culture

Changing Politics, Changing Country

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How does the Church of England navigate a Britain of a transforming party system, transforming demographics, and increasing division?

Workshop presentation for the Diocese of Salisbury Clergy Conference, 8 July 2026, Bryanston School, Dorset

A densely detailed satirical illustration in the style of an eighteenth-century engraving. On the left, an angry crowd of working people brandish brooms and placards reading "Fair Wages!", "Tax the Rich!" and "Voices Heard!" beside a cracked classical column labelled "British Institutions". A woman in a red dress and white apron holds up an angel pendant, an angel embroidered on her apron. On the right, anxious men and women in suits and lanyards clutch clipboards, charts and phones as poll data, banknotes, ballot boxes and televisions showing shouting faces swirl away in a vortex between the two groups. Behind them, under a stormy sky, a small parish church with a square tower stands on a green hill, its door glowing with light as small figures climb the path. Signs read "The City of Confusion: where all is flux" and "Truth found only on the hill".

I. On radical cultural shifts

None of us interprets the world entirely as a blank slate. All of us see the world through a set of assumptions, values, and ways of understanding the world that a society or group takes largely for granted. We can call this a paradigm – a paradigm is the collection of usually unexamined beliefs through which people interpret the world, judge what is normal or plausible, and organise their collective life. These are never entirely fixed – they tend to change, gradually and organically, over time. We need these mental models, as reality is too complex for us to grasp in its fullness.  But every once in a while a paradigm that had been convincing starts to become very poor at describing the reality that people experience. When that happens, the paradigm starts not to evolve, but to collapse: the old ways of seeing the world no longer make sense, and for a moment all sorts of new ideas seem possible; after a period of uncertainty, even chaos, a new paradigm starts to congeal.

My argument is that we are inside one of those transitions in the way that people understand the world – a paradigm collapse. Even if you’ve never come across the concept, we have lived through major collapses of a paradigm within living memory. One of them happened to the Church; one of them happened in another part of the world but was of global importance. How the Church responded to the first, and how the world responded to the second, tells us much about how to respond to the one which I believe we are about to experience.

1963: the collapse of Western Christendom

1963 was a time of radical change – television had arrived in every living room, car ownership was increasing rapidly while Dr Beeching was taking an axe to the railways, and the Pill was just starting to rewire people’s most intimate relationships.

Philip Larkin fixed the hinge of the British 20th Century in that year, in the poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’, which starts:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

The joke lands because it is true. Church historians of every stripe now locate in the early 1960s the moment at which a Christendom in place for over a millennium gave way with astonishing speed. Callum Brown, an atheist historian of religion in Britain who positively celebrates the change, insists the data show this “was not the long, inevitable religious decline of the conventional secularisation story, but a remarkably sudden and culturally violent event” – one which followed a 1950s of rising church attendance and sacramental participation. Sam Brewitt-Taylor, who laments the change, has shown that senior Christian leaders suddenly conceded the arrival of the ‘secular society’ in 1963–64, making the collapse of cultural Christianity all but inevitable. The collapse of Christendom was less a case of gradual erosion since the Enlightenment, more an avalanche.

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Create, Suffer, and Love – Sermon Preached on 31st May 2026 (Trinity Sunday)

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Preached at Christ Church, Bulkington (Benefice Service)

2 Corinthians 13.11-13; Matthew 28.16-20

“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”

A large late-medieval brick town hall dominates the centre of the frame, its dark slate roof punctuated by small dormer windows and crowned by a tall square clock tower with a pointed spire. The tower displays a clock face and is decorated with red and white heraldic shields. Crenellated parapets run along the roofline, giving the building a fortress-like character. The façade features rows of arched and rectangular windows in warm red brick. A small statue on a pedestal stands in front of the building. The surrounding market square is busy with parked cars, a yellow delivery van, and a cyclist in a high-visibility jacket. To the right, a neighbouring building with an orange-tiled roof is partly visible. The sky is overcast and wintry, with bare trees to the left.
I was hoping for a few ales in Kalkar’s Rathauskeller, but it closes at 9 pm! © Gerry Lynch, 5 April 2018.

I was in Germany last week, which enjoyed the same heatwave as we did. I was therefore looking forward to exploring the pub culture as well as the much cheaper German pub prices. I arranged to meet someone I knew from social media but had never met in person, at 9.15 on a Wednesday evening. He lives in a town the size of Devizes, but he warned me that there wouldn’t be a pub open in that town for us to meet in. Instead we had to meet in the larger county town, about the size of Trowbridge, and even that wasn’t exactly lively.

