By James Mustard, Canon Precentor
I’ve been thinking this week about Jesus’ repeated warning in the Gospels of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. What had the Temple become? Increasingly subservient to the Roman regime, it was synonymous with the exploitation of the people through extortionate exchange rates for Temple Currency. The currency, the Tyrian Shekel, was required to pay for ritual sacrifice. It bore the image of the god Baal, also known as Beelzebub. A graven image facilitated sacrifice to God, so the coinage itself added insult to extortion. I’m sure that the priests in Jerusalem, responsible for a vast complex in the centre of a busy city, faced many of the same challenges as our cathedrals: how to maintain the buildings and worship in a complex society of delicate political relationships and a vulnerable economy? But the Temple’s contract with the people was being broken. In 70AD the Temple was destroyed by the Romans, and Global Judaism has continued without it for just under two thousand years. The Wailing Wall alone remains.
This week, Chapter Members and the Chief Operating Officer from our cathedral attended the third National Cathedrals Conference, “Living Stones: Living Hope” hosted by Bristol Cathedral. Around five hundred delegates gathered in the cathedral nave for a series of addresses by various speakers. The full programme can be found here.
A number of the addresses praised cathedrals for all that we achieve across England, despite increasingly challenging circumstances. We heard about a new report from Theos, “Living Stones: English Cathedrals as Sacred Spaces in Changing Times” which set out many of the joys, challenges and opportunities faced by cathedrals.
But I could not help feeling that the speakers were preaching to the converted: we know our cathedrals and their communities are remarkable and precious. The addresses and report set out for us much of what we already know. So a common frustration was the reluctance to engage with some of the more knotty questions with which most cathedrals wrestle:
- How do we persuade our communities, diocesan colleagues, donors and the Government that we are indeed in need of significant financial support?
- Most cathedrals are poor, but the Church Commissioners have increased their already substantial coffers by around 30% over the last five years, to over £11 billion. Why should we expect the Government, or indeed anyone else to fund us? Won’t they expect the Church to pay for itself?
- How do we reconcile the reliance upon increased commercial activity with our obligations to provide daily worship?
- How, when many cathedrals are in structural deficit and unable to trade their way out of debt, can their ministries continue?
- What will happen if a Cathedral becomes insolvent?
Despite the many things we can and should celebrate about our cathedrals, the elephant in the room was the imminent crises facing the majority.
Yet again, our ministry of worship received no keynote or panelist representation. Our music ministries received mention but no serious engagement. Here as elsewhere, substantial time, care, personnel, talent, money and the commitment of staff and volunteers are invested into our patterns of daily and weekly worship, and supporting our musicians of all ages. Worship is our “core activity” in every sense, and in every cathedral it is rightly the substantial item on every chapter’s agenda. Yet at no point was the challenge of sustaining our worship and music in our varied contexts given a focussed airing or consideration.
There was also, yet again, little room for God or theology on the agenda. This is a crying shame, not only because God is in every way our “unique selling point”, but because some engagement with theology might provide us with a strategic and decision-making framework to help shape our futures. We were reminded that our cathedrals are works of faith. But there was little willingness to ask how working with the inheritance of our faith, and not just our buildings, might shape our collective response to present crises?
Cathedrals are and should be places of worship, creativity and community, including commerce. We’re trying to capture this in our strategic plan for Worship, Welcome and Wellbeing. If our cathedrals are to thrive we will have to put serious energy and priority into every aspect of our engagement with our community and those who hold purse-strings. Let’s not forget, we have learned to live perfectly well without the eight hundred monasteries dissolved at the Reformation. If we go, other better venues will take up our commercial activity and other, more modest, churches will welcome our congregations. But I, for one, would prefer that our West Front continues to be the gateway to a marvellous, vivid and living vision of heaven, and not another Wailing Wall.