On 2 September 1939, in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom Parliament, as Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s government dithered about whether to declare war on Nazi Germany following its invasion of Poland, Arthur Greenwood rose to speak on behalf of the Labour Party. At that moment Leo Amery, a Conservative mp, called out, ‘Speak for England!’, a cry that was echoed by many voices in the House. In Alison Milbank’s The Once and Future Parish (scm Press, 2023) we have, I believe, one who speaks up for England, for the Church of England, and for its often despised parishes and their hard-pressed parish clergy. Milbank’s concerns will be applauded and supported by many at this critical time in the fortunes of the Church of England, where centralisation, both nationally and in some dioceses, has become the order of the day and where many parishes, especially in small towns and rural areas have been largely stripped of their clergy in order to merge the parishes, unite the Parochial Church Councils into one, and to gather the clergy into remote ‘hubs’ and ‘resource churches’, from whence they will supposedly sally forth to re-evangelise the land.

Professor Alison Milbank is based at the University of Nottingham, UK, and is also Canon Theologian of Southwell Minster, the cathedral and mother-church of the Church of England Diocese of Southwell. She is engaged in Christian adult education and works particularly in the field of Christianity and the arts and literature. The arguments of her book are measured and reasoned and she lets the evidence on the ground speak for itself. Her pastoral instincts are sound and profound. Milbank is one of the founders and driving forces of the Save the Parish campaign which works to defend the parish system of the Church of England against recent and current so-called ‘reforms’ which serve to undermine the traditional pattern (https://www.savetheparish.com). With many disturbing local examples, accompanied by eye-watering financial statistics of misspent and misapplied central funding, she exposes a concerted assault on the integrity of the English parish and its local ministry and mission – one that is taking place under our noses, though veiled by disingenuous rhetoric to the contrary.

Milbank’s main targets are: the invidious, disparaging and patronising language, that goes unchallenged in public church discourse, of ‘inherited church’ and ‘traditional church’, as opposed to the preferred language of ‘fresh expressions’ and ‘new’ forms of ‘church’; the deliberate draining of clergy from rural parishes and the consequent threat of closure for some churches; the drive to insert new Christian communities and plants in places where they are neither needed nor wanted (which makes these initiatives schismatical actions) and which happens – unbelievably – with episcopal approval; and the creation of megaparishes and of distant, impersonal and expensive ‘resource churches’. A ‘resource church’ benefits from national funding; its name means both that the church’s resources of clergy, lay ministers and money are gathered together there, and that they are meant to ‘resource’ the work in (ironically) the very parishes which might have benefitted from these resources. All of these steps serve to increase the pastoral distance between the faithful in their local setting and the appointed means of grace (principally the ministry of the Word, the sacraments and pastoral care and oversight) that are intended in the divine economy to sustain us on the way of Christian discipleship. Combine the undermining of local priestly presence with the increasing central control and consequent bureaucratization of the Church of England, both nationally and in some dioceses, with consequent swollen diocesan staffs; spurious notions of ‘leadership’; and the ultra vires grab for executive authority by very senior persons and you have a frankly desperate situation and a recipe for unintentionally accelerated decline.

Milbank refers somewhat cryptically and mysteriously to ‘the hierarchy’ of the Church of England; this is now the language we need to use, though it really belongs in the Roman Catholic Church where it is common parlance. I think the term ‘oligarchy’ might be more apposite – rule by a small group of privileged or elite persons. In terms of this oligarchy or ‘hierarchy’, she is not afraid to name ‘the archbishops’ (that is, of Canterbury and York) and ‘the Archbishops’ Council’. The latter body, which is chaired by the two archbishops, is meant to advise them and to coordinate funding and policy. In the latter capacity, the Council has the power to direct the expenditure of large sums of money that are provided by the Church Commissioners. In that capacity, it has chosen not to provide a desperately-needed boost to parish ministry with this money, but rather to pour it into untried, experimental and largely unaccountable projects that override local needs, loyalties and responsibilities. I remember being present at the first meetings of the Archbishops’ Council, twenty-five years’ ago, when, literally at every meeting, Council Members would ask such questions as: ‘Why are we here? What is this Council for? What are we supposed to do?’ The Archbishops’ Council seems to have answered those questions now.

Alison Milbank also analyses the import of the plethora of reports that have emanated on behalf of the oligarchy which, she says, ‘offer a queasy mixture of missiology and management-speak in every report’ (p. xix), in effect promoting a very different kind of church to the one that Church of England people have known. These reports tend to deploy repeatedly such nebulous terms as ‘vision’, ‘strategy’ and ‘mission’ without much definition. Sometimes these weasel words are a smokescreen for a radical demolition of the church’s historic pattern of dispersed or distributed authority and for the shift of the centre of gravity to the centre (i.e. ‘the top’). It is surely significant that historic Anglican ecclesiology and polity does not recognise a ‘centre’ for any Anglican church, least of all the Church of England. That church’s centre is everywhere (or should be) and its circumference nowhere; it is a church without walls because it offers its ministry to the inhabitants of the whole parish. Such reports are patently deficient in theological grounding and consequently lack ecclesial authority as a basis for legislative action and change. They tend to be replete with uncritically-adopted, superficially-deployed and long-outdated management jargon. What credentials of theological education, parish experience and pastoral aptitudes do the authors of these reports bring to their responsibilities and tasks, we may wonder.

