4. Shifting Ground – an investigation into possible causes of changing funeral praxis

How people deal with death is changing. Cultural factors

significantly influence an individual’s worldview in

death just as they do in life.1 However, the trauma or

‘terrors’ of facing a death can cause people to re-

evaluate their worldview and incorporate their

experience of death,2 as we shall see.3 Death can give

rise to hope or despair; frequently both. How the Church

responds to the changing culture is critical, and no

more so in the way it offers its ministrations to all

people as they seek to deal with a death. This is no new

phenomenon:

It was the best of times, it was the worst oftimes... it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair... in short, the period was so far like the present...4

Dickens, looking back on the French Revolution, wryly

observed that then, as in his own day, people had been

torn between hope and despair. In the process he was

1 Cf. Walter, Tony, The Revival of Death, Routledge, Abingdon, 1994.2 A term coined by Davies in, for example, Davies, D.J., A Brief History of Death, Blackwell, Oxford, 2005.3 For example the Anglican client in my survey who upon the death ofher husband began to attend church and found a new expression of faith, and the ‘reality TV personality’ Jade Goody, as she faced herown impending death, turned to a broadly Christian worldview of lifebeyond death. Both examples are explored in more detail later.4Dickens, Charles, A Tale of Two Cities, Oxford World’s Classics, OUP, Oxford, 1985 edition, p.1

86

inviting his readers to recognise the universality of

this dichotomy. One could easily observe that such a

dichotomy faces the Church as it too looks to its future

in the third Christian millennium. In the vortex of

worldwide change – technological, economic, moral and,

perhaps most of all, cultural – perhaps the greatest

challenge to date faces the Church. Against this

backdrop of unprecedented change and the rapid pace of

transition within European and particularly British

society since the end of the Second World War, the

Church finds itself under attack from a new enemy: the

nature and speed of cultural change. John Drane

comments: ‘Any institution that is not at the cutting

edge of change is soon going to find itself cast on one

side as irrelevant and unhelpful, no matter how

grandiose its claims to truth may be.’5

Robert Warren, the former Church of England National

Officer for Evangelism concurs, stating ‘There are not

really many options in a period of rapid and profound

change; only death or renewal. We change or we die.’6

The consequences of not changing have been perhaps

rather prophetically articulated by Malcolm Muggeridge,

an outspoken critic of the Church, particularly on the

matter of relevance, thus:

5Drane, J., Faith in a Changing Culture, Marshall Pickering, London, 1994 p.186Warren, R., Transmission, Bible Society, Swindon, Spring 1997

87

In an average English village today Anglican worship has become little more than a dying bourgeois cult. A small cluster of motor-carsmay be seen outside the parish Church when aservice is in progress; the bells still ring joyously across the fields and meadows on Sunday mornings and evenings, but fewer and fewer heed them, and those few predominantly middle-class, female and elderly… It must be desperately disheartening, and the incumbent often gives the impression of being dispirited and forlorn. Whatever zeal he may have had as an ordinand soon gets dissipated in an atmosphere of domestic care and indifference on the part of his flock. Small wonder, then, that in the pulpit he has little to say except to repeat the old traditional clerical banalities, as invariable as jokes in Punch; sometimes, in deference to the 20th century, lacing the sadbrew with references to the United Nations, apartheid and the birth pill. He doubtless feels himself to be redundant. The villagers stoically die without his ministrations; theywould resent any interruption of their evening telly if he ventured to make a call, and have for long accustomed themselves to cope without benefit of clergy with minor misfortunes like pregnancy and delinquency. In the large cities the situation is not dissimilar.7

Muggeridge is by no means a lone voice. Within the

Church as early 1945, William Temple, then Archbishop of

Canterbury, stated:

There can be no doubt that there is a wide and deep gulf between the Church and the people...The present irrelevance of the Church in the life and thought of the

7Article in the Weekend Telegraph, cited in Watson, D., I believe in the Church, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1978  pp. 16-17

88

community in general is apparent from two symptoms which admit of no dispute. They are (1) the widespread decline in church going; and (2) the collapse of Christian moral standards...It is indisputable that only a small percentage of the nation today joins regularly in public worship of any kind.8

Indeed there can be little doubt that what was true of

these reflections reported in 1945 is equally true

today; demographic changes in church membership and

church attendance indicate that this bleak outlook

appears to be in the continuing process of being

realised. The proportion of the population attending

churches with any regularity had declined to just one in

ten people by the turn of the millennium9. In England, of

the churches surveyed by MARC in 1989, whilst

approximately twenty-five per cent were growing, seven

per cent were still declining, but the great majority

were simply static.10 The more recent English Church

Attendance Survey by Christian Research paints an even

bleaker picture. By 1998 only 7.5% of the population

attended weekly Christian worship in church and there

has been a drop of almost 22% in usual Sunday attendance

in the years between 1989 and 1998, ironically the 8Towards the Conversion of England, 1945. ref: http://swdeanerygrowth.weebly.com/the-situation-before-the-church.html - ‘The situation before the church’, p1, paragraphs 4 &5.97.5% attending weekly and a further 2.7% attending once or twice a month according to the ECAS 1998 published in Brierley, P., The Tide isRunning Out, Christian Research, London , 2000, p. 910Cited in Reaching the Unchurched, Grove Booklet on Evangelism No. 19, Grove Books, Cambridge, 1993

89

decade of evangelism11. By 2005 the numbers had dropped

further to 6.3% of the population attending weekly

Sunday worship, although this increases to 6.9% if

midweek attendance is included.12

The 2007 Tearfund survey found a more positive position

with 4.9 million or 10% of UK adults attending weekly

and 7.6 million or 15% of UK adults attending monthly.

Furthermore this survey found that 5 million additional

fringe and occasional churchgoers meant that 26% or 12.6

million adults attended church at least once a year.13

Perhaps most relevant to this project is the fact that

in Greater London this figure rises to 22% despite being

a more multi-cultural city than anywhere else in the UK

with 20% of people being of other faiths.14 In part the

higher church attendance figures may be attributable to

the high attendance of adults in Black Majority churches

(48%), thus skewing the overall picture, so any

conclusions to be drawn from this raw data must be

treated with caution.15

Yet, despite these more encouraging signs, Grace Davie16

11ECAS 1998 published in Brierley, P., The Tide is Running Out, Christian Research, London, 2000, p. 912 ECAS 2005 published in Brierley, P., Pulling out of the nosedive, Christian Research, London, 2006. The actual numbers saw 3.72 million people attending drop to 3.17 million.13 Jacinta Ashworth & Ian Farthing, Churchgoing in the UK, Tearfund, London, April 2007 pp. 5-714 Ibid p. 615 Ibid p.6; compared to 15% among white adults.16 Davie, G., Religion in Britain since 1945, Blackwell, Oxford, 1994, pp.

90

is correct to point out that the majority of British

people, in common with many other Europeans, are staying

away from the institutional Church. Here Davie means all

established Christian churches whereas Peter Brierley17

differentiates the institutional churches as Anglican,

Catholic, Lutheran, Orthodox, Presbyterian and non-

institutional as Baptist, Methodist, Indigenous,

Pentecostal and Other Churches. In grouping the

denominations in this way he is then able to establish

that whereas the institutional churches are in decline

in Western Europe, the non-institutional churches are

stable or growing. Both these trends are marginal but

worthy of note.18

However, Davie does not consider regular attendance as

the only marker of the significance of churches to

people. She attributes importance to institutional or

state churches in that they provide public utility in

the form of ‘vicarious religion’ for the large majority

of nominal believers, as opposed to the smaller minority

of the religiously active. She draws this out in her

study of religion in European countries19 where she

concludes that institution churches operate on behalf of

46-5017 Brierley, P.W., Future Church, Christian Research, Monarch, London, 1998, p. 4218 Ibid19 Cf. Davie, G., Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000 & Davie, G., ‘The persistence of institutional religion’ in Woodhead, L., with Heelas, P., and Martin, D., Peter Berger and the Study of Religion, Routledge, London, 2001, pp. 101-111

91

populations where the vast majority rarely, if ever,

attend religious services.