And I know what you’re thinking – what on earth does this have to do with the Holy Trinity? Did the Rector get heatstroke, or perhaps have too much of the unholy sort of spirit when he was across the North Sea?

Well, let’s park that for a moment, and return to it once we’ve had a chance to talk about what it means to be human, and what it means to be God.

To create, to suffer, and to love – these are three of the deepest experiences that human life contains. Creating, suffering, and loving are central to making us human.

They are also central to what God is – God also creates, suffers, and loves.

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Can You See Love?: Sermon Preached on 10th August 2025 (Eighth Sunday After Trinity)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Hebrews 11.1–3, 8–16; Luke 12.32–40

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

The image is a medieval-style illustration divided into four panels, framed with ornate floral and geometric borders. The top left panel shows a tree with various animals, including a lion, a horse, and a dog, climbing or interacting with it. The top right panel depicts a figure in a red robe standing on a structure resembling a tower or castle, holding a book or tablet. The bottom left panel features a figure in a yellow robe with outstretched arms, standing on a platform, with a monstrous face on its lower body and legs. The bottom right panel portrays a group of people in medieval clothing looking up at a large, menacing creature with a gaping mouth and tentacle-like appendages. The artwork uses vibrant colors and intricate details typical of illuminated manuscripts.
Hildegard of Bingen, Vision of the Last Days (ca. 1150).

How can you be convinced by something you haven’t seen? Well you can’t see love, but I married a couple yesterday and they seemed pretty in love to me. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews, whose identity remains a mystery to us, says that faith is “the conviction of things not seen”. When people are convinced about things they haven’t seen, others often dismiss it as blind faith, or even as wilful stupidity, at least if they don’t agree with them. But everybody has faith of some sort. Even if they don’t believe in God, even if they don’t think they believe in anything that can’t be measured or proven, everyone has some set of assumptions about the deeper nature of reality and how things work beyond the merely physical.

Of course we might say we can see the effects of love; they’re often rather wonderful. I don’t just mean romantic love mixed with sexual attraction – although that certainly is wonderful – but also the selfless love of a parent for a disabled child or the brotherly love of two old friends who’ve been meeting for a Saturday afternoon pint together for the last sixty years.

But you can’t physically measure love itself, in the same way you can measure electricity, or helium, or radioactivity. These things are undetectable by our five senses but we understand the physical processes behind them and have devices that can measure them all accurately. But you can’t buy a love meter from Amazon, or go to Google and look up today’s love maps and find out where the hotspots are.

So how do we know that love exists? Only because we have faith that love exists; we are convinced it exists although we can’t see it or measure it scientifically. We might say, as I noted, that we can see the effects of love – but we can only say that they are the effects of love and not something else because we have faith that love exists in the first place.

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OK, Sheeple! (Fourth Sunday of Easter: 11th May 2025)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington

Readings – Acts 9. 36-43; John 10. 22-30

“My sheep hear my voice.”

“OK, sheeple!” I don’t know how many of you have heard of the term “sheeple”. If you spend too much time on the internet, you might have! It is used in conspiracy theory circles – the sort of people who think the moon landings were faked and that Covid was invented so Bill Gates could implant us all with microchips under the cover of vaccines. In the conspiracy theorist part of society, the rest of the population is ridiculed as “sheeple” whose acceptance of received wisdom about the world is read as a sign of conformity and lack of independent thinking.

A painting depicts a flock of sheep and lambs grazing on a grassy hill near a stormy coastline. The sky is cloudy, and waves crash against the shore. In the background, a shepherd in a blue cloak stands near a cliff, with distant hills visible. The scene is lush with green grass and scattered bushes.
Coastal Flock by August Friedrich Schenk (1865)

While we shouldn’t lose too much sleep about what conspiracy theorists call us, calling someone a sheep isn’t normally meant a compliment. A sheep blindly follows their leader, is afraid to take a stand, lacks critical thinking, and probably isn’t the sharpest tool in the box.

Everything in our culture encourages to think of ourselves as being the opposite of sheep. We’re encouraged to think of ourselves as independent minded free spirits, who become the people we dream ourselves to be through the power of self-will. We don’t want to be sheep, and we don’t even particularly want to be shepherds. We romanticise the Lone Ranger sort of figure, the iconoclastic anti-hero who loves to do it all “my way” and refuses to let convention prevent them doing good or having a good time. The strange thing is that most people who think of themselves as self-willed free thinkers are desperately conformist, but that’s another story for another time.

