Mainstream Christian churches have “lost track of being doctors of the soul” just when society needs it most, a vicar has warned.
Churches are offering a “bland, undemanding version of Christianity that is decaf” and gives nothing but “a series of woke tropes,” said Reverend Daniel French, vicar of the seaside town of Salcombe, south Devon and co-host of the popular Irreverend podcast.
Speaking to NTD’s “British Thought Leaders” programme, Reverend French said there has been a “migration” of people from atheism towards a “classical Christianity,” a process that accelerated during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Unresponsive Churches
Judging from listeners’ response to the podcast he co-hosts with two other clergymen, Reverend French said potentially hundreds of thousands of people started having “religious experiences” during lockdown.But he said: “What’s very frustrating is that the mainstream churches are not responding. In fact, much of their response is making these people allergic to the concept of churchgoing.”
He said he heard hundreds of stories of people knocking at the door of churches only to see their local vicars “rolling their eyes” and telling them that “we don’t do that sort of thing any more, we’re more into activism.”
“It’s very frustrating when the powers that be in the theologians seem ambivalent” to people’s spiritual experiences, said the Reverend.
“Their search lamp is on a very narrow constituency who will never come to church on the whole—politically left-leaning activist types, who already consider Christianity, even if it was updated to their standards, beyond the pale.
‘No Different from the Local Gym’
Reverend French said he couldn’t get his head around the idea of lockdowns, which he found “disturbing.”“This was a break in the way of normal operations. We hadn’t had a lockdown in the Second World War. And yet here we were.”
He said, “Spiritually something in me also snapped when we were commanded by the hierarchy to evacuate—this rather ridiculous message that went around that we had to evacuate immediately our church buildings.”
“I can remember the day that the churchwarden gave me this, I sat outside church and wept that we have made an enormous blunder. How can we now argue that these spaces are liminal, sacramental, sacred spaces, spaces of healing, that these that what we do here is extraordinary?
“If we’re just putting ourselves up, it’s no different from the local gym. They were just another lifestyle choice.”
He said he felt particularly frustrated over the churches’ failure to help people deal with the “incredible contagion of mental health issues”—especially among the young—following repeated lockdowns.
“Instead, what we can end up having is clergy who say, ‘I’m too busy to deal with this, I’ve got some higher goal,’ which often is armchair philosophising.”
‘Deprogramming’
Reverend French said churches are not doing what is needed to address the spiritual needs in society.“Man has become a sort of psychological creature in the West. We live in this kind of Freudian pit of ‘it’s all about me,’ which I think must be really the subtitle for pretty much everything in the charts at the moment. And I think that’s a very hard place to be spiritual from.”
He said that to become a Christian now requires a “considerable deprogramming from that, to turn someone around to say: ‘life is not all about me and my fulfilment.’”
“How do you reach out to generations upcoming with the idea of faith, of heritage, of patriotism—in all the best sense of the word—love for your own history? If the culture has allowed us to just wallow in this sort of psychological pit, it’s very, very hard.”
Reverend French lamented that the clergy is “not having that theological conversation.”
Instead, “we’re having theological conversations that are easy—we’re having debates about identity politics, climate change, whatever.
“I think the danger is we’ve lost track of being doctors of the soul, just when society needs it most.”
