In my last post I suggested one way of thinking about current varieties of Christianity as a distinction between hard churches and soft churches. I now want to talk about the implications of this for mission. Both the hard and soft churches want more people to become Christian and join the church, even if they disagree on what that actually means and involves. How do these different churches relate to those who are non-church (who don’t believe or aren’t currently involved in a church)?

I want to start with another (doubtless simplistic) diagram about how people move between being hard, soft or non-church:

People may start at any of the three options (basically what they are raised in as children), but over their life they are likely to move between them. What I’m interested in here is why and how they move in and out of both. The main distinction is whether you drift in or out of an option (slow, gradual movement) or whether you jump (sudden decision). Hard churches are very much set up for jumping in. You have to make that commitment, leap of faith, decision etc, whether you’ve previously been non-church/non-Christian or whether you’ve been in a soft church that the hard church doesn’t consider to be properly Christian. In contrast, you can drift into a soft church and never have to make a definitive commitment to membership if you don’t want to (going onto the coffee-making rota is probably the nearest thing).

Equally, in a soft church it’s possible to drift out, gradually losing contact with it. When people leave hard churches, however, it’s more likely to be dramatic. They decide their church is wrong and they reject it by jumping out of it, sometimes abandoning churches and Christianity completely, sometime finding a soft church instead. (I’m not considering here the frequent phenomenon of people jumping out of one hard church and into another). There are some people, such as me, who gradually become disillusioned with a hard church and drift out of it into a soft church, but I think that’s less common.

Hard church mission

If you’re looking at mission now in the UK (because mission is very culture-specific), how effective are the hard and soft churches’ approaches? The hard churches’ story for the last 20 years is that people are jumping in (converting) to hard churches while drifting out of soft churches. But I see increasing problems with the standard hard church approach to mission and also some possibilities within the standard soft church approach (from the perspective of somebody in a growing soft church).

Firstly, the standard hard church method. This is:

1) Get people along
2) Tell them the message
3) Get commitment

There are increasing problems at all three stages:

Stage 1 - it’s harder to get people to come to any event/activity, just because there are increasingly more things going on and more opportunities. If you have a choice between X and nothing much in a specific time and place, you’re going to get more people at X than if you have a choice of X, Y or Z. Think of it as the real-world equivalent of multi-channel TV: it’s harder to get an audience for any individual event.

Stage 2 - it is becoming more difficult to tell people the hard church message. One reason is that people are less familiar with any aspects of Christianity and so it takes longer to explain the message than when preachers could assume most people had at least a cultural background of Christianity. (Christianity has never been a religion of conversion at the point of a sword, but that’s mainly because by the time you’ve explained the Trinity your sword arm would have dropped from fatigue). When terms such as sin or salvation are completely alien to your hearers, you need a lot of additional groundwork: you have to get people to come back to hear repeatedly before committing, and you’re obviously going to get more attrition.

Secondly, the hard church message is now more offensive/incongruous to people. Attitudes to homosexuality are the obvious example (although not the only one). I found some figures from the British Social Attitudes website, which has some very useful time-series. I might post more about that later, but here are some highlights (rounded up to nearest percentage point). Those believing that sexual relations between two adults of the same sex are always wrong: 1983 50%, 2006 24%. Among those who identify as having no religion, the figures are 1983 40%, 2006 13%. There is also a stark age gap: in 2006, 19% of 18-23 year olds thought same-sex sexual relations were always wrong and 14% of 55-59 year olds, as compared to 29% of 60-64 year olds and 46% of those 65+. Any church which makes condemnation of all homosexual acts an important part of their image or message is going to struggle to win over non-Christians, particularly young non-Christians. (‘The Bible tells me so’ is only a good argument to those who already accept the Bible).

Thirdly, it’s hard to get across the hard church message without coming across as authoritarian or patronising. That’s because it largely consists of telling people that they are wrong and you are right (or even more patronising, that there is something wrong with their lives that they don’t themselves realise). In a society that is increasingly hostile to being told what to do, that is a message that is less appealing.