From time to time, for instance, they are asked to articulate the sacred in the life-cycle of individuals or families or at times of national crisis or celebration. It is significant that a refusal to carry out thesetasks would violate both individual and collective expectations. The two most obviousexamples of this process in recent years werethe very public funerals of President Mitterrand (in 1996) and Princes Diana (in 1997).20

Davie notes that it is also the persistence of people in

having a religious ceremony at death that binds the vast

majority of Europeans to their churches.21 She notes

that there is a ‘noticeable evolution in the nature of

these ceremonies – shifts that reflect a more

individualistic culture – but relatively few take place

outside the influence of the churches altogether.’22

Davie’s views are significant yet not without challenge

from other commentators as we shall now see.

Beyond the statistics is another important cultural

shift in the place of the Church in British society. The

Christian Church had played an authoritative role in the

culture of Christendom, yet modern culture is highly

critical of it and increasingly secular in its

20 Davie, G., ‘The persistence of institutional religion’, p. 10721 Ibid, p. 11022 Ibid

92

assumptions. In our late-modern23 cluster of subcultures

this hostility remains with secularism continuing to

thrive in some quarters, whilst in others religious

pluralism also confronts Christianity and particularly

the Christian Church and its mission. Callum Brown

concludes in The Death of Christian Britain:

What emerges is a story not merely of church decline, but of the end of Christianity as a means by which men and women, as individuals,construct their identities and their sense of‘self’.24

This is a far reaching and important statement should it

prove to be true. That which influences one’s worldview,

identity and sense of self in life has profound

consequences for the way in which one faces and copes

with death, both the deaths of people we know (either

personally or ‘celebrities’ we feel we know) and our

own.25 In making his case, Brown catalogues the changes

in the late twentieth century thus:

In unprecedented numbers, the British people

since the 1960s have stopped going to church,

have allowed their church membership to

lapse, have stopped marrying in church and

have neglected to baptise their children. 23Rather than ‘post-modern’ culture as the influence of modernity isstill apparent in this culture or at least in some observable subcultures in British society, and so I would argue we are not yet fully ‘post’-modern. Yet it is noted that ‘post-modern’ is the popular term for this period. Cf. Walker, A., Telling the Story, SPCK, London, 1996 for support of this view24 Brown, C., The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000, London, Routledge, 2001, p2.25 I shall return to this specific issue later.

93

Meanwhile, their children, the two

generations who grew to maturity in the last

thirty years of the twentieth century,

stopped going to Sunday school, stopped

entering confirmation and communicant

classes, and rarely, if ever, stepped inside

a church to worship in their entire lives.

The cycle of inter-generational renewal of

Christian affiliation, a cycle which had for

so many centuries tied the people however

closely or loosely to the churches, and to

Christian moral benchmarks, was permanently

disrupted in the ‘swinging sixties.’26

One may add to this catalogue of decline, the reducing

number of funerals overseen by Christian clergy, yet it

must be noted that the funeral remains the most popular

of rites still undertaken by representatives of the

Christian Church. However there is no room for

complacency here either: whilst death rates are falling,

the percentage of funerals taken by Christian clergy is

falling at a marginally greater rate. 27

Not all concur with Brown’s explanation of the causes or

timing or the ultimate significance of this decline.28 26 Brown, C., The Death of Christian Britain, p.127 Office for National Statistics, Population Trends 136 on deaths. Cf. www.cofe.anglican.org/news/pr1008.html and http://www.cofe.anglican.org/info/statistics/churchstats2006/statisticspg16.htm; for Church of England statistics.28 For example McLeod, H., The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, Oxford

94

McLeod argues that Brown relies too heavily on specific

factors to provide a sufficient explanation for the

crisis facing the Church. McLeod further considers that

‘modernization’ is similarly too sweeping and

generalized an explanation and does not sufficiently

account for the fact that so many key changes took place

in and around the 1960s.29

Yet the overall trend is clear to see. John and Olive

Drane summarise the seriousness of the situation:

For the last forty years, the statistics havereflected an accelerating crisis in church life, and we are now faced with the serious possibility – likelihood, even – that the Christian faith might disappear entirely fromour culture within the first half of this century… Our churches are in incredibly bad shape. Moreover, the decline is affecting allChristian traditions. Every denomination faces the same issues, and they extend right across the theological spectrum.30

McLeod argues that this does not mean that the Western

Church is operating in a pluralist, post-Christian or

secular society as people persist in exercising

Christian faith, to some extent, in significant numbers

but, as Stuart Murray also concludes, that it is now

University Press, Oxford, 2007, Oden, T.C., ‘The death of modernity and postmodern evangelical spirituality’, in; Dockery, D.S., (Ed) The Challenge of Postmodernism, (2nd Ed), Baker Academic, Grand Rapids, 2001 p.20; and Walker, A., Telling the Story, SPCK, London, 1996 pp.106-10729 McLeod, H., Religious Crisis, p. 25930 Drane, John and Olive, ‘Breaking into Dynamic Ways of being Church’ in Breaking New Ground: The First Scottish Ecumenical Assembly 2001, Action of Churches Together in Scotland, Dunblane, 2001, p.142

95

operating in a post-Christendom era.31 Stuart Murray

defines this thus:

Post-Christendom is the culture that emerges as the Christian faith loses coherence withina society that has been definitively shaped by the Christian story and as the institutions that have been developed to express Christian convictions decline in influence.32

Hauerwas and Willimon posit that Christendom’s decline

is hard to date precisely, reasonably suggesting that

Christendom reigned from approximately 313CE

(Constantine’s Edict of Milan) and ended with the social

revolution of the 1960s.33

All of this appears to points towards the Church

becoming increasingly marginal in its influence. Yet, it

would be premature to say that all is lost. Clearly a

great number of people still turn to the church and its

clergy for help in dealing with the complexities of

death and the questions of life that arise out of facing

this disturbing situation.34 Also, as Davie notes, a

significantly high proportion of people persist in

31 McLeod, H., Religious Crisis, p. 26432 Murray, S., Post-Christendom, Paternoster, Carlisle, 2004, p.1933 Hauerwas, S., & Willimon, W.H., Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1989, pp.16-1734 Cf. Billings, A., Secular Lives, Sacred Hearts, SPCK, London, 2004, p.82 & Dying and Grieving: A Guide to Pastoral Ministry, SPCK, London 2002, p.115 and Church of England statistics for the number of deaths to the number of funerals undertaken by their clergy, at: http://www.cofe.anglican.org/info/statistics/churchstats2006/statisticspg16.htm; and Davie, G., ‘The persistence of institutional religion’, pp. 107-111

96

believing in God; they believe even though they may not

belong to a worshipping community.35

Yet Habgood negatively interprets such belief as being

‘a pathological form of belief, a hyperactivity when

there seems to be nothing more substantial with which to

engage.’36 Or as G.K. Chesterton in his oft-quoted remark

suggests ‘when a man ceases to believe in God he does

not believe in nothing. He believes in anything.’37

For Habgood, in turning away from the depth and

stability of the established Church and the expression

of faith in God to be found within it, what appears to

have been discovered is easy transcendence – the self-

help programmes, the spiritual journeys, the New Age

philosophies – through which one moves rapidly in a

desperate quest for self-renovation.