In that view of the world, of course, there’s nothing positive to be said about being one of the sheep. But let’s be fair to our fluffy friends, they have their positive side, and not just as a delicious Sunday lunch. Sheep are part of a community, and while our individualism has brought us many blessings, its dark side has been that the bonds of our communities have become much weaker. Staying part of a coherent community doesn’t require dull conformism, but does need sensitivity to the needs of others, adaptability, and mutual trust.

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Wilderness and the Garden: Sermon Preached on 31st March 2024 (Easter Day)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Holy Cross, Seend

Readings – Acts 10: 34-43; John 20: 1-18

“Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher).”

When we get to the end of a journey, it’s sometimes helpful to remind ourselves where it started.

Painting of a garden, in which Mary Magdalen, in a red dress and bending down, is trying to touch Jesus cloak - he is walking away from her, but looking back at her, and putting his palm out in admonishment.
Fra Angelico, Noli Me Tangere (1440-2), in the Basilica di San Marco, Florence.

Jesus’ public ministry started with His baptism by John the Baptist, then immediately being taken out into the wilderness for forty days. His public ministry ended with His crucifixion, or so it seemed. Because on the first Easter morning, a few of His closest followers encountered Him risen from the dead. They were the first witnesses to the Resurrection.

The season of Lent consists of forty days of fasting that are intentionally modelled on Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. Lent also ends on Easter morning—in other words, it too ends in Resurrection.

So travelling through the wilderness seems to be an essential part of experiencing Resurrection. In the wilderness we are confronted by the sheer scale of God’s creation, and how much of that creation lies outside our normal day-to-day experience. In the wilderness, our illusions of being in control die, and we learn just how limited the power of human beings is.

It seems to me that the Western world is entering a wilderness. The financial crisis of 2008, and the very slow recovery from it, was perhaps first warning signthat the existing political and economic order might be in trouble. Other signs include the ever widening gap between the rich and the rest, the fact that it’s often easier to make money by speculation than doing something worthwhile, and the increasing difficulties even relatively well-off young people have in finding security. All these have been warning signs, throughout history, of civilisations in trouble.

A gathering sense of crisis became acute after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. One thing the two years since have told us is that the Western world is weaker than is thought by our pundits, our politicians, and the lobbyists and campaignerswho try to influence them. Western attempts to hobble the Russian economy through sanctions have, regrettably, been at best partially effective, and have been ignored by the rising powers of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Western fantasies of power and control lie in tatters, and we seem to have entered a geopolitical wilderness.

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Making it in the World to Come: Sermon Preached on 24th March 2024 (Palm Sunday)

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A painting in mixed media: Christ, riding donkey and approaching from the left, is welcomed by a large crowd, greeting him with palm leaves; two angels appearing at top left.

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot, Holy Cross, Seend, and Christ Church, Bulkington

Philippians 2. 5-11; Mark 11. 1-11

“he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”

If you want to make something of yourself, you’ve got to get out there and sell yourself. The modern world is no place for humility, especially with the job market being the way it is. Pay close attention to your image, not only in the physical world, but especially on social media. To build your profile there, never forget that outrage sells and angry people click.

In the style of Giotto, Jesus riding on a donkey gives blessings to some passersby, some of whom have a halo and some of whom don't.
Giotto, The Entry into Jerusalem (1305). In the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy.

That’s a reasonable summary of the sort of advice that might be given, in an entirely well-meaning way, to an ambitious young person trying to make it big in a bad old world.

Now, we all know that St Paul has the reputation of being a real old curmudgeon, with views completely incompatible with the modern world. That is clearer nowhere than in this morning’s Epistle reading, when he writes:

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who … emptied himself … humbled himself and became the obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”

Holy week turns the values of the 21st Century West upside down. Then again, it also turned the values of the Roman Empire upside down, and it turned the values of Second Temple Judaism upside down. Our Western obsession with self-fulfilment dies on the Cross, just like the Romans’ obsession with power, and the Jewish leadership’s obsession with piety.

And within Holy Week, if there is one story that really speaks to our own times, to the manias and failings of the 2020s, it is that of Palm Sunday. At its core, Palm Sunday is a story about the fickleness of celebrity.

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Choose Your Story: Sermon Preached on 18th February 2024 (First Sunday in Lent)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington

1 Peter 3. 18-22; Mark 1. 9-15

 “repent ye, and believe the gospel.”

