Theology Everywhere

by Jennifer Smith.

Each week TV presenter Stacey Solomon and her unflinchingly cheerful team have been rescuing a household drowning in possessions and helping them have a clear out.  Their belongings are displayed in perfect rows in a cavernous warehouse, and the household is ruthlessly cajoled to sort their possessions into three groups: keep, sell, donate.  With tears and memories, they work their way to letting go all but what is loved or needed.  Meanwhile, the team at home blitzes and paints, creating new ordered space to receive inhabitants and the (many fewer) possessions back.  In the final scenes, the household gasps and rejoices. 

Having less feels like having gained so much more: they can live and breathe to see and use and enjoy their possessions and each other.[1]  At least on camera, no one laments after the fact or goes diving through the skip to retrieve a cracked serving dish.  And no one addresses the serious questions about why we accumulate so much, how much time and money has been spent on the process, or what impact my consumption might be having on someone else.

What is going on here?  Why is ‘Sort your life out’ such compelling viewing, and what might the process of downsizing actually offer as a means of grace?  I am interested partly because I am in the middle of downsizing myself in preparation for moving to a much smaller, if quirkily beautiful house.  But more than that, I am interested because I am aware that my ownership of things, my acquiring or divesting of ‘stuff’ is not morally neutral.  First of all, many in our immediate neighbourhoods can afford very little or only the most basic necessities, which is why there is a market for my ‘to be donated’ no-longer-non-stick frying pan.  Should I feel virtuous about giving four away to buy one new, when I have decided those four were unfit?  Being able to own less by choice is a massively privileged unusual situation in human history.  It speaks of the injustice of our present world, and any reflection on the process of downsizing needs to start with that reality. 

Second of all, each of the objects I am getting rid of was made by someone.  Whether in a factory or piecework in someone else’s home, a real person assembled the hairclips and T shirts, novelty curios or fridge magnets.  Our getting of stuff is not an individual action, but part of a whole inter-related network different people working together for good and ill.  It should not be news to Methodists that our way of spending or keeping money and the things it buys are part of our ‘social holiness.’  In his sermon ‘On the use of money,’ John Wesley was specific that no earning of it could be righteous if it caused workers harm, or distorted a marketplace.[2]  James K A Smith observed that if the mall or online purchase has replaced cathedral and religious ritual in our contemporary culture.  This means that of course I end up with too much, if I have enough money or credit to do so.  It is in the process of acquisition that I come to know I exist, and by which I belong to a group and participate in a common culture.[3]  In this culture, perhaps the show ‘sort your life out’ is the new form of participatory public repentance. 

How then, might downsizing be a means of grace?  Obviously, it is helping me to remember that my stuff is not the foundation of my personhood, much as I have loved some of it.  Objects are for me signs of memory, reminders of story.  But even memory and story are themselves signs in turn of our creation by a God who loves us and delights in us.  So downsizing is about reclaiming a more durable identity, I hope.  It is hard, as it means walking again through times of loss.  And a laying aside of some parts of life that for me are finished.  But I hope, in this season as I get ready to move, I might also re-focus on what I do love, and who I love, and how my getting and giving sits in my whole community.  I don’t think John Greenleaf Whittier meant anything as prosaic as cluttered closets when he wrote ‘…take from our souls the strain and stress, and let our ordered lives confess the beauty of thy peace.’ [4] But if I start with a closet, maybe it gets easier to move on to an institution, to an economy, to a culture or political system.  One household at a time. 

---

[1] ‘Sort your life out’ plays Tuesdays at 8 pm on BBC1, until 10 June.  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00116n4  (31 May, 2025)

[2] John Wesley, ‘The Use of Money,’ Sermon 44 in Sermons on Several Occasions, (London: Epworth Press, 1944). pp 576-81.

[3] James K A Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. (Michigan, USA: Baker Academic, 2009).

[4] John Greenleaf Whittier, ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’ in Singing the Faith. (London: The Methodist Church, 2011). 495.

by Ruth Gee.

Writing in another week of news about the actions of powerful leaders and the impact of their decisions on the most vulnerable in the world, I am reminded of a paradox at the heart of the Christian faith. The sorrow of Holy Week, including the crucifixion and death of Jesus and the long, despairing wait on Holy Saturday are transformed to joy on Easter Day as we proclaim, “Alleluia, Christ is risen. He is risen indeed! Alleluia!”  St Paul wrote, “…God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” (1 Corinthians 1:25). It is this that we proclaim as followers of Jesus in whom the glory of God was revealed on the cross.