Habgood sounds a clarion call to arrest this decline. In

doing so he attempts to identify some common indices of

Western culture in this age, commonly referred to as

post-modernity, in order that the Church may find paths

that would lead to a greater engagement with people of

this generation and culture:

The undermining of authority, the distrust ofgeneralisations, the affirmation of the localand the particular, the multiplicity of

35Davie, G., Religion in Britain, pp. 78-8036Habgood, J., Varieties of Unbelief, DLT, London, 2000 p. 237Chesterton, G.K., cited in Habgood, J., Varieties, p. 2

97

choices, the primacy of relationships, the struggle for authenticity, the enrichment through diversity, the lack of solemnity – all these may combine to make an attractive, if somewhat bewildering, mixture within whichtraditional religious concerns tend to seem irrelevant and alien, when they are not seen as actively hostile.38

We may be prompted to ask how such a situation could

develop. Again Habgood suggests that forms of belief can

themselves generate their own forms of unbelief.39 It is

certainly worth asking whether some religious boundaries

may have been drawn in the wrong way, or in the wrong

places, or become too impermeable to allow access to

current generations who have grown up under the

influence of differing world views. This is especially

relevant to our questions about the frame and content of

funeral liturgies. We must ask if it is the Christian

story of hope and meaning even in the face of death that

is considered inauthentic to current generations in this

culture, or if it is the framing of the liturgy that is

inaccessible, or both.

My study certainly found that the Civil client did not

want what she perceived as disconnected elements of a

standard Christian funeral (a long sermon) yet was open

to consider questions of life in the face of and beyond

death.40 It could be interpreted that it was the content

38Habgood, J., Varieties, pp. 71-7239Ibid40 See Civil Client Transcript.

98

that was being rejected but there is a strong suggestion

that it was in fact the form. One must then seek to

investigate what has led to such a position being held.

In order to consider this important question we need to

better understand just what contemporary culture41 is and

what it represents in terms of any commonly held

worldview. At the same time it is acknowledged that it

may be other points of engagement between Church and

culture that form people’s perceptions about the

relevance and helpfulness of the Church’s ministrations.

Habgood argues that cultural changes have led to what he

termed Anorexia Religiosa.42 It is a pattern that in some ways

shadows that of the modern debilitating disorder,

anorexia nervosa. The latter is found in the kind of

society where a choice of self-images is possible and

where there are pressures to conform to over-ambitious

ideals. It is an expression of anxiety, the product of a

fixation on an unrealistic goal. With religious anorexia

the desire to revolt, peer pressure, the multiplicity of

choices, and self-mastery as a means of overcoming

social anxiety, can all switch off the religious

appetite. Unbelief can gradually replace belief without

the need for any great crisis of faith. It is an

imperceptible erosion of faith where the abandonment of

41 As we shall shortly see contemporary culture is actually anythingbut monolithic42 Ibid p.84

99

traditional forms of religious input leaves the

individual, or indeed the whole community, unaware of

any great loss in consequence. Indeed the loss may be

experientially ameliorated by feeding the spirit on

whatever takes its fancy, from music or other forms of

art to sex, or other neo- or pseudo-religious

movements.43

A more positive reading of the erosion of adherence to a

formal framework of religious belief is Paul Heelas &

Linda Woodhead’s study The Spiritual Revolution.44 They chart

the state of religion and spirituality today in Great

Britain and the United States of America, suggesting

that spiritualities that engage the depth of personal

experience are faring better than religions that demand

conformity to ‘higher truth’. Indeed, implicitly such

expressions of faith demonstrate that there is an a priori

religious capacity within all individuals in the wider

community, whether or not this has been starved, or at

best malnourished, because they have been denied any

opportunity to develop this capacity through their

cultural experience. As Woodhead and Heelas suggest, it

is more common in the cultures of the late-modern era

that it is subjective spiritual feelings and experiences

that mould the person’s worldview rather than the more

objective religious framework of church tradition.45

43 Ibid44 Heelas, P., Woodhead, L., The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality, Blackwell, Oxford, 200545 Ibid

100

Another study drawing similar conclusions is Gordon

Lynch’s study of new spiritualities. In it he

illustrates that we are witnessing the rise of a new

religious ideology which reveres the natural world and

links religious faith with novel scientific theories

connected to people’s own experiences.46

Yet there is a sense of loss, whether the denial of God

is deliberate or otherwise. The agonies suffered by the

honest Victorian doubters are classic examples, as is

Heidegger’s, ‘I do not deny [God’s] existence: I merely

state his absence.’47

Whilst late-modern British society points to the absence

of God, it is desperately searching for a sense of

meaning, and a sense of the divine-other, and it is

making this spiritual quest, by and large, it seems,

without the Church. This cultural shift has profoundly

affected not only individuals’ worldviews but also the

way in which local communities operate.

Before I seek to give an overview of the significant

changes within the culture that have contributed to the

current situation it is important to note that a

‘snapshot picture’, or ‘bite-size’ pen picture, to use

46 Lynch, Gordon, New Spirituality – An Introduction to Belief Beyond Religion; I.B. Tauris, London, 200747Cited in Habgood, J., Varieties, p. 101

101

contemporary jargon, of the prevalent culture in Britain

is almost impossible to give. This is principally

because there is no single culture which can be

described as the culture. Instead one must survey the

fragmented array of subcultures and their associated

nomenclature. The heterogeneous nature of our societies

means that ‘[none] can have entry to all aspects of

modern culture because it is so diverse, so bewildering,

so kaleidoscopic.’48

With this caveat I would describe traditional

communities as being those in which individual and

family life was lived with a much greater reference to

the wider community.

In a Traditional Community there is a shared culture of institutions, religious and moral values, ways of thinking and norms of standards behaviour.49

These ‘traditions’ are authoritative and are considered

normative, giving rise to much less room for

individualism which may lead to disapproval by other

members of that, or the wider community. Whilst this is

a generalisation, it gives a picture of the common

culture pre 1960; a culture in which funerals had a set

format from which few would depart.

Billings suggests the Traditional Community is largely a48Walker, A., ‘Into the future’, in Ministry Today , Chelmsford, Vol. 8,1996, p.4149 Billings, A., Dying and Grieving, p.5

102

function of poverty – whereby individuals need the

support of others to provide (shared) resources at

especially lean times.50

When Harold Macmillan, the British Prime Minister, told

the Country in 1957 that they ‘had never had it so

good,’ few disagreed, and by the 1960s new living

patterns and attitudes to life and death were emerging.

The erosion of Traditional Community, its norms and

practices, could be observed in many areas of life. In a

wider Western context Dockery declares confidently: ‘A

new day has dawned. A new generation has come of age.

The new generation is post-Christian, post-

Enlightenment, and post-modern.’51

Like many other commentators, Dockery sees the current

age as a new one, as post-modern; the modern age having

passed away. Thomas Oden, for instance, sees the modern

age coming into existence in 1789 with the storming of

the Paris Bastille, and coming to an end with the fall

of the Berlin Wall in 1989.52 Whilst this may provide a

convenient schema, as Walker comments, ‘we cannot

guillotine history in such a neat way.’53

Instead his wider interpretation of boundaries of

modernity stretch from its embryonic form in the 50 Ibid p.651Dockery, D.S., The Challenge of Postmodernism, Baker Academic, Grand Rapids, 2001 p.1152Oden, T.C., ‘The death of modernity and postmodern evangelical spirituality’, in Dockery, D.S., The Challenge of Postmodernism, p.2053Walker, A., Telling the Story SPCK, London 1996 p.106

103

humanism of the Renaissance, through the individualism

and freedom of conscience of the Reformation, the rise

of merchant banking in the sixteenth century, maturing

in the philosophical Enlightenment of the eighteenth

century and becoming socially and economically

inculturated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.54

Walker concedes that modernity has grown old, and

therefore we may apply the label of late-modern to our

age, but rejects the notion that it has yet passed away.