We see all sorts of patterns in the universe that repeat on vastly different scales. Most famously the swirl of water down the bathplug has the same pattern as that of the clouds in a big storm system coming in off the Atlantic to batter us – like last night’s – and that of the impossibly slow swirl of stars in the arms of a distant spiral galaxy.

Snowdrops, in focus, in front of a church, which is quite out of focus, with raindrops also visible on the lens. The sky is grey. There is a St George's flag flying from the church tower.
Snowdrops and raindrops six Februarys ago at Winterborne Kingston, Dorset. © Gerry Lynch

The evidence of order in the universe is everywhere. At this time of year, we are particularly aware of the natural world following the pattern of the seasons. The flowers have arrived early in this exceptionally mild winter – we have not only the snowdrops but the violets and daffodils and even some of the blossoms. In very different climates, something similar happens. I have been on the South African/Namibian border in August, when the spring rain comes and briefly turns that parched landscape into a riot of multi-coloured daisies. There as here, what we see is new life following death.

In today’s readings, we see this pattern of new life following death, as part of an ordered universe. Jesus, God made human, does not start His earthly ministry until he has been baptised by John the Baptist. John was a great man but still a human being, so this Gospel reading is saying something very powerful—God puts Himself under human authority here, and respects John’s own distinct calling.

Baptism is rich in symbolism—a symbolic drowning before a rising to new life, a drowning of hate and selfishness and contempt and all the sins that keep us from loving God and our neighbours as we should. Our Epistle reading, from St Peter, looks back to the story of Noah’s Ark as a something that pointed towardsbaptism—the flood marks the close on an old and wicked order, a terrible but necessary death so that new life could begin.

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The Transfiguration of Technology: Sermon Preached on 11th February 2024 (Sunday Before Lent)

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Carol Beer from Little Britain, and her computer which always says no.

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne and Holy Cross, Seend

2 Corinthians 4. 3-6; Mark 9. 2-9

“He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.”

Carol Beer from Little Britain, and her computer which always says no.
Computer says… yes…?

We seem to be hardwired to giving more credibility to information that comes from a screen than things we hear in-person from other people, or even things we see directly with our own eyes. Last month, after falling for a so-called Deep Fake, an employee of a large multinational firm in Hong Kong transferred twenty million pounds to fraudsters. Police in the territory think that the criminals faked an entire video conference, with perhaps fifteen computer-simulated participants, using Artificial Intelligence to add made-up dialogue to real recordings. Because the people in the video conference looked and sounded just like people the victim knew from the real world, she fell for it. Would she have fallen for a similar con attempted in the flesh by a troupe of actors?

And so to our first reading, from St Paul, writing another of his letters to those perpetually troublesome Corinthians. “The god of this world”, he warns them, “has blinded the eyes of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel.” The “god of this world” is, fairly obviously, a reference to the Devil. But the quote sets off all sorts of reflections about what the actual god or gods of today’s society are. We seem particularly prone to worshipping our own supposed cleverness, and the products of it. Above all, technology seems to be the Zeus or Jupiter of our 21st Century gods, the solver of problems and the bringer of enlightenment. That’s why we are at risk of falling for scams delivered via a screen, in a way we never would for a real-life cold caller at the door.

I’m hardly opposed to technology. I make quite heavy use of social media and the Internet and all sorts of gizmos and software for my photography. Technology is a morally neutral thing, neither good nor evil – at the end of the day, a computer is just a fancy tool. Difficulties start when we forget that humans are supposed to use tools and not the other way around. Technology often seems to be our master rather than our tool.

The Church seems besotted with technology as a sort of magic bullet to appeal to young people and reverse Church decline. In particular, during the pandemic, we tried to convince ourselves that Zoom services were the future of the Church rather than an emergency response to an unprecedented situation. By the end of all those lockdowns, however, I think we all knew that being on a videoconference call with people was emphatically not the same as being in a room or a Church with them. Electronic presence is not the same as physical presence; and, as already noted, experiencing things through a screen can make it harder, not easier, to discern the truth.

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The End of the World: Sermon Preached on 24th December 2023 (Midnight Mass)

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A painting of Our Lady in a stable with the Baby Jesus in her arms; watched by St Joseph and the angels, who have halos, and shepherds and animals, who don't.

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Isaiah 9. 2-4, 6-7; John 1. 1-14

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”         

How would you react if a vicar, at Midnight Mass, in a medieval church, in a rather traditional village in the depths of Deep England, started preaching about the End of the World? Would you wonder if he had been teleported in from the American Bible Belt? Or perhaps, on hearing a certain accent, wonder if he was a friend of another Ulster preacher, whom some of you may remember, the man who liked to say “no” a lot?

