Know the Truth

As I analysed my problem, I detected a layer of fear in myself that I had never encountered before, including fears of death and dying. These surprised me, and I had no idea where they had come from. At first I wondered if they originated in the study I was doing at the time on existentialist thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and others. This focused on the principles that seemed to underpin modern life and culture, and I was enjoying this particular dimension of thought. The fears, however, were real, and faith seemed so insubstantial. The challenge of the ‘absence of God’ coincided with a spiritual barrenness that I was palpably aware of. Worship seemed boring and unreal; God Himself seemed remote and without substance, and the arguments for His existence weak and foolish. Even Jesus Christ, for so long the heartbeat of my faith, now appeared to be little more than a vague historical figure, incapable ever again of inspiring enthusiasm and commitment in me.

In the priesthood, the job and life are one. I was in my mid-thirties, still very young in ministerial terms, and merely to go through the motions was hypocritical and out of the question. I knew that if I could not sort this out, I was finished as a priest. I was faced with a dreadful reality – all that I had worked for and stood for seemed perilously close to disappearing.

I tried to confide my feelings to Eileen, but she was bearing the burden of a growing family, and as a protective father and husband I felt inhibited from sharing them fully with her. Much later I realised that I was wrong to carry this all alone – Eileen was more than capable of understanding, and would have been an enormous help. Nevertheless, only those who know something of the ‘dark night of the soul’ can comprehend the darkness I was feeling then. Of course, as anyone in the priesthood knows – and for that matter anyone in any profession where strong convictions prevail – one can fool people a great deal of the time, and I am sure that few of those around me knew anything of my inner turmoil. But one cannot fool oneself. These struggles went on for many months, and were resolved in an unexpected manner.

The summer of 1972 was spent in London, Ontario, with Eileen’s widowed mother, and her sister Evelyn and brother-in-law Roy and their family, who had moved to Canada some years earlier. We were now a family of six, as Elizabeth had joined our brood eight months earlier. It was a delightful holiday with much bonding, laughter and fun. I took time out to study the Canadian Church, and read a great deal besides.

I refused all offers to preach or lecture – except one, to preach at Little Trinity, Toronto. Little Trinity, a large evangelical church, was led then by Harry Robinson, a dynamic minister and a very effective leader in the Canadian Church. The engagement necessitated a trip on my own, and I was put up in a community house on the evening prior to my sermon. I shall never forget what happened after I was shown to my room. I walked across to the bookshelves and saw a charismatic book that was very popular at the time, Aglow with the Spirit by Robert Frost. As I skimmed through its pages, I seethed with indignation at the author’s interpretation of the work of the Holy Spirit. Uncharacteristically I tossed the book away from me in disgust, and to my shame it hit a picture, which fell to the floor with a crash. As I walked over to replace the picture and retrieve the book, I found myself thinking that it is easy enough to throw away a book, but that what I could not discard was the faith, the confidence and the sheer joy of the Christian life.

I sat down and began thinking more about my faith, my spiritual state and my hopes for the future. I thought back to the start of my spiritual journey and the deep convictions I had had then, and which I no longer felt. I traced that journey of faith from my origins in the East End of London to Dagenham, and to the trust that others had placed in me. I knew that I still longed to serve God, but my personal integrity was crucial to my survival as a believer. In that quiet Toronto room I began to wonder if it was possible to recover my former assurance when it seemed that the iron of deep unbelief had entered my soul.

I decided to bury my pride, and fell to my knees. I remained wordless for a very long time. Then a prayer started to form which was, I suppose, in essence a confession of failure and an admission that intellectual pride and human arrogance had stopped me hearing God’s voice. How I longed to come home, I said to myself and to that ‘Other’ who was listening. Then something happened. There was no answering voice, no blinding light or angelic appearance – only a deepening conviction that God was meeting me now. I felt the love of God and His tenderness towards me. As I prayed out loud – a practice I strongly recommend – I felt a sense of joy and elation, of reassurance and hope as I resumed my walk with God.

I returned to my feet after what had been a very long period of quiet prayer, reflection and encounter. Even now, many years later, it is impossible to say why that moment was so important to my life and experience. Was I so longing to believe that I made myself believe? That might be possible, but so strong in me is the spirit of enquiry that such an interpretation could not sustain me in the long run. I am not the kind of person who is afraid of doubt – indeed, I regard it as an essential component of faith. The steadiness of my faith since that encounter in 1972 is for me an assurance of the reality of faith, not an illusion. It represented a ‘coming home’ to the roots that alone hold one fast. The nearest approximation I have read to what I felt then is by the scientist F.C. Happold, who in his book Religious Faith and the Twentieth Century recounts his own experience:

It happened in my room at Peterhouse in the evening of Feb 1st 1913 when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge … When I tried to record the experience at the time I used the imagery of the Holy Grail; it seemed just like that. There was, however, no sensible vision. There was just the room, with its shabby furniture and the red shaded lamp on the table. But the room was filled with a presence which in a strange way was about me and within me, like light or warmth. I was overwhelmingly possessed by Someone who was not myself, and yet I felt I was more myself than I had ever been before.