Stage 3 - it is harder to get a commitment from anybody about anything now. If you don’t want to have a year-long contract for your mobile phone (in case a better offer comes along), why would you sign-up to a lifelong commitment to a church or to God? More that that, the hard churches’ undoubted ability at ‘marketing’ Christianity, is now becoming less of an advantage and more of a liability. People are generally far more aware of and hostile to sales techniques and far more sceptical about the existence of ulterior motives behind friendly approaches. And given that hard church mission almost always has a ulterior motive (to ‘win souls’), it’s hard to avoid this being spotted.

Soft church mission

If those are new problems for hard churches, what about soft churches? Their traditional problem (and it still exists) is shrinkage, which in turn weakens their appeal (who wants to join a group in decline)? My guess, however, is that the shrinkage is now mostly due to members of the congregation dying off without being replaced, rather than living people leaving the church. The big outflux from the soft church was when church-going stopped being part of social respectability, which in the UK had happened by the 1970s (unlike in the US). Most soft churches now have a majority of committed members (even though exactly what they are committed to may vary and the church itself doesn’t demand commitment). The difficult issue is how they can encourage non-church people (or ex-church people) to drift in and stay in.

It’s now that the standard soft church mission method, with its obvious flaws, may come into its own. This model is:

1) Help people/be there for people
2) ?
3) Church membership

The weakness of the soft church method has always been that it doesn’t convert church contact to church commitment (or in business language, sales prospects to sales). But that leaving of the initiative to the other party may now be an advantage, in a culture increasingly hostile to marketing. An emphasis on respecting a person’s choice, whether or not it’s one you agree with, is increasingly welcome to people. Paradoxically, we may have not to mind whether or not people become Christians to encourage them to become Christians. (It’s all too easy in hard churches for rejection of God and rejection of us to get tangled up together).

I think the soft church also now has possibilities in helping/being there for people that the hard churches are increasingly losing. For example, it is easier for soft churches to be involved with schools in an increasingly multicultural society. Most schools do not want to get involved with anyone who will alienate the Muslim/Sikh/non-believing children and parents in the school by telling them they are wicked/going the wrong way/misguided/spiritually blind. Relatively bland messages are necessary for such work.

Similarly, non-church people still often want to turn to churches for celebrations (baptisms, marriages) and in times of trouble (funerals, relationship break-up, illness etc.) What they may hear from a hard church is ‘we won’t do a service unless you’re prove you’re one of us’ or ‘your problems are due to your lack of faith’ or ‘your mother won’t go to heaven because she didn’t believe’. It’s hard to get alongside people at such moments if you take a judgmental attitude: the fuzzier theology of soft churches is useful here.

What I think soft churches need to do is develop these ways of being alongside people and also adopt a different marketing approach: ‘If you like this, you might try this’. If you like the children’s crib service, why not try the monthly family service? My current church is proving quite good at this approach to building relationships. There are bereavement/pastoral care teams and also ‘follow-up’ options: for example, an annual memorial service for all the families who have had funerals there recently. Similarly, as well as baptism visitors, those who have been baptised recently get individual invitations to particular family events at church. These repeated contacts may sometimes lead to a person developing a relationship with the church; if they don’t, they are nevertheless still valuable, as signs of concern for and interest in others.

What my discussion of mission finally shows, I hope, is that both hard churches and soft churches are necessary. Some of the hard churches in Anglicanism seem to be in the mood now that the soft churches should be driven out, that they are of no use, just as in some liberal Anglican thought there is the fantasy of the hard churchmen just going away and not dragging us down anymore. But in fact both hard and soft church Anglicanism have their own unique selling points or ecological niches and Christianity as a whole would be impoverished without them. However much hard churches may think that soft churches aren’t truly Christian, they can reach out to people who the hard churches can’t. Meanwhile, members of soft churches must also be willing to recognize that there are some in hard churches who are truly holy: people whose expressed values may seem reactionary, but whose personal life shows the love of God. If soft church members accept that there are many ways to God, they have to allow that some people may be attracted and supported by a black-and-white approach, even if they personally aren’t. It is little better to have one true liberal way to God than one true Conservative way. Soft churches and hard churches may not be comfortable with one another, but they are stronger together than apart.