A painting of Our Lady in a stable with the Baby Jesus in her arms; watched by St Joseph and the angels, who have halos, and shepherds and animals, who don't.
The Nativity by Giotto (1311-20), in the Basilica of St Francis, Assisi.

In fact, in the churches I go to I never hear anyone preaching on the end of the world. They’re far too moderate and sensible for that sort of thing. But lately, I’ve heard people talking about the end of the world on Radio 4 and in the pages of The Times.

That nice Matthew Syed, who won an Olympic medal in ping-pong, and makes those interesting radio programmes about quirky bits of modern history, had a column in The Times the other week saying our advancing technology meant that we might cause our own extinction. Then last Tuesday, when I was driving, Radio 4’s PM programme – not normally known for fire and brimstone sermons – had an interview with Geoffrey Hinton, the man often called “the godfather of artificial intelligence”, warning of the risks that AI might pose to human existence within the next 5-20 years. And all that’s before we talk about climate change, or nuclear war.

The world might be entering a very dark era.

So far, so cheerful!

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Return to the Gospel’s Core: Sermon Preached on 8th October 2023 (18th Sunday after Trinity)

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Marten van Valckenborch, The Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen (ca. 1580-90). Hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Philippians 3.4-14 Matthew 21.33-46

“I press on towards the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus…”

This morning’s readings give us an intensely personal and impassioned passage from St Paul coupled with one of the more difficult and judging of Jesus’ parables. I think this pair of readings is profoundly relevant to the times we are in and the state of our Church. Christ’s words judge the Church of our time forcefully, and St Paul points a way out.

Marten van Valckenborch, The Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen (ca. 1580-90). Hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
Marten van Valckenborch, The Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen (ca. 1580-90). Hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Let’s start by looking at the gospel reading, the Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen.

Most of our Sunday gospel readings this year come from Matthew, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that as we’re coming towards the end of the year, we’re coming towards the end of Jesus’s public ministry in the story. So although it’s October, this Gospel reading is set in the Temple in Jerusalem in the last few days of Jesus’ life.

This parable might explain why the religious hierarchy in Jerusalem had come to fear and hate Jesus so much. The story is a sort of fictional representation of the history of God’s prophets in Jerusalem – most of them were mistreated or even put to death, at the hands of people like them. The landowner represents God, and in the end sends his son, obviously representing Jesus, to try and sort out these unruly tenants and get them to give him some of their grapes as rent, as they agreed. But they kill the Son. Jesus’ audience assumes the landowner would rightly put the murderers of his son to death. Jesus doesn’t actually confirm that, but He makes it clear that, “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the Kingdom.” Bear that in mind – we will come back to it.

Our epistle comes from St Paul’s letter to the Philippians, and recalls his faith as a young man, and how he came to believe Jesus Christ was the son of God.  The young Paul was proud of his Jewish heritage and that he had always remained the staunch Jew he was brought up to be. Except for one problem: Paul was so convinced he God’s man that he forgot that God in the Hebrew Bible was clear that He wanted mercy rather than sacrifice and love of neighbour. Paul, however, thought his faith gave him the right to duff up the people he considered God’s enemies, foremost among those being the Church in its first years.

Thinking he was an expert on pleasing God, Paul found instead that God had to hit him with a bolt from the blue to put him on the right path. Writing with the benefit of several decades’ hindsight, Paul was glad that his preconceptions had been shattered. Paul had lost everything considered valuable by ordinary standards, but he willingly paid that price to gain his faith in Jesus Christ.

In trying to meet God’s standards through his own efforts, Paul found out that he didn’t even know really what God’s standards were. Instead, in following Jesus Christ, he learnt that he could never meet God’s standards, but instead had to throw himself on God’s grace – and in abandoning his self-will, he found true liberation.

So what does all this have to do with our situation today? Well I think the church lost its way in the middle of the 20th century, in a way somewhat reminiscent of the young Paul. Paul was, in his own words, confident in the flesh – confident in his heritage, his intellect, and his faithfulness. The churches of the Western countries, very much including the Church of England, became overconfident in its brain. As we entered a world of nuclear power and television, the Church thought it was much too advanced for these hoary old Hebrew fairy stories, and started thinking the idea that Jesus rose from the dead was primitive. It told itself it had “matured” beyond this, that the rest of society had matured beyond it too, and that for the Church to survive it would have to abandon belief in anything supernatural.

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