As a member of Monty Python, Sir Michael Palin revelled in playing characters including the Boring Prophet, Pontius Pilate and one of the three wise men in the Life of Brian.Now he has joined an altogether different holy crusade: a movement geared towards protecting the future of UK churches.Expressing his concern about places of worship falling into disrepair, Palin, 78, said they formed a vital part of the country’s history, as he put his weight behind the National Churches Trust’s (NCT) campaign to preserve the sites.Palin, who is vice-president of the organisation, said: “Churches remain a vital and much-loved part of the UK’s heritage and we can’t let them fall into neglect and disuse.“There is hope. More and more churches are adapting to the modern world, providing not just spiritual comforts but a range of valuable services to local people such as food banks and youth clubs.“We must build on this and encourage people of all backgrounds to find hope and relevance in their local churches.”The NCT began what it describes as a debate to highlight the struggles of buildings around the country after warning an increasing number are facing closure.The future of churches debate will highlight “the community, economic, heritage and spiritual benefits of churches”, the charity said.Palin said: “If you care as much as I do about the future of these much-loved buildings, do get involved with the debate about the future of churches and help to shape their future.”The number of churches open and being used for worship has fallen from about 42,000 to 39,800 in the past ten years, the NCT said. The closure rate has been particularly acute in some inner-city areas.At its peak, in 1941, the Church of England had 18,666 churches. That number is set to fall below 16,000.A survey found that 12 dioceses were considering up to five closures in the next two to five years.Nine planned six to 12, and five planned up to 40. “That’s anything between 131 and 368,” said the Friends of Friendless Churches, which looks after 59 “redundant but beautiful” places of worship.
While most delegates deliberate about whether to drive, fly or catch the train to the Cop26 summit in Glasgow, a dozen or so pilgrims have just spent the past 55 days getting there on foot from London. Members of the female-run faith group Camino to Cop26 have been walking a 500-mile route since early September.Theirs is just one of a number of pilgrimages reaching Glasgow this weekend, with about 250 individuals expected, some coming from as far as Poland and Germany – one group has walked more than 1,000 miles from Sweden. Extinction Rebellion Scotland says their arrival will mark the “opening ceremony” for nonviolent protests planned in the Scottish city and around the world during the UN climate talks.From 18-year-old students to 74-year-old grandmothers, members of Camino to Cop26 – which is part of Extinction Rebellion – have been raising awareness about the climate and ecological crisis along the way. On some days they had 70 people walking with them. The group spent nights sleeping on the floors of churches, village halls and community centres, raising £17,000 to cover their costs, with any additional money going to support the work of climate activists in developing countries.Wandering monk-like from place to place and surviving off the hospitality of local people is an ancient activity – in this case with a modern spin. The group’s support vehicle was an electric van packed full of lentils and rice, and along the way they joined samba players under Birmingham’s Spaghetti Junction, waved flags above the M6, and found spots for wild swimming. They also consumed a lot of vegan dinners.There were the same old aches and pains – blisters, dodgy knees, achilles heel injuries – as well as the challenge of spending eight weeks with a group of people they had never met before. In the 14th century’s Canterbury Tales, Chaucer wrote about pilgrims telling stories to entertain one another along the way, and little has changed on that front. Belting out songs and poetry was encouraged, and there was even an impromptu barn dance thanks to one pilgrim who was good enough to carry a fiddle and bagpipes.They were only able to wash about once a week. “I think I’m quite smelly at this point,” says Steph Alderton, 26, who is a few days from Glasgow when I speak to the group. She has everything in a 10kg rucksack: one change of clothes, a few pairs of extra socks, a sleeping bag, sleeping mat, book, and packet of peanuts – standard packing. “You have to let go of your daily shower. The older people in the group say that was normal when they were young.”Participants have a spectrum of beliefs, from devout Jews, Christians and Buddhists to committed atheists, like Alderton, who left her job as a career adviser at a school in Birmingham in June to put more energy into climate activism. The notion of “intention” is what makes a walk a pilgrimage, and for Steph it was not about reflecting on God, but learning about the UK’s people and wildlife.“It makes me feel so sad to know so many animals are going extinct. That’s what drew me into the climate crisis, and walking the length of the country seemed like a good way to reflect on that connection with wildlife,” says Alderton, who liked the outreach side of it and found speaking to people in their own communities made it easier to connect. “Everyone needs one issue that is their gateway into activism and for many people that will be a local issue which leads them on to thinking about things more generally.”The Rev Helen Burnett, vicar of St Peter and St Paul’s Church in Chaldon, Surrey, helped organise the pilgrimage. As a Christian, she says she believes she must act now to fulfil her calling to “love thy neighbour” and care for vulnerable people. Inadvertently channelling Forrest Gump, Burnett led a Sunday service at her parish and then just kept walking. She was able to join the pilgrims for about half the time, yo-yoing up and down so she could spend the other half fulfilling duties in her parish.She was moved to walk because she believes more and more people are discovering God is in nature, not a building: “So many people, when you ask when they feel most connected to God will say ‘on top of a mountain’ or ‘when I’m in a garden’, and I think that’s really powerful. That was part of the Celtic tradition and the history of the church is we’ve sort of domesticated God and popped him inside a nice, sanitised box, but people find God in the outside world.” A few of her parishioners joined her on the walk.