That seemed to capture the essentials of my experience.

Two things flowed immediately from this unspectacular but important event. First, the grave doubts and spiritual darkness were a thing of the past. I was now able to move on with contentment and trust – and with no little joy. Of course, such experiences of God’s love do not mean the end of doubt or distrust. Any thinking Christian will encounter the unknown, the darkness within and without. Doubt, as I have observed, is an important element for faith and may at times even be the engine that drives trust. But what I had dealt with – or rather, what God had sorted out in me – was that terrifying shadow that had clouded my faith and work.

The second result of that meeting with God was that it denoted for me an awareness of the Holy Spirit and, as a consequence, an experiential discovery of the Trinity. I guess that many evangelicals encounter God through Jesus, and this can result in an overfamiliar view of God that scorns mystery, distance and wonder. In the same way, there are Catholics whose Christian experience seems wholly theistic, avoiding any personal intimacy with Jesus Christ. I recall once overhearing a Bishop say: ‘I’m a God-the-Father kind of Christian’ – a code that intimated that he found ‘Jesus’ talk too embarrassing to handle.

My Toronto experience unexpectedly opened up the Trinity for me in a most exciting way. It dawned on me that I had never thought much about the Holy Spirit, who up to that point had been for me either a doctrine in the Creed or a mysterious force at work in the Bible. Now I saw Him as a living reality in the Church today, and at the heart of what we mean when we say ‘God’. This led me to a greater sympathy with Charismatic theology and practice, whilst still rejecting the two-stage baptismal theology that some believed in. Where I found myself overlapping with Charismatic thought was in the realisation that there was so much to discover, experience and understand about God’s love. In the wonderful words of John Taylor, Bishop of Winchester: ‘Every Christian is meant to possess his possessions and many never do.’

This new experience of God’s love in Christ, made known again to me through the Holy Spirit, was like a second wind to me in my work. I returned to St John’s bursting with energy and eager to get on with the job. The remaining three years of my time at the college were very creative ones, in which I completed my first book, I Believe in Man, which explored human nature and sexuality. But the Toronto experience led me to reconsider my future. After nine years in two theological colleges it was time to move on, and put into practice all I had gained in theology and experience. In 1975, at the age of thirty-nine, I became vicar of St Nicholas’s, Durham.

6 Challenges of Growth

‘I have no difficulty in saying how I conceive the work of a parish priest. My object is first of all to gather a congregation; large, converted, instructed and missionary-hearted and then set it to work. Forge, temper and sharpen your sword – then wield it.

Peter Green of Salford

THE DECISION TO LEAVE ST JOHN’S and return to parish ministry was not taken lightly. There were those who felt that I should stay on at St John’s and consolidate my work, but the ‘Toronto experience’ had given me a thirst to work out what I felt God was teaching me. I considered a number of parishes which the Bishop of Southwell asked me to visit, but an invitation to St Nicholas’s, Durham, caused my heart to beat in excitement. St Nic’s, as generations of Durham undergraduates still call it affectionately, is a leading evangelical church in the north of England, with a distinguished teaching ministry. Interestingly, the previous incumbent was also a ‘George’ and his wife an ‘Eileen’. George Marchant had served for twenty-five years as vicar of St Nic’s before becoming Archdeacon of Auckland. A fine scholar and pastor, he had served the church devotedly and would be a hard act to follow.

Our first visit to St Nic’s confirmed my suspicions that there was much to do there, but that suited me down to the ground. I needed a real challenge, and a cosy bolt-hole was not for me. We met the churchwardens, Gerald Brooke and Dick Bongard, and hit it off with them at once. They were frank about the church’s problems, which were many. The local congregation was very small; there was hardly any youth or Sunday-school work to speak of; the buildings were in bad shape; the student congregation had shrunk ever since George Marchant had left, wooed away by the Charismatic, Catholic style of another city-centre parish, St Margaret’s; giving was appalling; and there was too much reliance on a small but dedicated lay team who had struggled manfully during the interregnum.