On 24 May 1738, John Wesley came to a deep realisation that assurance was not something that could ever result from his own actions and strengths but is a gracious gift from God. Any true strength we have comes only from acknowledging our weakness and our need of grace.[i]

As I reflected on these things, I was reminded of a reflection that I wrote some years ago:

Mother and Son: End and Beginning.

Your hair is so dark, streaked with red, the blood of birth. They told me you would be born with hair when they knew how very sick I felt as I carried you, my son. How could human hair have so profound an effect on me and on you?  This dark hair can never be cut; it marks you out as chosen for better or for worse.

I remember the first time I felt that overwhelming nausea and the faintness that made me sit down quickly to prevent falling. I didn’t know what was wrong and I was frightened until he explained it to me. I never expected to be pregnant, no-one expected that of the barren one. That is how I am known, the barren wife of Manoah, descendent of a people once great and now without hope. Your birth has changed all that, with you the change begins. This is the promise made to me and binding on you, God’s promise to the nameless that the sun will rise in its might. You are named for that promise, Samson.

You are precious my son, full of potential and offering so much hope. The blood of life and death runs through your dark hair.

Your grip on my finger is strong, your mouth moves urgently, seeking comfort from the breast. You suck and are at peace. Sure of your own importance you are at the centre of your own world. All is well.  All is quiet and there is a hush of expectation in the air.

Outside your range of dim vision, he arrives and the sound of sudden movement startles you. Your arms fly up and out pushing against the weak resistant air until all is well again – you are at rest. My son with blood-streaked hair.

———————————————————–

Mother, see me bound in chains and led by a child. Where is the promise now? Blood from the beating is sticky in my new born hair. I am in pain. I long for your love, your trust, your hope – all gone now and buried in sorrow.

I have no ass or fox or fire to help me here. They are taunting me and I am alone with only the hesitant grip of a child to keep me safe. Named for the sun, I see no light. My enemies have my eyes, my lover has my hair, and a child has my hand in this place of fear and darkness.

I am the centre of a celebration that is not mine. I am important only for my weakness, the product of treachery and broken promises. I am a symbol of all who place their hope in their own strength and desire beauty above truth. I am God forsaken; my bones are as wax and my heart thrice broken.

I, who cannot be held, am bound to solid stone and I am desolate. There is no comfort now, not even from the small hand of the child. The tumultuous crowd quietens into a pregnant, expectant, dark silence. Is this the quiet before the storm?

Then, beyond my dimmed vision I hear a sudden movement.  Like a startled infant, I call out – “Mother, God help me!” My arms fly out and up and push against the stone and the blood runs through my dark new hair.

It is finished.

(Judges chapters 13-16)

---

[i] On 24 May 1738, John Wesley wrote, “I felt I did trust I Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”

by Philip Sudworth.

“When a scientist brings a bottle of sea water back to his laboratory, it is still essentially sea.”  A church leader used this analogy to try to explain how the man Jesus was still actually God himself.  What it did  illustrate to me was how we can sometimes have too limited a view of God.

Suppose an exchange teacher took a bottle of seawater to a landlocked country, showed it to the children and told them that they had now seen the sea.  What a limited understanding of the sea that would be.

Even those who have dived into the depths only have a partial knowledge of the oceans. South Sea islanders may spend most of their lives by, in or on the sea but they have no appreciation of what the sea can be like for the crew on an Icelandic trawler in a winter storm.  Even oceanographers would not claim to know everything that goes on in the great deeps. On Boxing Day 2004 the world was shocked at the power within one wave. 

How much more beyond our understanding then is the creative force that produced the oceans and the thousands of species in them on this minor planet orbiting one of trillions of stars?  Yet we too often think that we can encapsulate God in doctrines.  Some even have the effrontery to claim that they have the only truth about God and all other religious experiences are invalid.   It is like telling people that unless they have ridden the waves on a surfboard, they have no real experience of the sea.

No such attempt to present the “the simple truth” about God as a neat package of ideas is going to come even close to doing him justice. He is far more wonderful and multi-dimensional than we can ever imagine.  St Augustine warned us that, “If you understand, then it is not God.”  When we insist that people see God as we do, we attempt to contain God within our own faith-shaped bottle.

