Ad Clerum Issued on the 10th June 2020
UPDATE FROM CHURCH HOUSE WESTMINSTER
Following this morning’s Government update, we have been advised that places of worship may now reopen from 13 June, as opposed to 15 June which was the previous advice.
The Church of England has a short advisory note which we hope will be useful in addressing any local confusion. https://bit.ly/2B2Wtgo
- You must not feel under any obligation that puts at risk your own safety, that of your family, household, Church officers, congregation or wider society.
- If it has never been your practice to open the church building other than for Sunday or weekday services, that is an arrangement that you do not have to explain or defend.
- Other churches in your locality might choose to open; that does not imply that you are failing in your responsibility or that they have made a better decision.
- Government regulation will now permit you to open your church building for individual prayer.
- This is what is permitted: “A person or household entering the venue to pray on their own and not part of a group, led prayer or communal act.” (Robert Jenrick announcement)
- Clear signage will be needed, indicating what safety and hygiene regulations are in place.
- The use of hand sanitiser must be available and used on entering and leaving the church building.
- It might be helpful to have a one-way system for entering and leaving church.
- It would be helpful to have clear demarcation of social distancing: placing of many fewer chairs or marking of pews, will be important in making this happen safely.
- Within the church building social distancing of 2 meters must be observed between individuals and observed by a household group from any other household group or individual.
- It might be helpful to increase the amount of standing space available especially around a focus of prayer where candles can be lit.
- No books should be available for communal use. Holy water stoups and fonts must remain empty.
- Food banks and other community service activities should not coincide with times for private prayer.
- It is not a requirement that you should monitor the space and record details of people who enter church for individual prayer.
- It must be as safe to enter church to pray, as it is to enter a shop to make a purchase.
- As a minister of religion you may not conduct any form of liturgical prayer that engages with individuals while they are in the church building. This still includes weddings, baptisms, the daily Office and the Eucharist. These are Government regulations and the Church of England’s guidance is consistent with them.
- The House of Bishops has now revised its guidance on funerals in church, permitted from 15 June, conducted strictly within Government regulations(guidance attached).
- You are, however, permitted, as an ordained minister, to worship liturgically in church alone. During the course of these restrictions, you have already been given exceptional dispensation as a priest, licensed or with PTO in this diocese to celebrate the Eucharist without a congregation.
- The Church of England has issued guidance on how to prepare the church building to be opened again for individual prayer after a prolonged period of closure (see below and attached details).
- Ministers of religion may continue to enter a church building to film or record a service for broadcast.
- Church buildings may be accessed for essential voluntary activities for the local community (e.g. homeless, children’s services, etc).
- Church buildings should remain closed to tourists.
The Church of England website provides documents that give guidance on how to prepare the church building to be opened again and accessed for individual prayer.
These documents seek to provide guidance that covers every context. It is important for you to assess which elements of this guidance are appropriate and should be applied to your particular context.
The Press Release:-
https://www.churchofengland.org/more/media-centre/news/bishops-revise-and-produce-further-guidance
The guidance:
https://www.churchofengland.org/more/media-centre/coronavirus-covid-19-guidance-churches
Documents of particular relevance include:
Access to church buildings during lockdown: advice for incumbents, churchwardens and PCC:-
https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2020-05///Access%20during%20lockdown%20v1.pdf
Keeping churches clean:-
Further resources on signage and hygiene supplies will soon be available on the Diocese of Chichester website.
We know from the New Testament and from other documents from the sub-apostolic age, that Christians worship in the early centuries followed a variety of patterns from which emerged a growing consensus on the nature of ministry and liturgy.
A very accessible YouTube presentation on this by Dr Peter Anthony[1] explores what the house church might have been. What emerges is a very early picture of gatherings in homes that were able to provide for quite large gatherings (30 – 40 people) where the things we still see in church buildings (font and altar) could be found.
We often fall into the trap of starting our understanding of church buildings with the expansion of towns and cities in the 19th century or, if we want to be historical, we go back to the reformation.
But the reformation was itself a movement of renewal that was energised by what today we would think of as resourcement – a return to our origins in Scripture.
Contemporary Biblical scholarship (Professor James Dunn is one example that Dr Anthony names) indicates that we have to be very careful indeed with labels that suggest Christianity and Judaism are somehow opposites.
The relationship between temple, home, church, and synagogue is complex as it emerges in the early centuries. Exploration of it should make us humble in our relations with our Jewish neighbours.
But for those who understand the value of history in being confident about our identity today, the late 16th century work of Richard Hooker provides an important point of reference for the Church of England.
Hooker writes powerfully about the importance of church buildings for our newly reformed Church:
Churches receive as everything else their chief perfection from the end whereunto they serve. Which end being the public worship of God, they are in this consideration houses of greater dignity than any provided for meaner purposes.” (Hooker, 5.26)
Hooker goes on to note that God can be worshipped in any place, and he cites examples from scripture that show how unlovely some such places are: “Job on the dunghill…Jeremy in the mire, Jonas in the whale” etc.
Hooker concludes that though these examples indicate that God can be worshiped in any place, nonetheless “the very majesty and holiness of the place, where God is worshipped, hath in regard of us great virtue, force, and efficacy, for that it serveth as a sensible help to stir up devotion.”