His contention is justified as one considers the indices

of modern culture associated with the sociology of

knowledge of Berger and Luckmann.55 This view defines

modernity as a:

… both a mode of social life and moral understanding more or less characterized by the universal claims of reason and instrumental (or means/ends) rationality; thedifferentiation of spheres of life-experienceinto public and private; and the pluralization and competition of truth claims… it is dialectic between moral understanding (e.g. the value of reason, the supreme importance of individuality, the value of tolerance and relativism), and social/institutional life.56

Not all of these indices can be studied with any justice

here.57 Instead I would seek to investigate them briefly54Ibid p.107 55 Cf. Berger, P. L., and Luckmann, T., The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Penguin, Harmonsworth, 197956Hunter, J. D., ‘What is modernity?’ in Sampson, P., Samuel, V., and Sugden, C., (Eds.) Faith and Modernity, Regnum, Oxford, 1994 pp.16-1857See Walker, A., Telling the Story, SPCK, London ,1996, Chapters 5, 6 & 7 and Hunter, J. D., ‘What is modernity?’, p.16-28 for a full

104

through the lens of institutional carriers of culture.

The first carrier of culture to consider is industrial

capitalism. Many scholars have concluded that it was not

so much the particular property relations that were

formative in the modern age through the institutional

carrier of industrial capitalism, it was the extremely

consequential application of functional rationality: the

division of labour and specialisation that came with the

Industrial Revolution.58 This had many effects, being

what Hunter labels ‘the most innovative and efficient

system ever created. Such methods could be applied not

only to capitalism but to all economies.’59

However, despite the economic benefits of the systems

came social consequences. Urbanisation resulted, with

labour being concentrated in one place which

destabilised rural communities. Where once work and

domestic and leisure time were fused and interdependent

in cottage based industry, the rational organisation of

the factory system meant that work was concentrated

outside the home. The public sphere of wage earning

became separated from the private realm of kinship,

family and friendship. With this came cultural pluralism

where religion was seen as a personal choice to be

account.58 Weber observed this (cf. Weber, Max, ‘Science as Vocation’, in Gerth and Mills, On Max Weber, OUP, Oxford, 1958. Marxists later conceded it and it is restated by Hunter and Walker, cf. Walker, A.,Telling the Story p.114-116; Hunter, J. D., ‘What is modernity?’, p.18-2059 Hunter, J. D., ‘What is modernity?’, p.19

105

exercised in the private world. 60 Similarly, funerals

have been ‘privatised’ and rationalised as we have

established. Paid ‘undertakers’ or funeral directors

have taken the place of the deceased’s community of

family and friends in arranging the storage, preparation

and disposal of the bodily remains. It is efficiently

executed, to keep the terrors of death from public view.

Death has become more remote, less familiar and

impersonal. It is no longer the way for individual

grieving to be swallowed up in communal mourning.61 Such

features as drawn curtains, sending wreaths, having a

collection, standing at the front door to see the hearse

pass by, or wearing black are no longer commonplace as

acts of communal association with the dead and the

bereaved.62

The second carrier is the modern nation state. The modern

state introduced a bureaucratic form of social

organisation and structural rationalism which became its

modus operandi. With this growth in bureaucratic

organisation came compartmentalism rather than

integration of the many and various areas of life

touched by it. Increasingly anonymous and abstract

social relationships were also modelled as the norm.63 60 Ibid61 Cf. Billings, A., Secular Lives, p.8462 This is partly because more people work during the day and are unavailable to regularly take part in funeral processions; and in some cases this may be a good thing as ‘drawn curtains’ had more to do with the superstition of keeping death out of the house as it passed by.63 Hunter, J. D., ‘What is modernity?’, p.20

106

For example, a school dinner lady, Carol Hill, who

worked at Great Tey primary school in Essex had to

appear at a disciplinary hearing having been suspended

after she approached a parent to tell him his daughter

was being bullied at the school. She was charged with

breaching confidentiality rules and told she should have

only reported through school procedures and that only

‘the school’ would inform the parent via its

bureaucratic and more anonymous channels. Whilst it was

acknowledged that having members of the local community

working in the local school had benefits, it was also

expressed that it caused ‘problems such as this’. These

‘problems’ appeared to be that two adults who knew each

other in this local community, could not discuss what

happened to this child whilst she was at school.64 This

bureaucratic modern state substantially influenced

funeral practice by building and managing not only large

municipal cemeteries but also municipal crematoria, as

we have seen. Here control of practices at death passed

from the Church who up until this time owned the vast

majority of burial lands. In the twenty-first century

the modern state is again seeking to influence funeral

practices by facilitating a new civil funeral liturgy

with its own celebrants.

The third carrier is the knowledge sector. These are, as64 www.bbc.co.uk/news 24 September 2009; It is acknowledged that at the time of writing the full story has not yet emerged and so this example is provisional, yet it serves, in its raw form, as a good illustration of the anonymous influence of the State.

107

Hunter describes them, ‘the contemporary institutions of

culture formation and reality definition.’65 Most

prominent of these are the modern university, the arts,

and the media of mass communication, which have affected

the development of popular culture. These institutions

are the significant presenters of pluralism and its

competing perspectives of reality. They are, by their

very nature, carriers of scepticism and relativism

goaded on by Enlightenment ideals over the past two to

three hundred years.66 Here, people were being educated

to ‘think for themselves’ rather than blindly conform to

what had been considered societal norms of behaviour at

specific times. Exposure to a broader world through

media opened up alternative vistas in people’s thinking

and living. Their choices were made in more

individualistic ways. People started to belong to social

‘communities’ not necessarily located geographically,

such as at work, clubs, or even with those to whom they

could speak on the telephone. Technology and travel

opened up to allow ordinary people wider access to a

global community.67

This mass media, empowered by the dominant electronic

technologies of this age, have played a significant role

in creating a mass culture. This mass culture, 65Hunter, J. D., ‘What is modernity?’ p.2066 Cf. Berger, P., ‘Protestantism and the quest of certainty’, in The Christian Century, Chicago, 26 August-2 September 1998, p. 782; Newbigin, L., The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, SPCK, London 1989; Hunter, J.D., ‘What is modernity?’ p. 2167 Billings, A., Dying and Grieving, pp.7-8

108

electronic technology and consumerism have become

inexorably linked. One area we are yet to mention but

cannot ignore is the development of the ‘information

superhighway’. Such technology can bring people

together, and it does in terms of electronic

conversations and ‘virtual relationships’ develop. But

it can also drive people apart. The mass media already

cater for a bewildering diversity of sub-cultures so

that it is difficult to establish any common political,

moral or religious conversations.

