Why Are We Here?

This year’s Hucklow Summer School asked the right question. Why are we here - which I take to mean, why are Unitarian & Free Christian churches here? 

The brutal truth is that we are not ‘here’, or in any other location because we have what people want. If that were the case there would be Unitarian churches in all populated areas of the UK. We are where we are, just about, because wealthy industrialists and landowners of centuries past bequeathed us buildings and investments. These prop up churches that are a long time dying. 

Why aren’t we everywhere? The UK population has never been more in tune with Unitarian & Free Christian beliefs, something that no other denomination can claim. And yet we exist only in those places where rich folk have left us the means. We are here because of our investments and legacies, and yet some people think we are here to take down capitalism. 

So why are we here? Why is any church here? Because life is mysterious and difficult, and churches can and should make it less so. Churches exist because people crave the things that successful churches offer: connection, meaning and purpose. And successful churches do this through four core activities: worship, pastoral care, fellowship and mission. These four activities are utterly indispensable.

There, I’ve said it: successful. The point of a church is to be successful. And this has become a controversial thing to say. 

A successful church is a church that is alive. Because churches are organisms, or, as the Bible puts it, bodies. Understanding the church as an organism is the key to breathing life into it. Healthy organisms grow and are attractive, unhealthy organisms decline and die. So, if we want a church - any church - to be successful, we must understand what a church is, in the same way that we learn the essence of any organism, by asking how it is supposed to function naturally. 

This takes us back to what churches do and how they do it. They offer connection, meaning and purpose through core activities: worship, pastoral care, fellowship and mission. They do other things as well, but these four activities are the vital organs of the body that is the church.  If two or three vital organs are functioning well but one is failing then the patient is going to die. Better that all the church’s vital organs are just about adequate than it excels in one but fails in another. 

Most of our churches are out of balance in this respect. That’s why we are only just here. Most churches are failing with at least one of the four core activities. This explains how it is that we pour energy and resources into projects without getting results. If we perform our core functions adequately then we might have a chance. Fail on any of them and we’re going nowhere - no matter how well we might do other things.

Core activities should be integrated. This is really important. Our worship should pray for the mission, and the mission should express the worship. Pastoral Care and fellowship should inform worship. Fellowship should express the values that are spoken of in worship. Mission should put those beliefs into shoe leather in social action.  Anyone attending on a Sunday should be fully aware of the connection between the worship and the other three core activities. The person attending the fellowship function or helping out with the mission should sense that they are doing what was spoken of on Sunday. 

Do we need to be more inclusive? Absolutely, but that’s not why we are here. Being inclusive is a feature of true religion, but isn’t itself a religion. What is it that we are including people in? Inclusiveness? Inclusivity is part of what we believe, but it isn’t the sum of it. What else is there that we are inviting people to be part of?

The highlight of Hucklow Summer School was when Jo James asked us to raise our hands if we were happy to be described as non-conformists, then to raise them if we were content to be called Puritans. It needed saying. The drive for inclusiveness easily becomes a list of thought crimes and wrong speak to be rooted out. We often seem more interested in purity than inclusion.

Why not be really inclusive? There are seventeen million people in the UK who voted for Brexit. How welcome would they feel in our churches? What about all those wicked Tory voters?  Are we inclusive towards people who haven’t been to University? How many working class people could join and feel that their point of view was respected?

People’s lives are really difficult. They live with emotional and physical pain. They worry about getting old. We have relationships that we can’t fix, sadness that we can’t heal, loneliness that we can’t endure. This is the stuff of life and it’s what religion addresses. In the past week I’ve seen Facebook posts from friends and family about all sorts of life experiences that are as crushing as they are common - and it has struck me how our churches seem so uninterested in the everyday suffering and complexity that religion has always helped people to live with.

We are here to serve our community. We are here to mend broken hearts and sit with people in their pain. We cannot do this through speeches about global capitalism.  To do so seems so remote, and elitist. It seems uncaring. We are surrounded by hurting people whose needs can and should be met by churches being what churches are and doing what churches do. Should politics be part of this? Yes it should. I would object to a church that ministered to the personal and the local without ever connecting this to a bigger picture. But a church that talks politics instead of fulfilling its core function is a church that is driving itself to extinction and failing its community. 

It’s also concerning, even a little sinister, that the politics that replaces faith is always one version of politics - as though the orthodoxies of the anti-capitalist left were a creed that we have all signed up to. Look at any election result or poll. How is it that a denomination whose beliefs chime with well over 80% of the population is pushing a political ideology that appeals to such a minority of potential church members? 

Where is faith in all this? We are faith communities who have given up on faith. Yet faith is why we are here. The faith of those who left us resources. The faith of martyrs who forged our tradition. We are here to nurture faith and to declare that faith matters. We are here to challenge our local community by looking them in the eye and saying that their life could be better if they had faith in it. But who are we to challenge anyone to take faith more seriously? We don’t all need to have the same faith to say that faith matters. But do we even believe it ourselves? 

So why are we here? A mental health support worker, who attends a Unitarian church, once told me how challenging her job was, and that she went to church on Sunday to get 'something to get me through the week’. As a statement of why our churches are here it’s hard to improve upon.