Too often we project onto God our own understandings of unlimited power and complete knowledge.  Hence God is often depicted like a medieval king on his throne – listening to petitions, munificent to those who submit to him but executing terrible justice on those who disobey him. Just what we would do, if we were in his place.  Some even claim to know how God thinks and attribute to God motives, such as “God must always act against sin” or “God can only forgive people if they believe the church’s teaching.”  This measures their own level of compassion rather than the depth of God’s love and mercy.  Such thinking puts God in a bottle shaped in our own image. 

Those who believe that God is perfectly revealed in scripture forget that God cannot be contained in words.   The pre-scientific and often poetic descriptions of people’s experiences of God present such different pictures as a God who orders genocide and joins in battles by hurling great hailstones and one who is the good shepherd going to great lengths to find one lost sheep.  Whenever we read or discuss scripture, we interpret the words.  Unfortunately, we too often use scripture more to condemn others and to exclude their beliefs rather than to challenge ourselves.  Scripture becomes the word of God when it is lived out and so changes people’s lives.  God does not fit into a book-shaped bottle.

We should encourage people to develop their own personal experience of God rather than try to impose our own faith upon them by telling them what they must believe about God.  How many people have we lost because we insisted that their faith must be a particular shape and their experience of God did not fit into that bottle? 

Jesus compared the attempt to contain the power and vibrancy of a living and dynamic faith within inflexible religious traditions with the folly of putting new wine into old bottles. Attempts by church leaders to constrain new experiences of God within the bottle of orthodoxy have led to young people leaking out of the church in huge numbers in recent decades.

Albert Schweitzer only fulfilled his potential in God’s service when he stopped trying to shape and contain God with definitions and dogma and allowed God to shape him.  Like him, we have to worry less over doctrine about Jesus and respond to the call to live out our faith in Jesus by the way we live our lives.

by George Bailey.

Another Easter season and another round of reflections on resurrection and its implications for our daily lives. I wrote about this last year here – Growing Resurrection – and this article develops some ideas already begun in that one.

I continue to encounter conversations in church life in which doubts are expressed about the resurrection of the body. People find it difficult to grasp what it could mean in the face of contemporary medical science and the widespread practice of cremation. On the other hand, a non-bodily resurrection produces doubts about our relationship with the world around us, as eternal life might somehow not include the physical stuff of life now. Tom Wright’s detailed exploration of these themes traces clearly how ‘hope for the resurrection of the body, has however been so out of tune with several of the prevailing moods of Christian thought down the years that it has become muzzled, distorted and then not even known.’[1] Proceeding here under the assumption that Wright is correct that the New Testament is clear about the resurrection of the body being central to Christian faith, and Christians need to rediscover it for the 21^st century, there is one facet of the issues which lead people to read the NT without accepting an expectation of bodily resurrection that I am particularly interested in at present – how to approach the NT analogies between natural processes and resurrection. Here are two examples:

‘Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies it bears much fruit.’ (John 12:24)

‘But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen and to each kind of seed its own body.’ (1 Corinthians 15: 35-38)

I have had trouble bringing these images into my conversations about the resurrection of the body in recent weeks. These verses seem to be using an analogy from nature to help the reader reflect on the meaning of resurrection – new life comes from death in the same way that plants grow from seeds. The major problem with this is that when the seed is planted, it does not die. The seed contains the potential to become a new plant, usually also containing some initial nourishment, and this potential is activated and realised when the conditions are suitable (warmth, water, light etc). Seeds are a natural process of reproduction, and not of resurrection. Is this an analogy that works so far, but then breaks down? If read it as a metaphorical image, it can contribute to the diminishment of any expectation of resurrection in a bodily, physical sense – this lends support to the notion that bodily resurrection too is only a poetic image for what would actually be a purely non-material process. It is worth noting that this is difficult to explain clearly as terminology here is ambiguous (e.g. ‘physical’, ‘material’), because the Christian expectation of the resurrection of the body includes the belief that the resurrection body will be in continuity with current experience, yet will also be transformed. It will be an immortal body, but still a body – a new transformed physicality of human persons. On this point, the verses from 1 Corinthians 15 do include the helpful notion that the eventual form of the plant is very different from that of the seed. That said, the disjunction between resurrection and reproduction remains an issue.