Furthermore communication technology itself –

television, radio, newspapers, popular music and the

like – transforms our sense of space and time, alters

our sense of value and predisposes us towards

superficiality and subjectivity. As the likes of Hunter

and Walker point out, the medium is not neutral but

carries a message in itself.68

A principal agent of cultural transmission during this

transition from the early to late phase of modernity has

been the marriage of consumerism and mass media. The

defining moments for this came in the burgeoning

consumerism of the 1950s fed by the application of

mechanical mass production methods to create consumer

durables for a mass public market at affordable and

competitive prices, following the earlier lead by Henry

68 Walker, A., Telling the Story, pp.114-116; Hunter, J. D., ‘What is modernity?, pp.20-21

109

Ford. After the Second World War, rising standards of

living, full employment, technological advance, and

innovative marketing spearheaded the revolution that

started in America and spread to the rest of the Western

world and beyond. Advertising moved directly into the

home through television and powerfully linked products

to lifestyle. The suburbs expanded with improvements in

housing provision yet established communities were

broken up. With changes in lifestyles came a diminishing

sense of traditional community.69 We may also observe

that consumerism matched to mass media has affected

people’s expectations for the form and content of

funeral services. The widely televised funeral of Diana

Princess of Wales has contributed to the raising of

expectations that funerals can be very person centred,

with music, poetry, prose and eulogies all reflecting

the life and interests of the deceased.70 I certainly

noted that this was a ‘watershed’ moment from whence

increasingly personal and challenging requests were made

for individualistic elements to be included in funeral

ceremonies. Here questions of medium and message became

very real; what was the overall message given at these

funerals? This is the central point of this thesis that

I shall return to later and in chapters five and six.

But can we talk of a new cultural era? Walker thinks not

69 Cf. Hunter, J. D., ‘What is modernity?’, p. 22f70 Cf. Wolffe, J., Great Deaths, Grieving, Religion, and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, The British Academy/OUP, Oxford, 2000

110

entirely:

Structural pluralism is wobbling, but the privatisation of religion, and indeed the privatisation of the public world, looks set.Cultural pluralism, on the other hand, will escalate, but seems likely to end in fragmentation rather than harmony. Science asa world-view, along with metanarrative progress, seems already to have been shelved... What all this amounts to is a shift towards a new cultural epoch, but one in which there will obviously be continuitiesand discontinuities with the old one.71

It appears too early to divorce our ties with this

recent past and proclaim the age to be entirely post-

modern. As it is a transitional phase, it is too early

to know where our destination may be. However to

consider these markers remains valid as we seek to gain

our contextual bearings in order to have a platform from

which to communicate Christian hope, specifically at

funeral services.

Yet significantly, with all this came a perceived

insecurity: people had lost a common moral code which

informed their behaviour, especially in difficult

circumstances, such as at a time of a death. As Billings

states, ‘people no longer knew what to believe or how to

behave.’72

The fear of a breakdown in social cohesion gave rise to

71Walker, A., Telling the Story, pp184-572 Billings, A., Dying and Grieving, p.8

111

governmental intervention with resources poured in to

try and re-establish traditional communities. Community

workers, community centres and the like were all

invested in local areas, but people opted in and out as

they had need and did not feel bound to be permanent

members.73

Billings comments further:

The role of women – as the major influence onthe next generation – is critical, and the evidence seems to be that younger women want the kind of freedom that can only come with an end of traditional families and traditional community.74

Amongst the casualties of this social change was the

Church. Younger women from the late 1950s not only

stopped going to church, where women had been the

mainstay of congregations, but were less likely to

induct the next generation into the faith and the church

as they had their families.75 Callum Brown concluded that

the loss of young women also led to an Exodus of men

from the church.76 The consequent loss of children has

affected and will continue to affect all subsequent

generations. Yet it was not just that people stopped

going to church in the 1960s, it was also that religion,

and specifically Christianity, began to lose its place

73 Ibid 74 Ibid p.975 Billings, A., Secular Lives, Sacred Hearts, p.10; 76 Brown, C., The Death of Christian Britain, in which he also posits that the secularising of Christian Britain was not a long process beginning with the industrial revolution but commenced and developedrapidly in the 1960s.

112

of influence on people’s worldview. As Jean-François

Lyotard articulated, a deep scepticism was developing

about ‘told worldviews’ – grand narratives or meta-

narratives which were seen as tools of modernity and now

incredible by a late or post-modernist person.77

However, as we are starting to glean, this decline in

the influence of institutional Christianity was not

mirrored in terms of a decline in people searching for

some sort of spiritual enrichment. In the 2001 Census78

77% of people in England indicated they ‘had a

religion’, with around seven out of ten in England and

Wales indicating that they ‘belonged to the Christian

faith’79 – but many of these people would not be regular

members of faith communities.

Nevertheless, this displacement of institutional

Christianity as the source of a grand narrative

providing a sense of meaning at significant points in

people’s lives has had a profound effect on the way

people think about death. Traditionally Christianity had

provided the framework for thinking about life and

death. This combined with the fact that patterns of

dying and grieving have changed over the past half

century, has affected the framework and content of the

77 Lyotard, Jean-François, ‘Interview’, Theory, Culture and Society, volume 5, numbers 2/3. 1988, p. 30278 http://www.statistics.gov.uk social trend 13479 http://www.statistics.gov.uk social trend 134

113

funeral service.80 In short, people are living longer and

die at a relatively old age from degenerative diseases.

As we have already noted, in previous centuries people

had generally died at home and many of them prematurely

because of acute diseases, lack of affordable medical

care, war or industrial accident. Death was more sudden,

yet it was familiar and seldom far away. Better diets

and medical care have increased life expectancy greatly

and people are more often dying in hospitals or nursing

homes. Death has become more remote, less familiar, and

impersonal.

As I have previously explored, links between death,

community and church have broken down in tandem to these

developments. It is no longer the way for individual

grieving to be swallowed up in communal mourning.81 There

are some notable exceptions where a community has

engaged with the tragedy of a death or multiple deaths,

such as the Hillsborough football crowd disaster or the

shooting of a child, when people en masse spill out onto

the streets or attend the place of death and/or the

funeral service. But these are exceptions rather than

common practice for all funerals. Clergy were also

involved much more with the dying and their family prior

to the death than is the case today. They would have

said prayers with the family and prepared the dying. But

now medical rather than spiritual concerns override,

80 Cf. Walter, Tony, The Revival of Death, Routledge, Abingdon, 1994.81 Cf. Billings, A., Secular Lives, Sacred Hearts, p.84

114

chaplains or indeed counsellors rather than local

ministers may be called to assist in preparing for the

death and coping with it once it has occurred.

The shift was to a more professional therapeutic model

with meaning being found in significant relationships

now, rather than in the larger story of the Christian

faith where questions of God’s plan for the whole of

creation as well as one’s engagement with God and one’s

eternal destiny would be addressed as a wider context to

life and death.82

With human relationships as the greatest source of

meaning in people’s lives, the threat posed by death is

enormous and the disturbance it causes to everyday life,

overwhelming.

The Christian tradition is that Christian faith gives

shape to our experiences, no less so than at death and

in bereavement. With the loss of this Christian

worldview, death is faced in an entirely different way.

Giddens’ concludes that (funeral) ritual has been

replaced by discourse. He argues that whilst some

counsellors might contend that their words are simply a

summary of what the bereaved clients say about their

experience and feelings, if clients find it a helpful

discourse it is because something has been added,

usually providing a language which can be used to label

and interpret feelings. This may not help the clients to82 Cf. Walter, Tony, The Revival of Death, Routledge, Abingdon, 1994.