The recent turmoil within the Anglican Communion over women bishops and homosexuality is showing that the old classifications of different traditions/theologies don’t work anymore. Referring to ‘traditionals’ and ‘liberals’ has always been a simplification, but even the threefold division of ‘Anglo-Catholics, Evangelicals and Liberals’ doesn’t seem very helpful now, given both the splits within the Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic traditions and the rapprochement of some Evangelicals with Anglo-Catholics in FOCA). There’s also the fact that whatever the official Catholic line, there are clearly quite a lot of Catholics who don’t have a problem with women priests or homosexual acts. I’m starting to think that a more useful classification for many purposes (and one that goes beyond Anglicans) is that between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ churches, denominations and groups (using churches to mean individual congregations, denominations the aggregation of churches, and groups to mean other fellowship/support networks).

I would say that hard churches/denominations/groups are made up of people who want to believe Christian beliefs and do Christian acts. Their leaders are teachers and correctors, or perhaps tour guide leaders. Their theology is of clear boundaries between church/world, us/them, good/evil. They are a community of saints, those fully committed to God. Their tendency is to reject society’s mores unless they can be shown to be good.

Soft churches/denominations/groups are made up of people who want to be Christian (though they may have very varied ideas of what this means). Their leaders are supporters of learning, advisers, or perhaps map-makers for individual explorers. Their theology is far more fuzzy on boundaries. They are what St Augustine would see as a mixed community, both the fully committed and the less committed to God. Their tendency is to accept society’s mores unless they can be shown to be bad.

Some denominations have both kinds of church/group co-existing in them. For example, while remaining an Anglican all my life, I have gone from a broad rural church (soft) via Evangelical Anglicans at St Aldate’s Oxford (hard) to a liberal suburban church (soft). A schematic look at the history of Christianity in England is also revealing. (I’m focusing on England here, not because the Scottish and Welsh denominations aren’t important, but because I don’t know them so well):

From the fourth century, when Christianity became the official religion in the Western Roman Empire, Catholicism has always comprised a hard group (often, though not invariably of professed religious) of very committed believers, inside a much wider soft group which practices, or at least accepts ‘folk religion’ and the ‘mediocre’ Christians, whose well-being St Augustine was concerned for.

This ‘hard within soft’ structure is inevitable for any would-be universal/national denomination, and so, although Protestants started off trying to create purely hard denominations (comprised only of the godly), the Elizabethan Church of England ended up again as largely soft, with a hard centre.

From the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, the main development was denominations splitting off from the Church of England and each other (mainly to form hard denominations, but also some soft ones, such as Unitarians). For the first time, there were also some people (though not yet very many) who became non-church, no longer adhering, even nominally, to any religion.

Between about 1800 and 1960, as Cameron Brown has shown in The Death of Christian Britain, there isn’t a simple narrative of advance followed by decline in the English churches. Evangelical ideas of deep personal commitment had an important effect on people throughout the period, and there were times of revival, such as the 1950s, even if there was also a countervailing tendency for people to drift away from religion altogether. The overall trend was for the hard groups/churches within Protestant denominations to expand slowly, while the overall size of the denomination declined. Although I’m less well-up on the Roman Catholic church in England at the time (which also had a zealous hard core, surrounded by groups of those affiliate more through cultural traditions e.g. some working class Irish), I think the same move towards greater commitment by believers who remained, with slight decline in overall numbers was also seen there.

Then came the 1960s and the collapse of Christianity in England. I think it’s important to point out that this wasn’t due to ‘liberalism’ in the church. The soft church in the 1950s wasn’t generally liberal, because society as a whole wasn’t liberal; when soft groups/churches ‘conformed to the world’ it was by too great an emphasis on social respectability. Liberal Christianity (among Anglicans, Catholics and other denominations) was a reaction to the problems of Christianity, not the cause of them. The changes by soft churches weren’t successful at stemming the collapse, but nor was a hard-line approach: the Catholics under Paul VI didn’t do a lot better.

The hard church view from the 1980s onwards (Evangelical Anglicans, new Protestant movements, traditionalist Catholics) has been that soft churches/denominations (now mostly liberal, though some still broad church) are doomed, whereas hard churches/denominations are booming. This is true to a certain extent, but the hard church success has been limited. Despite all the prayers and excitement over nearly 30 years, there hasn’t been mass conversion or ‘revival’ in England, and it’s hard to see it suddenly happening (which may just show to the hard church that I don’t have enough faith). I want to write in my next post about future mission and hard/soft churches, but I think it’s important to see first of all where we’ve come from.