Jürgen Moltmann proposes that we focus here on ‘nature’s openness for analogy’.[2] Accepting that resurrection is not a natural event, and is even more than simply an interruption in the natural laws of mortal life – rather, the laws of mortality themselves are being changed – what is made clear with the NT language of reproductive images (about seeds, but also birth) is that natural mortal life however remains open for analogy from the perspective of the resurrection. It is not that natural processes are helping us to understand the resurrection, but the resurrection is helping us to see natural processes in a new perspective and with new potential. Moltmann explains:

‘Although every morning is followed by evening, every spring by winter, and every birth by death, in the light of Christ’s final resurrection it is only in these natural beginnings of life that pointers to eternal life are seen, so that they are lifted out of the cycle of eternal return of the same to which they otherwise belong.’[3]

Hence for Moltmann, the natural world is not just a ‘parable of eternal life’ but ‘is becoming God’s mode of appearance and the advance radiance of his kingdom’.[4] New life, fruitfulness and harmony in the natural world are signs of the new eternal life of God’s kingdom, which will not be detached from the natural world, but will encompass a transformed natural world, with resurrected humans as part of its ecosystem. The pursuit of new life, fruitfulness and harmony in the world around us now is therefore entailed by our hope for the resurrection of our bodies, especially in the face of opposite cycles which are leading to death, desertification and climate crisis. Christian hope for eternal life is intertwined with action for change in the current day.

---

[1] Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (2008,

New York: HarperOne), p141.

[2] Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions (1990, SCM Press: London), p250.

[3] Ibid. p251 (his italics)

[4] Ibid. p252.

by Philip Sudworth.

This year is 1700^th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea of 325, which produced a creed, which is still recited regularly in many churches and acceptance of it is a requirement for membership and for ordination. The traditional church celebrates that this creed has remained largely unchanged over hundreds of years and sees this as mark of the unchanging nature of God.

In other aspects of knowledge and understanding, there have been huge developments over the 1700 years. The creeds have largely ignored most of those developments. Language has also moved on. I wonder how many of the people who recite the Nicene creed week by week fully understand what it is they are saying. “Seated at the right hand of the Father” rather suggests a medieval stained-glass window. To what extent do the words they recite reflect or conflict with their own perceptions and experiences of God?

Our children and our doctors, our rugby mates and our parents, our lovers and our lawyers will all see different sides of us.  Yet that does not stop each of them having a genuine relationship with us, even if none of them know everything about us.  Do we even know all there is to know about ourselves? If humans are too complex for us to know even ourselves fully, how much less can we even begin to comprehend the creative force that formed the billions of people and innumerable other life forms on this one small planet which orbits one of trillions of stars in an expanding universe that would take us 43 million years to cross travelling at the speed of light. 

I suspect that the Trinity doctrine, as defined in the creeds, is an attempt to put a mind map, a structure on something infinitely more complex than we could ever hope to grasp – just as scientists talk about light as either particles or waves to enable them to calculate its effects. 

Perhaps, if we see the Trinity as dimensions of our individual experience of God, as in the diagram, then the interplay of relationships between the persons provide an infinite number of points or ways in which we can encounter God.  One is just right for us personally at this phase of our faith journey. 

I’ve been to church services that have focussed almost exclusively on the Spirit, several that have substituted Jesus for God throughout and others that have been totally Father-centred and ignored both Son and Spirit.  We clearly need a better balance than this but the point of equilibrium is probably different for each of us.  We can’t prescribe it for others. Indeed, our own perceptions are likely to change as we develop spiritually.

Although the Trinitarian theory of God, if interpreted in a broad rather than a dogmatic way, can allow for a variety of approaches to God, it may still be too limited for modern thinking.  In their attempts to unify the fundamental physical forces under one single theory, scientists are now postulating that there are far more than three dimensions.  Perhaps we ought to be open to the thought that God is more multi-facetted than just Trinitarian.

If “God is a Spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth” as Jesus said (John 4:24), then he is too fluid to be compartmentalised.  You might as well stand in the sea off Cape Agulhas in South Africa where the Atlantic and Indian oceans merge and try to work out which water belongs to which ocean, as to try to divide up an omnipresent spirit God.

It is not how we define or describe God that matters but how we live in relation to him.  Astronomers know that stars exist that they have not yet seen, because they can see the deviation in other stars and know that some as yet unseen body is exerting gravitational pull.  People will know that God exists if they can see him transforming our lives. Christian witness is not about telling people of a God up in Heaven who will judge them when they die but about showing them a loving God who is active in the world right now.  That way, we earn the right to share our faith.

by Jo Cox-Darling.

