Caroline Miley

I suspect Caroline Miley must be as disappointed with the response to her critique of the Anglican Church as she was with her own personal experience of Anglicanism.

The Suicidal Church is intended to be a provocative book, designed to rouse Anglicans either to change or to angry self-defence. The words most frequently used in this tract are “not” and “must”, accusing the church of “not” being inclusive, “not” being serious about religion, “not” being professional in its administration, “not” accepting anything better than mediocrity, and “not” structuring itself so that clergy and laity can better forward the mission of the church, which Miley defines as evangelism. The way forward out of all these deficiencies, these “nots”, is a series of “musts” – prescriptions for remedies that are asserted often without supporting arguments: the church “must”, she pronounces, be centralised nationally, thus solving all duplications of administration and deployment of clergy under one grand strategy.

These are criticisms the Anglican church of Australia does need to hear – and to respond to urgently. To lift itself out of its “relentless amateurism”, to rid itself of its passivity and co-dependent parish behaviour cries out for courageous leadership. Caroline Miley has some strong insights into the connection between the dysfunctional passivity of the local parish and the lack of effective leaders at wider levels which deserve a good hearing.

Her chapter on the “lukewarm spirituality” of Anglicans bites deep into the wounds of our ethos. Her descriptions of Anglican lack of courtesy towards sisters and brothers trying to use church buildings actually to pray in are unnerving because so accurate.

I resonated robustly with her censure of the way Anglicans actively pursue racist, sexist and homophobic attitudes.

And perhaps therein lies the problem of The Suicidal Church. I should have been provoked either to defend the church I love against unjust attacks, or to look with outrage at grievances for the first time. Instead, I found myself nodding in agreement with much of what Miley has written.

Her criticisms of the Anglican church are simply not new. It is instructive to note the theologians quoted in The Suicidal Church, Bruce Kaye, for example. Dr Kaye is a perceptive theologian, that’s true. He also happens to be an adept, modernised and professional administrator – in Miley’s view a very rare kind of priest. But Bruce Kaye is known mostly as Secretary of the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Australia, a fact to which she makes no reference. Surely it is of great significance that the senior bureaucrat in the whole of the National Church is on her side in these issues, and probably far ahead of her.

The institutional church is well aware of the challenges posed by Ms Miley. Many within the institution are as impatient as she is for change. The issues she raises are actually quite old questions. They have largely lost their power to shock.

This raises for me the question of her purpose in writing the book. Is it genuinely an attempt to change the culture of Australian Anglicanism? Her 10-point plan (p.165) looks like an agenda for change, but not one of these points is actually an action that can be taken: “become more religious,” “make evangelism the top priority”, “abolish hierarchy” can only be distant goals for shifting attitudes. All they achieve is to turn the questions back on the author, “Yes – but how?” Without some practical unpacking of the 10-point plan, the book is only half-written.

Is The Suicidal Church an attempt to bring the serious flaws of the church to a wider Anglican audience? … to shock the “bums off the pews” into active Christianity? I commend Caroline Miley for her lack of jargon and clarity of writing, yet I seriously doubt that the indifferent, passive, dependent pew-sitters she pummels could actually be sufficiently motivated to read a book that told them they mustn’t be so comfortable.

I have an intuition that the way to either achieve change or communicate directly with the comfortable pews is not by this via negativa, this list littered with “nots”. Those who want change are already aware of the problems. They know what’s wrong. They are looking for solutions, or at least hope for solutions. Those who are unaware can too easily close their minds to criticism. They don’t want to know what’s wrong. As Miley quite rightly discerns, their unwillingness to engage with the reality is part of the problem.

I think Caroline Miley may well be asking the wrong question. The Suicidal Church: Can the Anglican Church be saved? Why the Anglican church? Part of the hope for the future is precisely the possibility that there is a way forward which honours the Anglican heritage and sheds unproductive aspects of the Anglican institution.

Twice Miley refers to the ‘suicidal’ decision of the Diocese of Melbourne in late 1999 to cut funds to school chaplaincy. What surprised me about this report is that the Diocese of Melbourne does not fund school chaplaincy. Parents at Church schools fund Church school chaplains through fees: local churches through the Council for Christian Education in Schools fund Government school chaplains. The Melbourne Anglican report may well have referred to central funding for CCES, or to some other aspect of school chaplaincy, but Miley fails to make the situation clear.

Had her research on this issue been more complete, she may have stumbled across one of the areas of the Anglican Church which is in fact responding dynamically to the criticisms of her book. Most, probably all, Anglican dioceses in the country, are active participants in the provision of school chaplains to Government schools, some 400 around the States. Through this ministry, the Anglican church and its ecumenical partners are in regular contact with half a million young people and their families. Add to this the provision of visiting Religious Education in every State except SA, and the churches are in contact with nearly a million young people – by far and away, the youth agencies with the broadest reach in Australia, except for the Education Departments themselves.

Government school chaplaincy is an activity of the church
 that is outward looking,
 that is Gospel-focussed,
 that values high standards,
 that recruits, employs and supervises ministers in accordance with good ‘secular’ practice,
 that (in WA at least) considers itself bound by Equal Opportunity legislation
This to me (and I confess my utter involvement in it) is a strong example of where the Anglican Church is defeating the criticisms raised in Caroline’s book. It is, however, largely invisible, because it is not supplied under the Anglican banner.

Can the Anglican Church be saved? is not a question for me of great urgency. I let God worry about that. But the Anglican Church can be used by God in radically new ways, and the way that can be encouraged is not by unremitting lists of our failures, but by showing the signs of hope, the ‘green shoots’ of the future.

The Suicidal Church is worth reading as a journal of one person’s disappointment with Anglicanism and the way the Anglican institution interfered with her spiritual journey. We all can learn from the experience of others. But we don’t have to allow this book to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. We simply need to look elsewhere for God’s indications of the future.

(c) Ted Witham 2002… (mehr)