While the parish as an institution is affirmed in Milbank’s book as our most ancient social structure and one that still has enormous flexibility and potential as a vehicle for reaching out into the local community, she rightly points to the need for ordinands to be specifically trained for parochial ministry. In fact she calls for us to raise the standard of ordination training across the board and publicly to value the work of the parish priest so that suitable individuals can hear the call of the Holy Spirit to this vocation. As a Senior Inspector (now they are called Reviewers) of the Church of England’s theological colleges (seminaries) and regional ordination courses for twenty years, I can wholeheartedly second that imperative. It may be no accident that the recent decline in the numbers coming forward for ordination selection and training happens to coincide with the public devaluing by certain voices of the work of the resident parish priest who is subject to many pressures and stresses in any case, quit apart from having their work devalued by some. The public discourse of any church – in the mouths of archbishops, bishops and synods – should wholeheartedly affirm the work of the dedicated parish priest.

In this book, Milbank is building on several earlier studies, including the book that she jointly authored with Andrew Davison, For the Parish: A Critique of Fresh Expressions (scm Press, 2023), John Inge’s A Christian Theology of Place (Ashgate, 2003) and Andrew Rumsey’s Parish: An Anglican Theology of Place (scm Press, 2017) and the various works of David Brown on related themes. All of these writings, and others, explicitly or implicitly affirm the parish and its ministry as the site of the mission of God in our midst. As an empirical entity in space and time, the parish church with its weekly or daily worship and sacramental ministry, its associated chapels and churchyards, its schools and parish organisations, its outreach of care and service in the community, is a prime vehicle of the mission of the church, as an agent of the missio dei, helping to give it ‘a local habitation and a name’, in other words a tangible identity. The fact of the parish helps to make ‘the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’ findable by those in pastoral need or seeking and searching for spiritual answers. The parochial dimension of the mission and ministry of a territorial church is its centre of gravity. But it needs to be supplemented by specialised or ‘sector’ ministries in the form of chaplaincies in schools and universities, hospitals and hospices, the police and the armed forces, as well as opportunities in leisure and entertainment communities. The clergy and lay ministers in such worthy institutions are enabled to have a more targeted, less generic, and more immediate, less long-term, engagement and focus. Our cathedrals also have a strategic role to play and the signs are that they are more than holding their own in their more specialised form of ministry and mission.

But it is still generally the parish that constitutes the local hub and heart of energy, motivation and dedicated service in English society and, if adequately resourced, always will be. Surveys show that a significant proportion of church-goers are also active in many other ways in their communities. The local is clearly where loyalties mainly lie. In spite of social networking and social media, everyone needs to belong and to know where home is. That is an attribute of human nature. The key factor is that trust, the basis of all effective ministry and its sine qua non, cannot be built at long-range, but requires close relational and personal engagement over time.

The work of a parish priest, even in more traditional rural areas, is more challenging than in the recent past. In a big city it is uphill work, in the face of social, cultural and economic trends, and demands exceptional qualities of dedication, skill and grit. Having said that, however, the faithful parish priest, wherever he or she may be placed, abiding steadfastly through the ups and downs of ministry in a parish or manageable cluster of parishes over time, building personal trust and enduring relationships, will often see the fruits of their labours. Their reward will be to see parishioners of all ages coming forward – or, more likely, responding to a personal invitation – to undergo preparation for baptism, confirmation and full participation in the eucharistic life of the Body of Christ, in other words the journey of Christian Initiation. Vocations to ordained and lay ministry will also be discerned and elicited, provided time is allowed for the Holy Spirit to work. The work of God in human lives needs time and place.

The parochial Church of England – and not only the Church of England, of course – calls and invites participation in the means of grace (Word and sacrament), with the steadfast intention of turning (that is, converting) seekers into eucharistically-formed missionary disciples through the power and work of the Holy Spirit. The way to achieve this missiological goal is to push everything towards the local – resources of personnel and money, affirmation and encouragement, guidance and support and salutary leadership, properly understood. The ecclesiology of the local trades in trust, loyalty, energy, support, relationship, precedent and continuity. Tragically, the opposite of a local ecclesiological strategy is now prevalent. Those who promote the centralising agenda at the expense of parish integrity should heed the admonition of Proverbs 22.28: ‘Do not remove the ancient landmark that your ancestors set up.’ But Alison Milbank concludes her tract for the times with some stirring examples of currently successful parish-based outreach and growth, and she puts forward some constructive recommendations that will help to secure a viable, even thriving, future for our parishes.