I found myself inadvertently attending the steering group of a Public Health roundtable on end of life care, death, and dying – seeking a community-wide, holistic development of bereavement resilience.[1] 

I was asked, if as a society, each community is prepared to help by, ‘people being ready, willing and confident to have conversations about living and dying well and to support each other in emotional and practical ways’ – then what part might the church play in that?

I left wondering what a bereavement resilient church might look like – as a ‘church’ we are both a community venue, and a group of faithful, broken, volunteers, seeking glimpses of God in the shards of life. Over the last 2 years, I’ve been using a community organising change methodology to explore this.[2]  Having listened to professionals and the community at large, a group of grief-experienced volunteers have built a suite of resources available to the whole community. 

The Theos research into death and dying concludes:

‘In a modern and pluralistic society, the Church is rightly one of many voices in this conversation, but it is well-placed to make a positive and much-needed contribution – not only because of its practical assets and historical engagement in this area, but also because of its continued theological witness […] The interplay of grief and hope in Christian theology also holds space for the many complex emotions people feel as they face dying and bereavement – and ultimately, gives theological voice to our intuition that grief is really about love.’

The space provided by death to forge meaning-filled connections with people is one of brokenness, vulnerability, raw emotions, curiosity, kindness, and trauma: the very places that Jesus was to be found.  We pressed into the question of what it means to be a bereavement confident church, a place which offers death-confidence and open-hearted compassion to all.

In our local situation where the Church now has little part to play in the rituals of death, (funerals are largely taken by celebrants) we noticed that there remains opportunity for relationship building which goes far deeper, and lasts much longer, than the funeral planning itself. 

In partnership with our local hospice, we learned about the ‘Death Café’ movement, which helps people become informed about end of life, death, and bereavement care.[3]  We heard their firsthand experience of attempting to pilot something in our village – the negative response being so damaging that the entire campaign was cancelled. 

People don’t like talking about death.

People don’t mind talking about health and wellbeing, though – so we hosted the Primary Care Trust’s annual wellbeing roadshow…on the theme of bereavement. This was a cross-sector, open event, including contributions from anyone involved in death, dying, and bereavement care.  The church worked hard to be a safe, hospitable place.  We built trust in both people and the church as a community venue – which led to memorial services with local funeral directors, other PCT themed roadshows, and the beginning of a wellbeing hub outside of clinical spaces.

We also reviewed our own funeral care and memorial service provision.  We researched what other churches offered, audited of all of the poems and music used in funeral services, and posed the question ‘what do you wish you knew about planning a funeral?.’  As a result, we:

• Produced a booklet of prayers and poems entitled ‘The Gift of Grief.’ 
• Collated resources from organisations, making them available around our buildings.[4]
• Our craft group began crocheting Forget-Me-Not brooches[5] for memorial, and prayer shawls for healing.[6] 
• A memory tree is available at the village Christmas fayre for the names of those loved and lost, which are then presented at…
• … a memorial service using a Blue Christmas theme.
• Christmas cards are sent to every bereaved family.

We asked social prescribers, public health, and the Integrated Care Board what it would look like if our volunteers became amongst the most trusted bereavement self-care specialists in the area. As a result, we were asked to start a bereavement café that others could refer folks to, and we now run a weekly drop-in café with peer to peer support.

Around the same time, a young adult in the community died, raising questions for many about the power of prayer, the existence of God, and the ‘right’ way to respond to the family in their grief and trauma.  

The volunteer leaders realised that if they were to be resilient, they needed two things… 

1. to be supported to do their own bereavement work, before they could offer support to others.  We engaged with The Bereavement Journey,[7] and have courses to support people taking their next steps in the grief journey. 
2. some basic training in bereavement support, which we sourced through Care for the Family’s Bereavement Care Awareness training. 

The circuit meeting has requested all local church councils to consider committing to the Bereavement Friendly Charter[8] and to embed their own practices in a shared and strategic fashion: so that the Methodist Church becomes a place of inclusion, justice, growth, and connection for all who have been bereaved.

Finally, using the resources of AtALoss, we have also engaged in political action, writing to our MPs to support the Early Day Motion – which has led to the All-Party Consultation on Death, Dying and Bereavement – bringing the experience of death and dying to the heart of government policy making.[9]

In Lent, we are reminded that we are but dust, and to dust we will return.

Ashes to ashes.

Dust to dust.

At Easter, we know that death is not the end of the story, and that the world can change because of, not despite, our experience.

