The Invisible Pews

Friday 19th April 2024

Church policy, for millennia, has been to ignore any sign that church members do not believe what is taught in the historic creeds. Heretical views, officially, do not exist!

Recently, I had the privilege to read a book by the Revd Leslie Newton – Revive us Again -which outlines his view of how the Methodist Church can promote a revival of Christianity in the multicultural, individualistic, and often atheistic, western world of the twenty-first century.

Leslie is a minister of the Methodist Church in East Yorkshire. He is co-Chair of the Methodist Church’s New Places for New People Guiding Team, and a Trustee of Fresh Expressions Ltd. He is also a strong advocate for experimentation and innovation in church structure, liturgy, and practice.

While Leslie’s general approach is traditional in character, some of his suggestions are very radical.

Leslie says that “We are called to be changemakers in the culture.” We need to discover diversity, with all churches trying new things and discussing new ideas. We need less top-down leadership and have more decentralisation. We need to mobilise local, lay church leaders to take charge of church services. We are in the “kingdom” business (here and now), not in “church” business, and we should be more ecumenical in practice.

Reading Leslie Newton’s book reminded me of Adrian Alker’s 2016 book: Is a Radical Church Possible? (It is also about 150 pages in length). Many may remember that Adrian’s book was later discussed by PCN members. The theme was, also, about reviving the Christian Church.

Looking again at my copy of Is a Radical Church Possible? I was impressed by how many notes in biro I had made on almost every page. This indicated to me how efficiently Adrian had developed his ideas and, to us, the benefit of his long experience as a member of the Anglican clergy.

Like Leslie, Adrian identified a view of being awe in the wonder of God, and of having a sense of things being sacred, as key Christian motivators.

An emphasis in both books includes the need to promote sincere, honest, and questioning approaches to personal religious beliefs.

Christians find great benefit in reading the works of modern commentators, and the above books include many references to the views of other experts, but in neither book is there much emphasis on seriously seeking and analysing the opinions of ordinary church members, or of people who don’t feel inclined to attend church. (Leslie does stress the importance of the now forgotten, Methodist, lay, class leaders.)

This is a big surprise when you realise that any experienced business consultant will point out that shop-floor workers and customers are often only too aware what is wrong with existing company practices and products; workers and customers just need to be asked for their opinions.

Adrian Alker hints at this reality at the end of Part One of his book. He writes: “In many a congregation, in my experience, there is a great mixture of people holding various aspects of belief and non-belief.”

Why have churches not followed general business practices and obtained regular feedback from their members? Why have they not analysed feedback, acted upon it, and improved member satisfaction, and church attendance?

We all know the answers.

Church policy, for millennia, has been to ignore any sign that church members do not believe what is taught in the historic creeds. Heretical views, officially, do not exist! This is still the attitude of many Church authorities: that doubters and the pews they sit on also do not exist! Poetically speaking, these pews (or chairs) can be classified as the “invisible pews”.

In the twenty-first century, the former invisible pews need now to become highly visible and also be the ones to which ideas are directed by the preacher (not as “truths” that doubters ignore at their peril, but as ideas for them to reflect upon).

The people sat in these former invisible pews now need to be identified and welcomed. They need to be encouraged to share their ideas, their thoughts, and their difficulties with doctrine or practice. And their feedback needs wide, open discussion by the Church– as something natural and to be expected in any lively, movement-type church.

In parallel, I believe that that there also needs to be much more stress on Christianity as a way of life and on the eternal struggle between good and evil, care and selfishness, self-satisfaction and despair These value-driven issues provide principal reasons for coming to church: to learn about living here and now in an improving community. (This is what all people are deeply concerned about and why many church members keep coming to church, despite many personal reservations.) God, as we are frequently reminded, is totally beyond human experience and understanding!

In these ways, people who sit on the former “invisible pews” will come back to church again and again, instead of stopping coming. They might even bring their friends.

Then, we really will have a Christian revival.

Image: Storye book, CC BY-SA 4.0 <;, via Wikimedia Commons