I don’t think I have ever started a post with a quote from the bible before, but here we go;

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb ² down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. 

Revelation 22

This passage is taken from an ancient text written in the mostly forgotten form of ‘apocalyptic literature‘, in which mystical language is used to shine light on the age; to bring new connection between the righteousnes of God and the oppression of the people. In the case of the book of Revelation, we are pointed towards a great reconcilliation, during which all the inequalities and injustices of the past will be wiped away. The bizarre imagary used may well have been better understood back then, and it has been subject to endless (and often problematic) interpretation since, but the utopian dream has been dreamed by all subsequent human generations.

Can we imagine better? What does this look like?

It seems to me that the Hebrew texts are full of these questions, couched not only in terms of individual righteousness, but also in the form of national/international justice and peace. Arguably, our religion has mostly emphasised the individual and convenienty forgotten the national/international.

We live in strange times, when shadows seem to be darkening, obscuring the light that remains. Wars in the middle east are not new, but this one seems all the more vicious and brutal, growing out of injustices that have been sponsored then actively ignored, resulting in hatred and extremist forming like sepsis in a wound. It is a deep irony to recall that the book of Revelation has played a negative part in the unfolding tragedy in Gaza. Christian Zionism, arising in part from a flawed and fantastical modern interpretation of St. John’s apocalypse, has entered the mainstream of US politics. It is a polarising force that makes heroes of one side and dehumanises the other.

Can we imagine better? What might this look like?

Or to return to those searing images from Revelation, where is that great tree whose leaves are for the healing of the nations?

I do not believe that history is unwinding like clockwork towards some kind of great reckoning point, shedding disposable casualties along the way. If the words of this ancient book are anything, if they have any worth, then they have to be encountered carefully, with safety goggle firmly in place. Their ‘meaning’ is no excuse for loss of compassion, loss of love, loss of perspective. The meaning does not outweigh the primary call of that sweep of Christian scripture towards grace, towards an understanding of the profound beauty and dignity of each person and of our relatedness towards each other, and to the created world that carries us.

Can we not image better? What might this look like?

How do we heal what has become sick? It seems as though we are not able to answer this question yet, because first we would need to understand the nature of our sickness.

The symptoms are everywhere. Not just in Gaza, but also right here in the UK. I read this in The Guardian this morning and felt broken;

It starts slowly at first. A food bank crops up inside your local mosque. You notice more sleeping bags on the walk to work. Over time, the signs seem to grow. A donation bin appears in Tesco for families who can’t afford soap or toothpaste. Terms such as “bed poverty” emerge in the news because we now need vocabulary to describe children who are so poor that they have to sleep on the floor.

Then one day you read a statistic that somehow feels both shocking and wearily unsurprising: about 3.8 million people experienced destitution in the UK last year. That’s the equivalent of almost half the population of London being unable to meet their most basic needs to stay warm, dry, clean and fed.

Does this sounds like a healthy nation? What does healing from this kind of sickness look like? What sort of leaves do we have to eat and where is the tree planted?

This blog has concerned itself with this question for a long time, in terms of politics, economics, theology, sociology, ecology and so on. I claim no deep personal insights, just ones borrowed and understood only in part. The answers here – if there are any – are complex and nuanced, and much like the interpretation of the passage above, have to be approached carefully, with safety googles in place and subject to the higher calls of compassion and love.

And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. 

This passage also takes my mind towards the forest. As I put it in a poem once;

You cannot ignore the forest, for like all

Prodigal apes you must eventually return to

Crawl soft ground beneath your mother oak

Burying your nose in those half-familiar musks

That smell like home

From ‘Prodigal apes’, in ‘After the Apocalypse’ 2022.

Or to put it another way;

Today I posted this message on Facebook;

I grew up in and around Churches. Most of my early adult life involved participating in, playing music for and serving the people of church. Then, after becoming increasingly unable to cope with narrow factional forms of faith, I left, albeit for at least a decade to become part of a small community of faith.

At present, I do not attend ‘church’. I can have a long conversation with you about why this is, but many of my friends are in just the same position.

For most of us this is not about the loss of faith – it might be that the way we think about this faith has changed and traditional forms of church no longer felt relevant. That is certainly not intended as a criticism of Church. We still need those who travel in the big old religious ships, even if many of us want to get into small boats.

Through the work of people like Steve Aisthorpe, we now know that we ‘church leavers’ form the majority of the people of faith in the UK. You might even say that these people ARE the church now. The old insitiutions have been and are continuing to be, hollowed out.

If this is true – if the church is now scattered, not gathered – what sort of support might people need? How do we collectivise? How do we teach? How do we debate? What the word ‘Christian’ still mean and do any of these things still matter in a world of global warming and mass extinction?