If we can get our care and compassion right for the community, building bereavement resilience, perhaps we can be more deeply resourced for those moments of death and resurrection within our property and policy making – as well as within the precious lives of our people.

---

[1] ‘Ambitions for Palliative and End of Life Care: A national framework for local action 2021-2026’, National Palliative and End of Life Care Partnership, https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/ambitions-for-palliative-and-end-of-life-care-a-national-framework-for-local-action-2021-2026/

[2] https://www.corganisers.org.uk/what-is-community-organising/our-framework/

[3] https://deathcafe.com/

[4] This includes The Good Grief Trust, National Bereavement Association, National Association of Funeral Directors, At A Loss, and the Local Health Authority.

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvOyZaB-H6A

[6] https://www.shawlministry.com/

[7][7] https://www.thebereavementjourney.org/

[8] https://www.lossandhope.org/app/uploads/2022/04/BFC-Charter-1.pdf

[9] https://www.ataloss.org/appg

by Jo Cox-Darling.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that we are all going to die.

In this first of two contributions to Theology Everywhere some of the issues around current trends in the death industry are explored.  The second article will tell the story of a local community seeking to discover what bereavement resilience might look like in practice.

Death is an ultimate fact of life, yet it’s surprising how distant people have become to death, dying, and the impact of grief in daily life.  The death knoll to the church’s involvement in all stages of bereavement has been tolling for a while. 

Much can be placed at the door of our under-researched experience of Covid lockdowns.  Those who were deemed vulnerable were kept at a distance from the rest of society.  Care workers were expected to make impossible decisions about who received treatment options and who did not.  Locally, temporary mortuaries were constructed out of sight of communities. One of the largest of these temporary mortuaries was a refrigerated hanger at the end of the runway at Birmingham airport.  Aeroplanes were replaced by ambulances taxying the dead to their final destination. 

Every day people were given the instructions for survival – and survive we did, intoxicated by the fear of becoming another statistic in a global pandemic. 

In Covid, we learned that funerals accommodating more than a handful of people wasn’t necessary, and that it can be easier to let the dirty business of death be done by other people.  We become protected from the contagion of grief which can be so incapacitating and overwhelming – and if we protect ourselves, then we’ve learnt that we are also protecting others.

An unexpected consequence of this clinical, politicised, approach to death has led to the huge rise in Direct Cremations.

The 2025 Sunlife Cost of Dying report revealed that 20% funerals are now Direct Cremations[1] – sold (widely on daytime advertising slots) as being an economic and compassionate alternative to expensive funerals, direct cremations are completely unattended cremations.  With the awareness within both the industry and wider society that some sort of death-ritual is a psychological (perhaps even spiritual) necessity, the National Association of Funeral Directors suggest that ‘pure’ direct cremations could be as low as 11%[2], with the difference being influenced by the addition of a reflective space, post-cremation memorial, graveside service at the burial of ashes, or even a wake.

The physical processes of death and dying continue to be clinicalised and professionalised.  Palliative care professional Dr Kathryn Mannix, in her book With The End In Mind to note:

‘The death rate remains 100 per cent, and the pattern of the final days, and the way we actually die, are unchanged. What is different is that we have lost the familiarity we once had with that process, and we have lost the vocabulary and etiquette that served us so well in past times, when death was acknowledged to be inevitable. Instead of dying in a dear and familiar room with people we love around us, we now die in ambulances and emergency rooms and intensive care units, our loved ones separated from us by the machinery of life preservation.’[3]

In 2023, 72% of 18-24 year olds had experienced the death of a loved one but only 33% had physically seen a dead body.[4]  This lack of lived experience of death and dying continues to lead to a lack of engagement with grief and bereavement – which in turn has an ongoing detrimental impact of the parasympathetic nervous system and the general wellbeing of people across all sectors of society.[5]  This had led to Theos producing an animation which explores simply what happens naturally to a body during the death process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayMhA1pRLeY

As the Sunlife research concludes, ‘Brits still don’t like talking about death.’[6]

If the Theos research about attitudes to death and dying is right, and that:

‘…ours is a society which keeps death at arm’s length and out of sight. Many of us experience bereavement without direct exposure to death, and most do not feel well-prepared for our own deaths… We are increasingly likely to grieve for others behind closed doors too: religious or not, we think a funeral should celebrate the life of the deceased and hold space for mourning together, but less than half of us (47%) now say we want a funeral at all. Financial pressures…made greater room for market forces to shape how we grieve. The result is a significant realignment in British grieving practices…[including] openness to emerging “grief technologies” among the young.’[7]

I want to argue that the Church has a responsibility to begin to understand the missional needs that are now apparent to us.  Dying isn’t often a shared experience for families.  Funeral services are no longer the purview of the ordained.  Death rituals are no longer assumed part of community life.  As a consequence, we are all suffering – unable to pay attention to our bodies, our psychology, and our spirituality. 