115

control their feelings but it can reduce their panic at

feeling those feelings. The provision of this discourse

seeks to help the clients make sense of their response

to loss; and is the very epitome of late-modern

reflexive ordering of one’s own biography and inner

life.83

Walter explores this further:

If modern death is a private affair, and revival encourages the sharing of personal feelings, then neither is conducive to ritual, for ritual is rooted in community andis socially approved not individually expressed emotion, in symbol more than in memory, in action as much as in talk. The neo-modernist, especially the expressivist, seeks not ritual but talk – hence, for example, the life-centred funeral.84

Psychotherapeutic bereavement groups are cited as an

example of this, providing a temporary group of

strangers to whom the bereaved can express their grief

facilitated by a psychotherapist, thus replacing ritual

action around the body and within the community. One can

understand that for people who regularly go to a

therapist (or a life coach) to review their lives,

bereavement counselling is an obvious thing for them to

do. Again, the point is that in the past such people

would probably have looked to the Christian Church for

this support, would have received teaching and counsel

from the priest or other representative person, not just

83 Giddens, A., Modernity and Self Identity, Polity, Oxford, 1991, pp.167-16984 Walter, Tony, The Revival of Death, p.177

116

at the point of the death but in preparation for it

through regular instruction, and had the aid of the

funeral rite to help them move through their grief.

Yet surely these therapeutic groups and these discourses

do not replace funeral rituals? Whilst they may provide

cathartic benefit for the living, they do not provide

for the disposal of the body in an acceptable manner nor

dispatch the deceased from this world. Therapy does not

allow a public paying of respect to the deceased as an

ultimate affirmation of human dignity and this, Walter

argues, is:

…why people continue to go to funerals, why funerals cannot be defined in terms of whatever therapeutic function they may or maynot have for the grieving, and why therapy and funeral can never be reduced one to the other.85

This being the case, I would argue with Walter and

counter to Giddens that the songs, readings, personal

tributes and the saying ‘goodbye’ to the deceased in

these new liturgies has taken on a ritual form. Even the

choreography at the final ‘committal’ provides movement

as well as words to express the final goodbye. The

curtains are either closed with appropriate words of

farewell or left open for the congregation to file past

and say their own goodbyes.86 But the question remains,

85 Ibid, p.18086 Or the limited number of other options at the crematorium, with the coffin descending out of sight or being rolled away etc. Similarly at gravesides, soil may be dropped onto the coffin etc.

117

do such new and secular rituals engender hope and

meaning at such times? Do they confirm a cogent

worldview and if so does this worldview offer hope and

meaning to life at the point of death? If, as I suspect,

they are less hopeful and offer less meaning to people,

then how have they come to be so dominant? To answer

these important questions we must look further at the

plausibility structures dominant in England in the early

twenty-first century.

The challenge of the relocation of beliefChristianity no longer reflects a common culture for there is no longer a common culture to reflect. Religion is now a lifestyle in a mass market of competing ideologies and designer sub-cultures. Each sub-culture has a niche in the consumer market, for lifestyles have themselves becomecommodities... It took perhaps twenty years after the Second World War for Britain to accept it was no longer a world power, no longer a great empire, but it would seem thatwe have not really grasped that we are no longer a Christian nation.87

This contention Walker supports by stating that, with

the privatisation of religion in Western culture,

Christianity appears to have been privatised almost to

the point of disappearance.

Church membership and attendance have declined

throughout the post-war period, markedly so between 1960

and 2005 as we have established.

87Walker, A., ‘Into the future’, p.40

118

Yet against this underlying trend lay further data which

gives a different, more optimistic picture. Nearly three

quarters of the population surveyed in the European

Values Survey88 and the detailed Ahern and Davie 1987

Leeds survey (which covered a wide variety of religious

themes)89 professed belief in God;90 over fifty per cent

defined themselves as ‘religious persons’ and regularly

felt the need for prayer, meditation and contemplation;

with nearly as many (forty-four per cent) drawing

comfort from religion. Only four per cent emerge as

convinced atheists.91

Even more interestingly, a further study carried out in

Islington92 as long ago as 1968 seemed to capture the

common religious understanding of the majority in

Britain today. When respondents were probed about their

belief in God, they were asked ‘Do you believe in a God

who can change the course of events on earth?’ To which

one respondent replied, ‘No, just the ordinary one.’ The

conclusions to this study are worth quoting at length as

they provide some clues to understanding the religious

mindset of those who believe in this ‘ordinary God’:

88 www.europeanvaluesstudy.eu/89 Ahern, G., and Davie, G., Inner City God: the nature of belief in the inner city, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1987.90Davie, G., Religion in Britain since 1945, pp. 77-80 91 Ibid92 For full details of the original study can be found in Abercrombie, N., Baker, J., Brett, S., and Foster, J., ‘Superstitionand religion: the God of the gaps’, in D. Martin and M. Hill (eds), A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain, 3, SCM, London, 1970, pp. 91-129

119

The analysis in the section above suggests the tentative conclusion that religious belief, when not associated with the active membership of a Church, tends to be associated with superstitious belief while Church attendance tends to be antithetical tosuperstition. Moreover, we have some evidencethat for those people who do not go to Churchyet say they are religious and pray often, religious belief has moved quite far from theorthodox Church position and is really much closer to what would normally be called superstition.93

Here, we have a furtive mix of privatised religion and

religious pluralism. This conclusion may be supported by

the Leeds study where religious belief may well at one

end of the spectrum have some links with Christian

teaching, but at the other be enormously diverse and

range through distinctly heterodox ideas such as

healing, the paranormal, fortune telling, fate and

destiny, life after death, ghosts, spiritual

experiences, prayer and meditation, luck and

superstition.94 This appears to be an ongoing trend with

research commissioned by Theos in 2008 confirming an

increasingly strong belief in ghosts and the

supernatural across the UK.

The poll of over 2,000 people shows that 70% of people

believe in the human soul, 55% believe in heaven and 53%

believe in life after death. Almost four in 10 (39%) of

people believe in ghosts, 22% believe in astrology or

93Abercrombie et al, ‘Superstition and religion’, p.12494Davie, G., Religion in Britain since 1945, p. 83

120

horoscopes, 27% believe in reincarnation and 15% believe

in fortune telling or Tarot, the research reveals. A

regional breakdown of the latest research finds

that London has the highest proportion of people in the

UK who believe in ghosts (50%) astrology/horoscopes

(26%) and heaven (69%).95

These are non-institutional expressions of religiosity

which are expanding in ever-increasing numbers.96 Some

are revamps of old pagan religions; others are bizarre

creations to which you can signify your allegiance by

paying the requisite fee. According to Walker, New Age

literature outsells Christian theology in high street

retailers by the ratio of ten to one.97 Consumerism, mass

media, and the relocation of religion into the private

sphere of life combine to make the religious scene in

Britain both complex and confusing. Such a scene is

perhaps an icon of this late-modern age. Religion has

very largely become a matter of personal and private

choice.

95 This research was conducted by ComRes on behalf of Theos. ComRes interviewed 2,060 adults by telephone between October 14 and November 21, 2008. The data was weighted to be demographically representative of all UK adults. The comparison with the 1950s is especially striking. In 1950, only 10% of the public told Gallup that they believed in ghosts, and just 2% thought they had seen one.In 1951, only 7% of the public said they believed in predicting the future by cards and 6% by stars. www.theosthinktank.co.uk/Four_in_ten_people_believe_in_ghosts.aspx?ArticleID=3015&PageID=14&RefPageID=14 96One only needs to search the Internet to be bombarded with new religious movements.97Walker, A., ‘Into the future’, p. 40

121

This reflects the structural relocation of belief in

that religious authority and influence has been

marginalised from the structures of power, and most

notably the structures of cultural power which create

and maintain a definition of public reality. Such a

retreat from a once dominant role is a consequence of

their being structurally displaced by an overwhelming

montage of competition. Where once Christian literature

dominated the literature of the day and therefore had a

firm grasp on the knowledge sector, it now occupies only

a small proportion of this sector. Yet despite this,

links are maintained with the Christian Church. Rites of

passage, notably funeral rites, are still areas of

contact initiated at the request of the individual or

individual’s family. Whilst links between the

individual’s beliefs and traditional beliefs may be

tenuous and increasingly so as regular links with

traditional Christian practice diminish, this is,

nevertheless, a remaining link with the Christian

Church.