I was to learn some very important lessons during the exciting seven years I spent at St Nic’s. First, one has to have a clear theological vision. I made no secret of mine when the churchwardens and the Church Council asked me what I stood for. I replied that I was first of all a Christian who accepted other Christians of all mainstream traditions as full members of the Body of Christ. Although the Church is hopelessly divided, all baptised Christians are members of God’s one family. I remember quoting the statement attributed to Archbishop William Temple: ‘I believe in one holy, catholic and apostolic church – but regret that it doesn’t exist.’ I went on to say that I was a cradle Anglican, able to work and live with people from other traditions in one Church. Although an evangelical – and absolutely convinced of the role of the Bible as the ultimate authority in matters of faith and morals – I did not regard the evangelical tradition as the repository of the total truth about God. Furthermore, I continued, I believed that the emerging Charismatic Movement in the Church of England had much to teach us. It would be my intention, subject to Church Council agreement, to bring in some of these new elements in worship and their spiritual gifts to make the faith more appealing and exciting. I am glad to say that the Council were prepared to take a risk by giving their wholehearted backing to this vision of change.

Secondly, I found that one has to have clear objectives. For me the overall objective was to make St Nic’s an open, accessible church where everyone was welcome. I believed in growth, and aimed to increase the congregation and improve the giving. The church was positioned perfectly at the heart of the small city but was closed six days a week, when shoppers, workers, students and tourists crowded the streets, and only open on Sunday, when there was hardly anybody around. I wanted St Nic’s to be available to all, truly a serving and caring church.

In order to achieve this objective of growth, the character of worship had to change. Worship at St Nic’s was solidly morning and evening prayer according to the Book of Common Prayer, but there was no choir to lead or enliven it. With a heavy heart I came to realise that the services were, frankly, very boring. Furthermore, the coldness of the church building meant that there was little that might attract casual worshippers to come regularly. Although there was a regular 8 a.m. communion service every Sunday, celebrations of the Holy Communion at other times amounted to the final part of the 1662 Service, used after a morning or evening service for the handful of worshippers who remained. This was plainly unsatisfactory. The missionary situation the Church was now in demanded a fresh approach to worship – it had to be accessible, friendly, joyful, yet also reverential. I was confident that we could make it so, with the talents of the many able people in the congregation. Indeed, as I drew upon these talents in creating a music group, and in encouraging children to bring their instruments along when a church orchestra was formed, the congregation increased and with it a deepening sense of fellowship.

Not everyone liked the changes to the worship, of course. A small core of devoted members of the congregation felt that I was changing the character and identity of St Nic’s to such an extent that it was no longer their church. One evening in my second year a former churchwarden asked me to meet twenty-two mainly elderly members of the congregation. I was shocked and saddened to learn of their deep distress. The last thing I wanted was to cut them off from their spiritual home. As we talked I realised that the conversation was wholly one-sided. They were only concerned about their worship, what the church meant to them and how important the Book of Common Prayer was to them. There seemed to be no awareness of the missionary context of the Church, and the necessity of adapting to meet the needs of a new hour. The Church of England had been experiencing years of decline, which accelerated during the 1960s and 1970s as I began my own ministry. The situation was so serious that no regular churchgoer could afford to be sanguine. The need for change, I felt, should have been obvious to all.

I realised that there was no real meeting of minds; yet it was important to keep everyone within the family of the church. We therefore replaced the 8 a.m. communion service with a new traditional service at 9 a.m. All the services with their new styles of worship attracted greater numbers, including this one, although its growth was more modest.

This was a very important lesson to me, showing that it was possible – indeed, essential – to include the more traditional element in church life. That is not to say that the other services were extreme, by any means. I saw no reason to depart from the Church’s expectations that clergy should use the official prayers and should robe properly. It was and remains my conviction that liturgies, appropriately and imaginatively used, and the traditional dress of clergy are not barriers to understanding.

Another lesson I learned at St Nic’s was that if there is to be growth in church life, it cannot be accomplished by the clergy alone. It is imperative to utilise the gifts and abilities of lay people. The problem was that at the beginning I had to do everything. This was a shock to the system, having served my curacy at St Mary’s, Islington, where I was used to working in a team, and having attended two theological colleges where manpower was readily available. I realised that I had to bring about a change of culture in which the leadership of the church was corporate rather than singular. Of course there were lay leaders there from the beginning, but there were many others whose talents were not being tapped. Over the next few years I gradually broadened the leadership team.

This was not without its problems. One of the main challenges when lay people bring their gifts and skills to the task of leadership is the tension between the corporate and the specific responsibility for the ‘cure of souls’ entrusted to the clergy. The church, through the Bishop, had given me responsibility for building up the congregation, and the Bishop’s words at my induction rang through my mind again and again: ‘Receive this charge which is both yours and mine.’ I could not democratise this role too much without completely abdicating from it. On the other hand, neither could I run away from a desire to share my leadership, and to accept the challenge when somebody else came up with a brilliant idea or when I found myself in a minority.

In my third year this became a very real issue. I began to feel uncomfortable and even threatened by the fact that more and more people were sharing the exercise of leadership. At about this time I shared the platform at a meeting with a leading clinical psychologist, Dr Frank Lake. I told him privately that although the work was going well at St Nic’s, I had a problem: ‘As I widen the team I’m finding that I’m delegating areas of ministry where I’m strong, and being left with areas of ministry where I’m weak-’

Before I could finish, Frank beamed at me and said, ‘That’s wonderful, George! How few clergy have the grace and ability to surrender what they’re strong at and bear the burden of weakness!’ Without another word, he left for another seminar he was leading.

