OPINION in the Church of England has, of late, become highly polarised between a passionate espousal of “the parish” on the one hand and “new worshipping communities” on the other.

When the book For the Parish was published, I wrote a commendation on the back cover, in which I spoke of the penetrating questions that the book posed not only for the “new church movement”, of which it was highly critical, but also, implicitly, for those committed to the parish church, whose witness was described in glowing terms in the text, when, as I put it, that witness “so often . . . falls tragically short of what it could and should be”.

Foulger engages thoughtfully with those questions. He observes that the parish in its most helpful form “has always been about engagement and encounter with what is there, about being close, not simply in terms of proximity, but relationally”. The problem is that a desire to sustain the structure might be the very thing preventing our engagement. Using imaginatively the work of the Roman Catholic theologian Nicholas Healy, he reminds us how the original intentions of practices can become lost or “so implicit that the meaning has become forgotten”. As any of us with any experience of the Church of England will be aware, parish churches can lose connection with their locale, and their congregation can cease to reflect the local surrounding community.

The author suggests — sensibly, in my view — that the way forward is to move away from binary thinking that sets parish against new worshipping communities. Having acknowledged that the signifier and what is signified may be very different, we are free to think imaginatively about how to “embody the principle; that is, the vocation to presence”. That established, he asks, “Might the moves within the Church of England to support non-parochial forms of church be understood, following the pattern of the BCP, to be part of the assessment, re-evaluation and clarifying of the parish system?” Absolutely, in my view: one of the churches that best represents the deprived and diverse community in which it is set in the diocese of Worcester is one of our resource churches.

The author proposes that we should allow our Church, parochial and non-parochial, to develop “structures that will allow presence in place to happen in our context”. He speaks, for example, of systems allowing multiple parishes to work collaboratively across a certain macro space, while maintaining their distinctive presence in the respective micro places.

There is much more reflection to be done in the light of recent experience, but this book is a positive and very helpful contribution to our ongoing discernment as a Church of God’s will for our future. I commend it.

Dr John Inge is the Bishop of Worcester.

Present in Every Place?: The Church of England’s new churches, and the future of the parish
Will Foulger
SCM Press £25
(978-0-334-06203-5)
Church Times Bookshop £20