One must conclude that British society cannot be said to

be entirely secular, perhaps nominally Christian, but

certainly spiritually open. For the Generation Xers this

is most acute. They are the generation who were born in

the 1960s and 1970s, coming of age in the 1980s and

1990s. In an American study Schultz et al note that MTV

122

seeks to generate ‘intimacy without relationship’98 for

this generation whose primary carer was a television. As

Zinn concludes, the resultant:

... grunge, anger, cultural dislocation and secret yearning to belong... add up to a daunting cultural anthropology that marketershave to confront if they want to reach the twenty-somethings.99

They are spiritually sensitive and desirous of a

relationship with God. Douglas Coupland, the Canadian

born X-generation spokesperson, in his book Life after God,100

concedes his hopelessness and desperateness without God.

He speaks for a generation that longs to have a

relationship with a God who will not let them be alone;

give them hope and meaning to life; and love them

unconditionally. Coupland declares: ‘My secret is that I

need God.’101 They are experience orientated and perceive

a greater need for supernatural intervention and

solutions in their lives and problems. Yet the

contemporary Church with little exception is still in

the process of embracing and reflecting the generational

values of the Boomer generation. The Boomers are those

born in the 1940s and 1950s, and came of age in the

1960s and 1970s. They are the product of a post-war

optimism.

98Schultze, Quentin J. et al. Dancing in the Dark: Youth, Popular Culture, and theElectronic Media. Eerdmans , Grand Rapids, 1991.   99Zinn, L., Move over boomers the busters are here – and they’re angry, Business Week, 12/1992 pp74-80.100Coupland, D., Life after God, Pocket Books, New York, 1994101Ibid

123

Generation X are certainly more spiritually sensitive

than the Boomers who embraced the functional rationalism

that modernity brought. Gerali concludes that:

Unless true contextualisation takes place, the contemporary Church will not be in a place to minister to the spiritual needs of the X-generation...[it] will alienate a generation... coming of age.102

Further examination of the generational values sees a

new and widening gap in what each group find culturally

relevant: Boomers seek a polished, somewhat flawless

presentation of everything, and this has become

synonymous with those products being seen as

“excellent”; Generation Xers see this slick package as

deceptive, lacking authenticity which is what they

cautiously seek.103 In turn the Boomers interpret that as

a sign of a lack of commitment. The Xers see their jobs

as providing a means of support not a means of identity.

They work as hard as they need to but when the work is

over they can relax without guilt. This is perhaps one

of the driving factors that have given rise to the

‘whole life/work balance’ trend in employment. The

Boomer anthem that he who dies with the most toys wins is met by

102Gerali, S., ‘Paradigms in the contemporary Church that reflects generational values’ in Ward, P., (Ed) The Church and Youth Ministry, Lynx, Oxford,1995 p. 63103 Beaudoin, T., Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco,1998 & Consuming faith: Integrating who we are withwhat we buy: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing, Lanham, 2007; An interesting exception seems to be the highly polished presentation of the Hillsongs Church.

124

the Xer retort that he who dies with the most toys still dies.104

Boomers value individualism, they are a transient,

upwardly mobile, individualistic generation who value

the organisation and their place in it. They need less

in relationships because they find fulfilment in other

things. Their relationships have design and function.

Indeed they are more committed to their own personal

needs than to community and community needs.105

Generation Xers do not wish to embrace the Boomer values

and culture, instead seeing themselves as an alternative

people with alternative music and lifestyles. They have

a driving desire for more intimate relationships and

their values allow them to foster contentment with

living on less. Their individual identity is not based

on what they accomplish, but rather on who they are,

with their definition of success being the quality of

their relationships as opposed to financial gain and

social standing. They long for relationships that are

authentic, meaningful, spontaneously generated and life

long. They have known little of this in their life and

so value it above all other things and seek it at all

costs. However, relational intimacy has been mistaken as

sexual intimacy, intimacy without relationship, and has

proven to be of only transient worth and has led to a

less promiscuous view of sex and a trend to more

104Gerali, S., ‘Paradigms’, pp. 56-7105 Ibid

125

monogamous relationships, even if this means ‘serial

monogamy’ – a series of exclusive relationships. These

can be multi-generational relationships and can readily

cross ethnic, racial and gender barriers, as well as

many other areas formerly considered taboo by

generations that preceded them.106

Placing these two generations side by side, the

generational differences are striking. Yet to place the

‘Millennials’ – those who have and will come of age in

this new millennium – into the equation, gives an even

more interesting picture. The three groups do not

operate in isolation but are interlinked in their values

and ideology. To use only one example, the Boomers were

the generation that went through the ‘sexual revolution’

of the 1960s. In effect that revolution was an

ideological one, and one which the Xers view

romantically as a great breakthrough; they admire the

Boomers for it. But it was the Xers who lived it out in

practice and have counted the cost of it. The

Millennials have observed the consequences of it in the

lives of their parents’ generation and are rejecting it

as giving false liberty. They are more conservative and

look for something more authentic in their

relationships. This leaves this generation more open to

spiritual matters than the generation before them, but

the Boomer run Church is not seen as in touch with them

or providing the appropriate spiritual environment. This106 Cf. Beaudoin, T., Virtual Faith; and Gerali, S., ‘Paradigms’

126

has led to an increasing tension in churches, especially

where they are Boomer led with both Xers and Millennials

in the congregation. New Churches have been born out of

such conflicts, creating homogeneous, niche churches.107

But our task of understanding contemporary culture is

not just a matter of understanding the value systems of

the generations. One must also be aware of the language,

indeed the nomenclature of the sub-cultures and identify

the carriers of culture to the respective generations in

order to be able to read, decipher and communicate using

the signs and symbols of the age.

So how is the Church to respond in the face of the

relatively recent and rapid changes to its social

context and engage with these spiritual seekers?

Neill’s comments are still apposite: ‘Nothing in the

contemporary scene is more striking than the general

regard which is felt for Jesus Christ and the general

dislike of the organised Church which bears his name.’108

Perhaps the words of Mowrer, an American psychiatrist

who once explained to a group of Church leaders why he

was an atheist will lead us to the heart of the problem:

‘The Church has failed [me] and many others [I know]

because it has never learnt the secret of true

107 Ibid108Neill, S.C., Christian Faith Today, Penguin, London, 1955 p.13

127

community.’109

Here we find a common thread from Muggeridge, through

Mowrer and to those who have abandoned the Church but

maintain some belief in God: the Church has lost its

meaning for people who separate belief in God from the

Church. More recent research confirms this situation

with a helpful, if contentious study by Alan Jamieson

Churchless Faith: faith journeys beyond the churches,110 and the

Richter and Francis study Gone but not Forgotten111 which

concludes that the Church has substantially contributed

to this situation by itself losing sight of what it is

to be Church; it has lost a true sense of community.

