An illus­trated con­ver­sa­tion with Car­di­nal Cor­mac Murphy-O’Connor, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Eng­land and Wales, explor­ing his pen­e­trat­ing insights on the Church’s role in a post mod­ern, mul­ti­cul­tural and sec­u­lar Britain.

For broad­cast on Com­pass: Pil­grim Cor­mac. Sun­day 15 Octo­ber at 22:15 on ABC TV, Fri­days at 9.05am, 4.30pm, 7.30pm and 9.45pm on ABC2 (Dig­i­tal only, IIRC)

I heard a radio promo for this last night and it sounds really interesting/bizarre. One of the things Murphy-O’Connor is reput­edly argu­ing is that the “Parish” con­cept is too large/impersonal for the unchurched (they didn’t use that word, I wouldn’t nor­mally either, but I’ve been read­ing too many reformed mis­sional blogs/websites of late and it’s start­ing to become a part of my vocab­u­lary, for bet­ter or worse), postmodern-influenced, sec­u­larised British per­son. Accord­ingly, he is (appar­ently, again with­out hav­ing seen the pro­gramme) advo­cat­ing a new approach/structure of fel­low­ship cen­tred around meet­ing in people’s homes/more casu­ally. One (pre­sum­ably sig­nif­i­cant) part of this is for prayer and bible study.

Which is excit­ing, to say the least.

Appar­ently there are only 4 mil­lion peo­ple who call them­selves Roman Catholics that Cor­mac Murphy-O’Connor has the respon­si­bil­ity of serv­ing (this is in Eng­land and Wales: 50– and 3-million pop­u­la­tion respec­tively), which has prob­a­bly con­tributed some impe­tus to reform. This idea that smaller groups are bet­ter for fel­low­ship (jar­gon for meet­ing together and talk­ing) than larger bod­ies is in inter­est­ing con­trast with large (chiefly Pen­ta­costal) churches that don’t seem to have (pub­licly) popped up in the UK par­tic­u­larly lots. British cul­tural thing? Roman-Catholic church thing? It’s hard to tell.

Cer­tainly it would seem that there are senses in which belong­ing to a larger com­mu­nity can be of equal value to small groups… and in which small groups pre­vent the poten­tial detach­ment of larger ‘com­mu­nity’. But it’s espe­cially inter­est­ing that a church defined by its cen­tral­ity of lead­er­ship and centuries-old adher­ence to struc­ture defined by Tra­di­tion (cap­i­tal T as in defined by Roman church, not tra­di­tion as derived from the bible) over Scrip­ture is appar­ently mov­ing back to meet­ing pri­vately, pos­si­bly (prob­a­bly, given clergy short­ages and so forth) con­sist­ing wholly of lay peo­ple, read­ing God’s word and pray­ing together. One can only won­der what this means for tradition-bound non-Biblical prac­tices such as confession.

Maybe I’m just think­ing wish­fully. It’s been a week of Roman Catholic outreach-ish stuff at Uni and there are some really bizarre things that keep crop­ping up. The ‘prob­lem’ (it is a prob­lem, I’m just hes­i­tant to call it that because I know peo­ple are going to be offended… as though the rest of this post were com­pletely innocu­ous) of Roman Catholi­cism isn’t going away any more than lib­eral Chris­tian­ity and false teachers.

But false prophets also arose among the peo­ple, just as there will be false teach­ers among you, who will secretly bring in destruc­tive here­sies, even deny­ing the Mas­ter who bought them, bring­ing upon them­selves swift destruc­tion.
–2 Peter 2:1

Keep pray­ing.