This is an appeal to the senses. It is a reminder that we come to the worship of God with more than just our mind and will. It is also the heart, the imagination, and the emotions that engage our capacity to apprehend the glory of God and to respond in penitence, in adoration, and in delight.
So to sum up how we set about the Christian duty and privilege of worship, Hooker maintains that “we think not any place so good the church [building], neither any exhortation so fit as that of David, “O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.” (Ps 96.9)
As Christians charged in the 21st Century with proclaiming afresh the mystery of faith, we, like Hooker, are aware that God is worshipped in many different contexts. The impact of social media and communication means that worship can be streamed into our homes in ways that connect us remotely with others.
But at the heart of our worship is the inconvenient and scandalous reality of specificity. God is caught on the nails of time and space in the work of redemption. In the same way, the work of the Eucharist demands that the weighted-ness of our physical presence is nailed in the experience of Holy Communion which is personal, and collective in its demand that we are together in a specific place bread and wine are offered.
This reality, in the Church of England’s tradition, is given a more contemporary expression by, Peter Hammond, landmark book, Liturgy and Architecture, published in 1960. This, in turn, was influential in shaping the vision of Richard Giles’s work, Re-Pitching the Tent.
Hammond notes that “Reduced to its bare essentials, [a church] is a building to house a congregation gathered around an altar.” It is the domus ecclesiae the house of the Church – a phrase Giles warms to, and one that reminds us of the inter-dependent nature of our life in a diocese as a household of faith.
Hammond also warns against the merely aesthetic attraction of churches as “sacred space”. We can be taken in by large numbers who pass through our cathedrals and churches at Christmas because they are drawn by atmosphere and undoubtedly a hunger to be more serious that just tinsel, noise and presents.
The journalist Simon Jenkins adopts this aesthetic approach to churches and cathedrals and will write persuasively about a church building as what Hammond calls “a pavilion of religious art.”
But this approach sells us short. It fails to note that the final gift given to the baptised and confirmed Christian is a delight in “the fear of the Lord”. This is altogether the more serious aspect of Christian faith and worship.
The fuzzy glow of Christmas cheer simply does not measure up to the determined stand for Jesus Christ that animated the Auschwitz martyr Edith Stein (St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), or St Oscar Romero, the El Salvadorean archbishop who spoke out fearlessly against institutional crime, violence and discrimination by the State.
Today, we have to assert that we long to gather in our places of worship because in the mystery of Eucharistic worship we take a stand with Jesus Christ against the world’s evils and the institutionalisation of its wrongs in so many aspects of global society.
One encouraging thing last week was a Zoom meeting in which a local teenager asked me what she could do to protest that “lives matter”. Here was a calm, intelligent challenge to any ruling elite that has grabbed power and is determined to keep it.
She reminded me of Stefan Perez, a 16-year old black Mexican, Puerto Rican and Nicaraguan student. He is acknowledged to be the person who recently brought to an end a potential riot in Detroit.
He had every right to be angry about the death of George Floyd. He’s had experience of police harassment as a black teenager. But he also has a bigger vision for the future, and peaceful protest within the law is part of that vision.
His intervention led to making a human chain that connected differences of age, race, gender and sexual orientation. “It was just beautiful,” Perez said. By being connected, people also became willing to obey the curfew and to go home.
It is a sign of hope that this pandemic might be fostering a global sensitivity which drives us to confront areas of institutional and social failure. The slogan, “Black lives matter” compels us to protest peacefully that all lives matter.
It is urgent that non-black people commit to this, because institutional discrimination corrodes the moral life of its perpetrators as surely as it destroys its victims. The trauma of racism is not simply a problem in the United States: it is our problem too. Its effects are global, like a pandemic.
The conviction that “lives matter” should prompt us to protest at the unprecedented loss to the coronavirus of lives in our black and Asian communities and in our care homes. Every unnecessary death should provoke in us a sense that something has gone seriously wrong. As a son observed at the death of Winston, his 89-year old father, from Covid-19: “He’s not a statistic; he’s my best friend.”
The skyline of our towns and countryside is marked by churches that protest “lives matter”. So I find it encouraging to know that our church buildings can soon open again.
We need these buildings. They exist to foster the protest of prayer and hope. They can enfold grief and anger. They can also deepen and sustain the joyful conviction that all lives matter because each life is given by God. And no such gift is unloved or unimportant to God.
This Ad clerum comes to you as the Church is preparing to give thanks for the Institution of the Eucharist – the feast of Corpus Christi. Hammond’s inspirational work on the church building reminds us of the potency of sign and drama, as recent protests have shown us.
Our church buildings are emblems of that potency. As Hammond puts it, “In the words of St Thomas Aquinas, domus ecclesiam significat – the church building is itself an image of the mystical body of Christ.”
Yea, beneath these signs are hidden,
glorious things to sight forbidden,
Look not on the outward sign.
Wine is poured and bread is broken,
but in either sacred token
Christ is here by power divine.
May our return to prayer and, eventually, to worship in our church buildings renew us in our protest of praise for the glory of God and the dignity of all God’s children.
+Martin