We hope you can join us at St Peter's Church, Hascombe at 10am tomorrow for our service of Holy Communion.If you can't you can't be there in person you can join us remotely by clicking on the following link.https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87383629849?pwd=NDRmUTFFKzBmS252S1VqWUR4eHZZUT09Meeting ID: 873 8362 9849</div>Passcode: 569609
I’ve met the Queen twice. Once in a cathedral and another time in her garden. I say ‘met’, though neither encounter constitutes what could normally be described as meeting someone. We shook hands in a line-up, all of us dressed a bit funny. Both times I was too self-consciously focused on my own etiquette to use the three or four seconds of our meeting to establish any sort of connection. Remember, “Your Majesty” first, then subsequently “ma’am” which rhymes with spam not palm. I never got to the “ma’am” bit on either occasion. I bowed my head, we shook hands, she said something nice, I smiled and agreed, she smiled and moved on.I wonder how many times she has done this? 10,000 people a year? For 69 years. Round up a bit. That’s three quarters of a million. A YouGov poll in 2018 found that 31% of the British public said that they have met or seen the Queen. By a long distance, she has been the most met monarch in history. Which is extraordinary given how shy she is. “You were so shy” Prince Philip recalled, thinking of their first meeting. She once told a friend that she was “terrified” of sitting next to strangers “in case they talk about things I’ve never heard of.” She soldiered on anyway. Fewer people will meet her now. Rest, withdrawal, and slight diminishments are her future. After all, she is 95. More audiences on Zoom, which she won’t like. Back to her Tupperware packed lunches and jigsaw puzzles by the fire. No more gin in the evening, on doctors orders. Her troublesome children to worry about. And now a widow. Her vulnerability only underlining once again how central she remains to this nation.But this vulnerability has long been a characteristic of her reign. Just 5ft 4, she walks among suited and uniformed men towering over her. The only Prime Minister to ever look her directly in the eye was Margaret Thatcher. She was just 25, little more than a girl, when she acceded to the throne, and 27 when the Archbishop of Canterbury placed the responsibility of the crown upon her head. 277 million people worldwide were gathered round their small black and white television sets.What they didn’t see was the central moment of the whole ceremony. Then the Queen was disrobed of her crimson cloak and her jewellery removed. Here she sat in a simple white dress on a wooden throne to be anointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury with holy oil, a mixture of ambergris, civet, orange flowers, roses, jasmine, cinnamon, musk and benzoin, ladled from a 12th century spoon. This is when the choir sings ‘Zadok the Priest’, its words extracted from the first Book of Kings, sung at every English coronation since 973 AD. These echoes of the Hebrew Bible are deliberate. She, like Solomon, was dedicated to God. Kings and Queens are supposed to be servants too. In Christian terms, like the servant king who emptied himself of power in order to achieve His most important work.This bit was too raw for the cameras, the daylight of technology threatening to cheapen the magic of sanctity, to paraphrase Walter Bagehot. The monarchy, he wrote in <em>The English Constitution</em><em>, </em>was the “dignified” branch of power. Romantic, awesome, sublime. The government was merely “efficient” — cabinet ministers and civil servants chewing pencils and pushing paper.Monarchy is a religious business — or else it would be nothing more than a technical constitutional necessity that sits at the intersection of money and class and power. And the essence of this religious business, the unseen holiness as it were, is a kind of vulnerability that places one’s life in the service of other people and of God. This is why all these headlines we now see about the Queen being “tired” and “exhausted” reflect something of the heart of her ministry — for that is what her role remains.In theological terms, the crucial word is <em>kenosis</em>, which means self-emptying. Christ “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” is how Paul’s letter to the people of Philippi puts it. What is being described here is a process by which the ego is set aside for the fullness of God’s love to enter into a human life. The less of me, the more of You. In this way vulnerability is regarded as the defining feature of precisely the sort of holiness that was there in that moment of the Queen’s anointing. A ‘tired” Queen is an exemplification of just this sort of kenotic servant monarchy. In other words, a “tired” Queen is the perfect sacrificial embodiment of what a monarch should be. And demonstrates why the well-being centred virtue-signalling showiness of some of her relatives is such a grotesque parody of the role.But to put this in more secular terms, vulnerability is the means of connection between people. Our vulnerability is how we are open to the other and the other is open to us. Which is why — and I don’t think I am just imagining this — the present vulnerability of the Queen is establishing a renewed kind of intimacy between the Queen and her subjects. Given the formality within which she is encased, it is entirely inappropriate to say this — but I want to give her a hug. We don’t need the handshakes or the curious peering into a familiar woman’s face to try and work out what is going on behind all that well-rehearsed small talk. The more vulnerable she becomes, the more human, and so also the more fully a Queen in the theological sense.Such public defencelessness is rare, at least in leaders. The last one I can remember achieving anything like this was Pope John Paul II. His last few years — and these may well be the last few years of the Queen’s life — were marked by a reduced physical capacity, while at the same time he became a more intense version of what he was called to be. To be a Pope is partly to perform a certain function. But when ill health robbed him of the ability to perform that function, all the job description utilitarian bits of being Pope dropped away and his, as it were, symbolic role was more fully exposed.A tired dying Pope turned out to be a beautiful example of what a Pope should be. In his pain, and specifically in the dignity of his final years, he expressed a kind of solidarity with the suffering of the world. That, in turn, modelled the solidarity of God with human beings as expressed in the final hours of Jesus, a king, a man crowned with thorns. In this vulnerability, he became most fully the Pope as saint.Thankfully, the Queen is not yet this ill. But she is 95 and easily the longest serving monarch in history. Her Christian faith has long been a comfort to her. And this is especially evident now, in the twilight of her years. Indeed, the version of the Queen that we are now seeing is the greatest of her roles as our monarch. It is not important if she misses COP26 or other political talking shops. She is doing something much more important now.She is showing us what human life is all about when we loosen our grip on power and status and function. Her last act may well be her finest.