Snyder, in his paper for the Lausanne Congress on World

Evangelisation in 1974, wrote:

Protestantism in general has emphasised the individual over community. Too often the Church has been more seen as a collection of saved souls than as a community of interacting personalities. But the model of Christ with his disciples, the example of theearly Church, the explicit teaching of Jesus and Paul should call us back to the importance of community. Fellowship and community life are necessary in order to prepare Christians for witness and service. Every Christian is a witness in the world, but his effectiveness depends largely on his

109cited in Watson, D., I Believe in the Church, p. 71110 Jamieson, Alan, Churchless Faith: faith journeys beyond the churches, SPCK, London, 2002 111 Richter, P., & Francis, L., Gone but not Forgotten: Church leaving and returning, DLT, London, 1998

128

sharing the enabling common life of the church.112

This is fundamental as he again asserts:

The Church is the only divinely-appointed means for spreading the gospel... Further, evangelism makes little sense divorced from the fact of the Christian community... The evangelistic call intends to call persons to the body of Christ... Biblical evangelism is church-centred evangelism. Evangelism should spark Church growth, and the life and witnessof the Church should produce evangelism. In this sense the Church is both the agent and the goal of evangelism.113

Jeff Schiffmeyer, from the Church of the Holy redeemer,

Houston, Texas vividly put it, ‘the effectiveness of our

ministry depends on the fervency of our love for one

another.’114

This sense of love and community is what appears to be

missing from the experience of those rejecting the

contemporary Church. Carr submits that ‘pastoral work

expressed in care for others has been central to the

Church’s life from its earliest days.’115

Yet one has to be careful not to interpret this care as

being merely or solely the care of individuals by

112Snyder, Howard, in Let the Earth Hear His voice, (ed. J. D. Douglas), WorldWide Publications, Folsom, 1975, p. 333 113Ibid p. 327114Cited in Watson, D., I Believe in the Church, p. 72115Carr, Wesley, Handbook of Pastoral Studies, New Library of Pastoral Care, SPCK, 1997, p.7

129

clergy. That type of care is much more a product of

modernity and the protestant emphasis on the individual

than the richer shared community life evident further

back in the history of the Church. Certainly in

contemporary practice, in many cases, such care is

failing to bridge the increasing gap between the Church

and the wider community, at least in the perception of

the majority of people outside the Church. Of course,

this breakdown in community is not restricted to the

Church, but is a mirroring, to some degree, of the wider

society.

Singing the song in an alien land – communicating in thecontemporary contextIn Britain today there is a danger that the Church will

simply go on singing its old song to archaic tunes that

results in even the curious becoming congenitally bored,

it will cause anorexia religiosa. This is described

graphically by Drane:

Once upon a time there was a mighty river. Itflowed gracefully and elegantly across the landscape. Along its banks it gave life and sustenance to the tribes of aboriginal Australians who camped by it. For many generations this river was a central focus oflife. Then, gradually, the river ceased to flow, becoming and stagnant pool. With the heat of the summer it started to dry up. Around the banks of the disappearing symbol of their security, the people watched aghast.What could be happening to them? By the driedup riverbed many sat, waiting for the river to flow once more. Yet others thought to lookaround and discovered that the river was not

130

gone. Still flowing, it had simply changed course upstream, creating a billabong on the curve at which they sat.116

So what is the way forward? I would argue that the

Church must be attentive to its social context in order

that it may continue to communicate, within its cultural

setting, Christian hope and meaning to people. The

danger is, as Walker envisages, that if this engagement

is determined solely by cultural context, ‘the gospel

will not be inculturated in contemporary society, it

will be domesticated by it’.117

Familiarity is necessary for cultural communication but

too much familiarity can lead to what Walter Brueggemann

has called ‘gospel amnesia.’118 In other words, having

learnt the languages of our pluralistic world we find we

have nothing to say.119 Here is the crux of the matter.

The relationship between form and content, between the

message and its medium, the lyrics and the tune, between

the gospel and its packaging is critically important.

There is clearly a need to experiment and be bold, but

also to be aware that the messages come through the

media and the two may be in conflict. The legitimacy and

116Drane, J., Faith in a Changing Culture, Marshall Pickering, London, 1997,p. 26, citing Peter & Sue Kaldor, Where the River Flows, Lancer, Homebush West, NSW, 1988, p. xxiii117Walker, A., Into the future, p.43118Brueggemann, W., The Bible and Postmodern Imagination: Texts Under Negotiation, SCM, London, 1993119Lesslie Newbigin argues that Christians have become timid in the face of modern beliefs and thought forms in Newbigin, L., The Gospel ina Pluralist Society, SPCK, London, 1989

131

efficacy of certain types of gospel communication are

perhaps more obviously questionable. The ‘flirty

fishing’ of the Children of God is a clear contradiction

between form and content. But Postman also questions

television as a medium as it trivialises religion by

forcing it into an entertainment format.120

That warning sounded, it must also be said that there

are many ways in which the Church, and its minister

presiding over funeral liturgies, can adapt to the

current cultural climate. Like the evangelicals at the

turn of the last century, it may need to sing the

historical song to a contemporary tune, the words

remaining true to the historical tradition of the faith,

liberating the tune from its secular usage.

In practical terms this may mean finding different entry

points into our current context and culture. I would

suggest that it is incumbent upon the Church in such a

social context to indwell the song in order to be sign,

symbol and sacrament to this age and generations. It is

through building such relationships, being such a

community, expressing pastoral care, encouraging people

to experience true spirituality through an appropriate,

worshipful environment and introducing to them the God

who is by his very nature a God of relationships and the

God of life, even beyond death, that the song may be

transmitted. 120 Postman, N., Amusing Ourselves to Death, Methuen, London, 1987

132

With the growth in secular funeral liturgies these

opportunities may soon be lost. Yet the imminent

collapse of the Church is dismissed by Hauerwas and

Willimon:

The demise of the Constantinian worldview, the gradual decline of the notion that the Church needs some sort of surrounding ‘Christian’ culture to prop it up and mould its young, is not a death lament. It is an opportunity to celebrate. The decline of the old, Constantinian synthesis between the church and world means that we [American] Christians are at last free to be faithful ina way that makes being a Christian today an exciting adventure.121

This could well be said today of the Church in England.

With a picture beginning to emerge of many people still

looking to the Church for assistance in this journey,

still spiritually seeking, but who find its message

inaccessible, unauthentic or light on meaning, the

Church clearly needs to know, live and tell its message

of hope in clear and engaging ways.

In other words, if the Church sings its song in this

alien land in a way consistent with its lyrics and with

a tune that resonates with its hearers, history may once

again prove that the Christian message articulated by

the Church is winsome and many will find enduring

comfort and be drawn to Christian faith as they seek

121 Hauerwas, S., & Willimon, W.H., Resident Aliens, p18

133

hope and meaning in difficult days. This portal of

opportunity is still open to the Church in its ministry

to the bereaved, but if it is not used well, it is

likely to close, marooning the Church to a ministry only

to the diminishing numbers of the faithful.

I will seek to apply these conclusions in my final

chapter but it is worth noting here that to allow a tune

that resonates with its hearers and yet provide lyrics

consistent with the Christian message of hope, the

representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ are

creating the potential to effectively communicate this

hope. This may well mean facilitating some

anthropocentric features in order to progress in an

engaging way to present Gospel hope to those who may

still be questioning what happens at death and who are

considering their own mortality in the face of the death

they are here marking. Perhaps if the Church had been

more engaging, the Civil client in my study may have

explored having her mother’s funeral performed in a

church context, where personal elements as well as a

message of Christian hope could have been included.

I would also wish to propose that for the Church to

point the way to enduring hope and meaning at every

stage in life, to assist people to find true spiritual

nourishment and so overcome the anorexia religiosa, it is

first to rediscover and reaffirm the meaning of true

134

hope and community for itself. Having rediscovered and

reaffirmed the true source of spiritual nourishment in

communion with God and each other, founded on the sure

and certain hope offered by the Gospel, it can indeed,

know, live and proclaim this hope to other spiritual

seekers. It is to this that I now turn.

135