The title does not refer to additional borgs, but lists inspired by Carl Pyrdum’s recent challenge to sum up the Middle Ages in seven words (or more precisely seven concepts). There have been many excellent suggestions made in response and I’m not sure that I can add sensibly to them. But what did get me thinking was Carl’s comments summing up the results. As he points out: ‘the most skippable medieval centuries were the sixth, seventh, and tenth’. For the early medievalists among us, then, how about seven words/concepts to sum up each of those centuries? Here are my attempts:

Sixth century:
Ethnonemesis
Avars
Justinian
Gregory the Great
Pottery analysis
Radegund
Boethius

Seventh century:
Islam
Formularies
Microeconomies
Christological controversies
Isidore of Seville
Double monasteries
Austrasians

Tenth century [updated due to second thoughts]
Hrotsvita
Danegeld [replacing Battle of Maldon]
Apocalyptic thought
Cluny
Hungarians
Cordoba
Towns [replacing castles]

Add in your suggestions (though please, if possible, avoid having King Arthur appear in more than one century).

Kate Cooper’s The Fall of the Roman Household (CUP, 2007) is a very interesting book, but its title is misleading and because of its structure it takes quite a while to work out what its subject actually is. It’s best described as ‘An analysis of late antique senatorial Christianity with special reference to the treatise ‘Ad Gregoriam in palatio’’, but that’s not a title to sell many copies.

Kate Cooper has worked on the text ‘Ad Gregoriam’ before (both in The Virgin and the Bride and in several subsequent articles: see her list of publications), but her main focus has previously been on the gender aspects of the treatise. In this work she looks at in connection with a number of other late antique texts by and addressed to western aristocrats in the late fourth to early sixth century, Her argument is that there was a sustained attempt by authors to inspire men and women in such circles to a Christian life, while respecting their cultural traditions. In a world where traditional Roman values were under threat from economic, military and social problems, such texts aimed to show how the good aristocrat could also be a good Christian. These men and women did not need to abandon their literary culture, their marriages or their households, as the ascetics claimed: instead they could remain in the world, yet sufficiently detached from it.

The parallels in principle with my own work on Carolingian lay nobles are striking, and yet when I look for actual connections, there are hardly any. Carolingian authors of lay mirrors and other moral texts addressed to the laity do not draw on these earlier works, nor come to the same conclusions about the most important moral precepts such people must obey. Kate Cooper argues that the texts she discusses are poorly transmitted, with early medieval monastic librarians tending not to preserve them, but I think there is a more significant reason and that the discontinuities in texts for the Christian laity lie further back.

There are at least two other earlier attempts before the fourth century to produce moral guides for a Christian lay life. One is Clement of Alexandria’s Paidagogus, from the late second century, the other, even further back, is the pastoral epistles of St Paul (or one of his followers), with their ‘household codes’. Cooper mentions St Paul briefly, but not Clement, which I suspect reflects the lack of influence of these earlier works on her texts. Why don’t these texts for the laity form more of a tradition?

Cooper describes ‘Ad Gregoriam’ as a ‘time-capsule’ and contrasts the cultural specificity of Cassiodorus’ work (very firmly mid-sixth century) with the timelessness of the Benedictine Rule, written at about the same time. I think that may provide the key. Texts which discuss how to live a Christian life in the world must of necessity discuss that world and one’s role in it, in a way that inevitably binds the text to a specific culture. Once that culture changes substantially (as in the post-Roman world), the content may become meaningless to a new generation.

In contrast, it is far easier to write a ‘timeless’ work which focuses on detachment from the world, as most of the great spiritual classics do. Some ascetic authors indeed seem to have deliberately striven for such a timeless, non-specific quality in their work, such as John Cassian or Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy, works which as a result could be appreciated by readers for centuries. It is possible to write such works for a lay audience (John Bunyan did it with Pilgrim’s Progress) but only at the cost of saying nothing about the realities of lay life. The minute an author starts talking about marriage or families, they are liable to fall back into the specificity of their age and to lose some of their connection to later readers. Only the literature of world rejection can, at least sometimes, remain outside the currents of time, in its own disconnected eternity.

As I indicated in the first part of my discussion, I think medieval history still keeps quite a lot of prestige in the UK. Why then, are British medievalists not dancing around in a merry England kind of way, but instead staring gloomily into their drinks, in between writing defiant or bracing blog posts?