If this is of interest to you – and if you too are a church leaver, then you might like to add your voice to some research being undertaken by Katie Cross at Aberdeen University. You can join on on this link.

I wanted to reflect on this a little more. I have posted previously about Steve Aisthorpe’s research into this area, no least this book

Or you can listen to a very good podcast with Steve talking about his research here.

We very much need people like Steve and Katie to enquire and research in this area, but more than this, it seems to me that we have to start thinking about ‘church’ in a different way. After all, we have tried for years to revive the old forms of Church. There have always been isolated success stories, but we know that the general pattern has been towards a decline in Church attendence for generations now across the Western world. I think responses to this decline within the insitituion of Church have led to attempts at innovation for a long time. I have been involved in some of them myself even.

The marketing approach

There have been a succession of attempts to get church to be more ‘seeker-friendly’, as if all we needed to do was to sell religion better. We had to have snappy answers to all the questions, sing modern soft-rock worship songs, serve coffee and doughnuts after the services etc etc. Alongisde this, we had an interest in ‘friendship evangelism’ (which always seemed a bit bait-and-switch to me) and dozens of versions of The Alpha course. This might actually work in some individual places, for a while at least, but the overall decline continues.

The embittered remnant

There are many small religious Churches, particularly those on the evangelical/pentecostal wings of the church, who see the decline as evidence of a sinful, permissive society. The fact that so few remain strengthens an idea of an eclusive elite who are waiting for the second coming of Christ, or the Great Tribulation (depending on the paricular interpretation of the Book of Revelation.) These communities see little or no growth, and decline as old stalwarts move on to glory.

The innovators

I feel most connected to those (including many of my friends) who are still trying to put new wine into the old wineskins. They are running messy church, forest church, alternative worship services, meditation groups, book groups, podcasts, art events, poetry circles and on and on. Many of them are also concerned about social justice, so others are running food banks or meal clubs, or addiction cafes, or mother and toddler groups. These people are the heart of much goodness in the middle of our communities. These people may well not be concerned with growing the numbers of Sunday attendees, but without a willing workforce, how can all this fantastic community activism continue? Who will champion the causes of the underclass, if not the Church?

The community makers

I have also travelled these roads. In leaving big Church, we started to do small church. We met around the table, we set up community events in the woods, in village halls. We did music, art and became Greenbelt Festival contributors. Our community lasted ten years, before it was time to stop, and this is the problem. Most groups like ours are ephemeral. They start well, usually led by pioneer types who bore easily, but what starts fresh soon feels stale. Organisation, holding together difference, staying focussed on things that matter- these things are not easy. Most groups like this have a shelf life, and after being in one, it can be hard to commit to starting all over again.

The wandering pilgrim

Those of us who have trod some or all of the roads above, but have found ourselves no longer part of any organised group can often feel alone. We still have friendship networks, podcasts, books. We may even be occassional attenders of religious services, but experience has made us wary of joining, for all sort of good and perhaps some bad reasons. Our theology shifts and finds new shapes because doctrinal conformity seems frankly ridiculous when the boundaries of faith are no longer policed by spiritual power brokers. Perhaps the new light we find is delusional, or perhaps we are in error, but increasingly we start to form the idea that what matters is not what you beleive but rather how we live our lives; what meaning we are inspired by and how we might move towards better.

The problem is that we are still alone. We form no salvation armies, open no food banks, make no converts,

But we are not going back.

I am often uncomfortable with the label ‘Christian’; It chafes, like a set of someone else’s clothes. I rarely apply it to myself, and when others, perhaps in response to reading one of my poems ask me directly, I usually prevaricate, wanting to narrow the descriptive field. The interesting thing though is that I do not say no.

If I am one of those wandering pilgrims I described above, it is because I am still looking for meaning – not ‘answers’ but meaning. I sill hope that light will get in through the cracks and have noticed that, for this particular pilgrim at least, this light is a particular shade of brightness when Jesus is involved with all that is beautiful and all that is broken.

In the wider sense, I find myself giving voice to something that sounds like it might have been uttered by those embittered remnants. We are living in a society that has lost its moral compass. Perhaps it never had one, but without religion, how do we unleash ideas of goodness? How do we commission people towards acts of grace? How do we measure our sectarian politics and find it wanting, thereby imagining something better? I make no claims as to the exclusivity of religious ideas to achieve these things, but we have to acknowledge that it has done so in the past… (whilst also remembering all those not-so-good aspects of the institutional religion that got in bed with empire.)

So, this question remains;

If this is true – if the church is now scattered, not gathered – what sort of support might people need? How do we collectivise? How do we teach? How do we debate? What the word ‘Christian’ still mean and do any of these things still matter in a world of global warming and mass extinction?