Jesus did not ordain women. The truth is Jesus did not ordain anyone. Priesthood emerged under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, a gradual recognition that the priesthood of Jesus embraced the whole Church. In time individuals were ordained to sustain particular sacramental ministries essential to sustain the priestly nature of the community of Jesus.
We must not allow the debate to settle for the ordination of women to the deaconate. The word “deacon” and “deaconing” occur 97 times in the New Testament, in almost every writing that make up that little library of books. Here it is one of many occurrences:
I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae that you may welcome her in a way worthy of the saints …
Paul’s Letter to Roman Christians 16:1
Of course, the Greek words “deaconing” and “deacon” in everyday conversation were used meaning “serving” and “servant”. But they began to indicate particular services and servants in the vocabulary of our earliest mothers and fathers in faith. It was probably Phoebe who brought Paul’s letter to tiny house churches of Christians in Rome. And why is Lydia not a named among the saints?
The Cost of Witnessing
We cannot allow money to determine our future. Of course, keeping open churches with very few “members” is expensive. But we must not rob cities, towns, and villages, of their churches, turning them into hamlets, the English word specially coined to describe an unfortunate little place that had no church. Indeed, a town couldn’t be a city unless it had a cathedral.
We must not rob our landscape of signs of God, signs of our Lord Jesus, signs of the Holy Spirit incarnate in a building we call a church. Of course, to the naked eye, it is only bricks and mortar. But to the people, not only to Catholic or Protestant people of rich varieties, but to everyone, these buildings are witnesses. They are acts of proclamation, pointing to the skies.
We must realise that a synagogue, a church, a mosque, even if very few people darkened their doors, are sacramental signs of God’s presence in our midst. They declare that life has meaning beyond the material. It is an appalling denial of God, indeed, a sin, to “desacramentalise” a church and have it re-consecrated as a Bingo Hall. The smallest little church points to God and proclaims that all will be well, all manner of thing will be well.
[Rev] Dr Joseph O’Hanlon.
[Given in response to our ACTA Zoom meeting on Wednesday, 26 October, 2022.]