One obvious problem is that even if an activity is prestigious, people are not necessarily eager to do it, if it is difficult, ill-paid or both. This, however, is not a problem restricted to medieval historians. The great prestige of stylite saints in late antique Byzantium, did not, I suspect, lead to vast numbers of pillar-climbing wannabe ascetics. Most people, given a choice, will prefer easily-gotten gains.

Greater problems come from the two social groups who are anti-medieval history: those who think it is not useful, and those who think it is fuddy-duddy. Oddly, those who think history is not useful are not, on the whole, the avid Thatcherites. This is because on an individual level studying history at university is useful, in that it often leads one to well-paid positions. Top employers like history graduates; all the guff about transferable skills is actually right in this case.

Those who consider that history is not useful are usually those looking in an equally utilitarian but broader sense: that it does not bring economic advantage to UK plc as a whole or to an individual university. Unfortunately, it is people of this kind who tend to predominate in those who make decisions on funding at both the national and university level. At the national level, medievalists have also recently suffered from the prejudice certain ‘progressive’ people have against the subject, seen as irremediably old-fashioned. Such an attitude has been visible for at least 50 years: when Kingsley Amis wanted to show the futility of academic life in Lucky Jim, he made Jim Dixon write articles on medieval ship-building. It is epitomised by the comments of an Education Secretary (Charles Clarke) a few years ago about medievalists as ornamental (for which he got a deserved ticking off from Jinty Nelson).

But I think possibly more significant in the long run is the collapse of historical consciousness in British culture (more particularly English culture). I don’t mean by this that fewer people are interested in history or that they know less about it (though this may be true). I mean that there is no longer a widespread sense that everybody *ought* to know some history, particularly the history of their own country. And the common stock of historical facts that ‘everybody’ knows has similarly declined greatly. For most people, ‘1066 and All That’ (the baseline of ‘memorable’ British history) would now require substantial glosses on every page.

This cultural change is not just due to factors such as the increasingly multicultural nature of British society, or a ‘modernist’ urge to ignore the past. I would say that a more significant factor is that there is no longer a shared historical sense of what it means to be British and/or English, and as a result history (in schools and in the media) has lost this important cultural and educational role.

It is easy at this point for right-wingers to blame trendy liberal schoolteachers and historians who rejected the traditional ‘kings and battles’ form of history teaching. But speaking as someone who got the tail-end of traditional teaching during my limited study of history at school (3 years at secondary school, 1976-1979), I don’t think that is the main reason.

Instead, I’d say the main reason is something I’ve talked about before: the failure of myths of Britishness, and of the Whig narrative of history. The key pillars of this narrative (crown in parliament, reformed religion, empire, Saxon liberties, the British navy) have lost all their resonance, and whatever the right-wingers may think, their power can’t be revived. Referencing Magna Carta when you talk about civil liberties now just seems ludicrous. All that survives generally is a vague sense of Britain threatened by European tyrants, which is equally applicable to Napoleon, Hitler and the EU (with the Spanish Armada and the Normans as outliers).

Because this Whig narrative has collapsed and no-one has thought up a widely-accepted alternative, when people do learn history (either at school or on their own), it tends to be in unconnected islands of interest, and the emphasis is largely on recent history (basically, most people study Stalin and Hitler for A level).

All this is a challenge for medievalists (and indeed early modernists), which of course, in true business style, means there is also an opportunity. University medievalists have to rethink how they advertise their subject (both before people get to university, and when they get there and choose their options). Lecturers can’t now rely on people automatically assuming that the history of Parliament or the Reformation ‘matter’, or knowing much about anything pre-twentieth century. Instead those who teach those subjects have to provide a pitch as to why people should do their options rather than more familiar recent history. (And of course, if we can make our option become popular again, it automatically becomes ‘useful’ to the university administrators and government ministers: the market has spoken and how can it be wrong?)

On ‘relevance’, we are always going to be struggling against the modern historians. What this means is that medieval historians must unashamedly embrace the weird and thrilling side of their subject. Do you want to study Hitler yet again? Or do you want to find out about dog-headed men, tomb-dwelling monks, the Fall of Rome and the rise of Islam? Or why decisions in the fourth century mean there are fewer female than male students at Oxford today? It is time for medievalists to promise to reveal all in glorious technicolour illuminations.