Frustrated, I initially did not consider this to be an adequate reply to my comment, but as I drove home I began to see that he had in fact given me a profound response. He was saying: ‘Leadership includes the ability to trust others and give them freedom to flourish. A true leader keeps watch on the whole, but is prepared to exercise humble ministries as well.’ That was an important lesson, and my sense of feeling threatened when leadership was shared diminished – indeed, my confidence in the exercise of my own leadership deepened.

Another thing I realised was that we had a very serious problem, in that there was hardly any children’s work going on. Even though St Nic’s was fortunate to have its own youth centre, it was rarely used. A young priest, Graeme Rutherford, who was doing a master’s degree at the university, was attempting to create an open youth club, but it was an uphill struggle and the results were meagre as far as church attendance was concerned.

It was the condition of the church accounts that gave the impetus to a change of attitude. As I pored over the accounts prior to my first Annual General Meeting of the Church Council, it dawned on me that they were a very good indicator of what we considered important. Our spending showed very bleakly that mission did not matter to us, and that areas like Sunday school and youth work were deemed unimportant. Indeed, the finances showed that the church was interested in maintaining itself only by spending money on buildings, repairs and heating.

I set the church a challenge. From now on, I said, our missionary giving must start at 10 per cent of gross income, and not what we can spare when all expenses are paid. Furthermore, I continued, we must have a realistic budget for children and youth work, for the reason that a church that does not invest in the young is doomed. Again the Parochial Church Council backed this overwhelmingly, but sadly the Treasurer himself was the first casualty of the strategy. He resigned because ‘the church would not be able to afford it’. The interesting thing is that when a congregation is set a healthy challenge, it will respond to it. This proved to be the case at St Nic’s. Giving soared as we created a missionary budget aimed not at simply maintaining ourselves, but at attracting new members.

Perhaps one of the most exciting developments was the creation of ‘Watersports’. The idea started when a new member of the congregation, David White, came to me one day and said hesitantly, ‘I know you’re appealing for people to help with youth work. At the age of sixty-two I’m hardly the sort that youth workers are made of, but I have a boat, and I’m prepared to take children sailing.’ From this small beginning developed a number of children’s and youth activities which continued for many years. Many dozens of families from inside and outside the church community, as well as a number of youngsters from areas of social deprivation, learned sailing and canoeing with the church in the Lake District. As a consequence many new children were fed into the Sunday schools, and often their parents began to attend the church.

I wanted the church to serve the wider community. For me, Christianity was too important to be left to churches and Christians. My theology was, and is, that God is at work in the world, and uses people of all faiths and none to further His purposes. Furthermore, caring practically for the body and the mind is as much a priority of the gospel as caring spiritually for the soul – indeed, the two cannot be separated. So I had no hesitation in raising the question: How may we serve our community better? As I saw it, healthy churches are relevant to the needs of those they serve.

It was difficult at first to see how St Nic’s was serving the wider community. I decided to do my own private survey, by going to people outside the church to see what they thought of it and what suggestions they might have. I approached the Mayor, the Chief Executive of the city council, market traders, shopkeepers, shoppers and others. The results were sobering as well as challenging. For the majority of them St Nic’s was ‘just there’, part of the landscape of Durham, and they had no expectations of it. But when I pressed the question: ‘What would you like to see the church providing?’ the answers were positive. Some wanted the church to be open, so they could go in and pray. Others suggested that they would like to see church people more involved in the life of the city, and St Nic’s more visible in providing help to the elderly, the young and the destitute.

This deepened my own resolve to get involved in the life of the city. I became a part-time Prison Chaplain at Low Newton Prison, which held over three hundred young men and about forty women. I spent up to twelve hours a week in the prison, and found it a healthy balance to the middle-class life of St Nic’s. I also became Chaplain to the Royal Air Force Club, where as an ex-RAF man I was made very welcome. This brought me into close contact with another side of Durham life, that of ordinary citizens very similar to the people I grew up with in Dagenham. Another area occupied a great deal of my time – I chaired the local committee of the Cyrenaian organisation, which dedicates itself to serving homeless people. From my days in Islington I felt I had a calling to help the members of this underclass, who usually drop out of mainstream community life. Today they constitute an even more serious problem than they did then. I and two other men of my age, one an agnostic, the other an atheist, made an unlikely trio as we set about helping such people get back on their feet by overseeing the management of a hostel where they could stay. Homeless men were frequent visitors to the vicarage as well, especially around dinnertime, when Eileen would make up a sandwich and a cup of tea for them.