Public health and healthcare professionals continue to grapple with the need to become a bereavement resilient society[8], the church still has much to offer into this space and sector.

---

[1] ‘Cost of Dying’, Sunlife, https://www.sunlife.co.uk/siteassets/documents/cost-of-dying/sunlife-cost-of-dying-report-2025.pdf

[2] https://www.nafd.org.uk/2024/01/15/nafd-highlights-the-impact-of-inflation-and-importance-of-talking-about-funeral-wishes-in-response-to-cost-of-dying-report/

[3] Kathryn Mannix, With The End In Mind, London: William Collins, 2017, p.2

[4] Love, Grief, and Hope’, Theos, https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/cmsfiles/Love-Grief-and-Hope.-Emotional-responses-to-death-and-dying-in-the-UK.pdf, p.14

[5] https://www.oprah.com/health_wellness/how-your-body-really-processes-grief

[6] Cost of Dying, p.34

[7] Ibid. p.xii

[8] ‘Ambitions for Palliative and End of Life Care: A national framework for local action 2021-2026’, National Palliative and End of Life Care Partnership, https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/ambitions-for-palliative-and-end-of-life-care-a-national-framework-for-local-action-2021-2026/

by John Lampard.

There are not many books which get a review in both The Church Times and The Financial Times, but The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power and People by Paul Seabright (Princeton University Press, 2024) achieved this unusual honour.

The thesis of the book is in the title. Seabright looks at religious organisations (mainly Christian, but not exclusively) as though they were the same as any other commercial organisation, which wanted to succeed in today’s world. It does not look at theological issues as such (although they are often close to the surface) but the effect churches have in a social setting.

A theme often revisited is, ‘Why do poor people give money and help to richer people?’ Seabright instances a young Ghanaian girl, Grace, who earns a pittance selling pieces of ice to motorists stuck in traffic jams in Accra. On a Sunday she donates more than a tithe to a church with a wealthy pastor, who is bedecked with gold jewellery. On a less dramatic scale the same question often went through my mind when I received the collection plate at a church I served in the 1970s, in a very rundown area of Leeds, containing many (then very poor) pensioners. Although we as a family felt we were just scraping by, our standard of living was considerably higher than many in the congregation.

Seabright suggests that Grace ‘benefits’ from an opportunity to dress up, to be treated with respect, to find friends (and possibly a suitable husband), she can sing and express herself, act as a ‘greeter’ and be responsible for younger and more vulnerable people than herself. I also think of a village chapel where many of the women who had known each other for years, and who were in service as maids etc, called each other ‘Mrs’ because the church was the only place they received that respect from others. Perhaps treating people with ‘respect’ is one of the most powerful evangelical tools available to the church.

Perhaps the most penetrating insight of the book, at least to me, is that it looks on church organisations as ‘platforms’ rather than as organisations. The word ‘platform’ conjures up today the digital universe of social media, search engines and apps, but Seabright argues that platforms, ‘Are organisations that facilitate relationships that could not form, or could not function as effectively, in the platforms’ absence.’ It occurred to me, as I read Seabright, that Mr Wesley was ahead of his time in creating a connexional ‘platform’ which was more about relationships, with travelling preachers and class leaders, rather than an organisation. A platform facilitates relationships into which people can opt in or out as they wish or as they feel the need.

Seabright uses the idea of the platform to examine three areas which a platform understanding can address. First, what are the needs in individual human beings which religious movements address?  Time and again he comes back to ‘purpose.’ ‘Human beings find purpose in activities that have a collective dimension.’ And religious organisations (unlike other purpose-creating organisations such as political parties) ‘have access to historical traditions, and stories from those traditions, that give them a powerful edge.’

The second series of questions are organisational. For example, why do different religious movements flourish, split, or die?  Seabright concludes, ‘they turn around questions of mission, of structure, of strategy, and of message. The way in which religious movements make these choices bear a marked resemblance to the ways that secular businesses do.’

The final questions are about the use of power. One insight I found particularly illuminating was the way in which religious organisations are more eloquent about the need for the sacrifice, that violence strategies require, than secular organisations. They can articulate the need for sacrifice (and Christian organisations have an advantage here with the centrality of the Cross) more successfully that a political organisation, which may need to base its appeal to ‘country.’ Think of the Crusades, the churches on both sides in World War One, and the Russian Orthodox Church today. Perhaps one of the reasons the churches struggle today is that sacrifice (giving, service and commitment) are not popular in a culture of me, me, me.

I am, in conclusion, aware that a contribution to Theology Everywhere, which is about a book which is not about theology, may seem an odd choice. But my grounding in the sociology of religion has been a constant insight into the theology I have tried to proclaim, and the church leadership I have tried to offer.

by Philip Turner.

‘It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, while the sun’s light failed’^[1]

When the sun should have been at its most radiant, Matthew, Mark and Luke are united in recording that the noon-day light is replaced by darkness at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion.

Without light it is near-impossible to see. ‘God is ignoring me,’ said the woman I was supporting in the hospital where I work as a chaplain.  Doctors had told her she had cancer and, with her husband recently dead, she now sensed her own life was at it’s end.  ‘I pray but God isn’t there,’ she said ‘but when I used to pray I knew God was there.’  How might we see when it feels like light has failed?

The contemporary experience of living on earth today might also be likened to a failure of light.  Putin’s territorial ambitions.  Genocide in Gaza.^[2]  12 million Sudanese refugees.^[3]  Global temperatures soaring past the critical 1.5C threshold.^[4]  Foreign aid diverted to pay for military spending.  We live in times where it can be difficult to glimpse light.  Yet, the noon-day light should be burning bright.  Never before has there been so many Christians on our planet as there are today.^[5]  So why is there darkness after noon?

Looking to Moses and the prophets^[6] could suggest that God is the bringer of darkness, perhaps to dazzle us with how much the world is misaligned with God’s kingdom.  This may be true, but it does not in itself offer hope for the cancer patient: it does not offer hope in a world where so much feels outside our control. 

In the darkness of the afternoon when Jesus hung on the cross Luke offers two avenues that are hopeful, if not necessarily comfortable.  The first is the example of Jesus who, in the noon-day darkness, articulates an active and embodied faith: ‘into your hands I commend my spirit’.^[7]  When we can no longer see, we can only trust in God’s vision, and stretch out our hands to be led.^[8]  The second is a reminder that trust in God can spring up beyond belief boundaries, like in the centurion who, as part of Rome’s military machine, seems to have developed eyes suited for seeing in darkness.  Where might we find such people today: the people who praise God, because in darkness they have seen the flame of God’s love?^[9]

Both avenues require surrendering the current way we see, in our own life, in the life of our churches and in the wider world.  Tomáš Halík, a Czech Catholic priest, philosopher, and theologian, draws on analytical psychology to suggest that the noon-day crisis is where the image of ourselves we have worked hard to create begins to crack, inviting us to root ourselves more deeply, and let our ego decrease so that the Christ within us may increase.^[10]  It is a book that challenges the way Christians have often unconsciously made the Christian mission colonial, where we seek more people like us, or more people to become like us.  Darkness might describe non-egocentric mission, the mission of the crucified Christ.

Perhaps Jesus’ followers today are called to the task of acknowledging how dark the afternoon can seem, but also that it cannot last.  Halík notes that evening must follow the afternoon, and in the Bible the evening is when a new day begins.^[11]  A new day that is rooted in surrender, because what Easter celebrates is not resuscitation, but resurrection: a transformation into a new way of being.

---

^[1] Luke 23.44f.

^[2] UN Special Committee finds Israel’s warfare methods in Gaza consistent with genocide, including use of starvation as weapon of war, 14 November 2024 [https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/11/un-special-committee-finds-israels-warfare-methods-gaza-consistent-genocide]

^[3] Sudan war: A simple guide to what is happening [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-59035053]

^[4] January 2025 sees record global temperatures despite La Niña [https://wmo.int/media/news/january-2025-sees-record-global-temperatures-despite-la-nina]

^[5] Tomáš Halík, The Afternoon of Christianity: The Courage to Change (University of Notre Dame Press, 2024), p.60.

^[6] e.g Exodus 10.22, Amos 8.9

^[7] Luke 23.46

^[8] John 21.18

^[9] Luke 23.47.

^[10] Halík, The Afternoon of Christianity, p.31-33

^[11]Halík, The Afternoon of Christianity, p.211