I have just been reading my church’s annual report for the AGM and I’m feeling just a little too pleased with myself. Our average Sunday attendance has risen steadily over the last few years. During 2022 it was 138; 2023 it was 153; during 2024 it was 170. Other churches have also experienced a bounce back after Covid, though most of them haven’t yet returned to pre-Covid levels. But my little glow of inner vicarly smugness is made utterly ridiculous by the story of Holy Week, the days running up to Easter.
This is the story of a vertiginous collapse of popularity. Jesus enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to wild public acclaim. Thousands line his route shouting support, waving their palms aloft, laying their cloaks on the road as he travels into town on a donkey. It is the welcome of a conquering hero, not all that different from victorious Roman generals arriving in Rome. This is what success looks like.
But within a few days of this triumphal entry, the same crowd will be screaming for his blood. Nervous politicians, with one eye on popular sentiment, will give in to the crowd and send him to his death. Hanging on a terrifying Roman instrument of torture and death, he will drip with the spit of jeering passers-by. There he will suffocate and die, abandoned by most of his friends and followers, a tiny footnote in the long history of Roman cruelty. This is what failure looks like.
What changed? One of the things you could say that Jesus wasn’t very good at expectation management, especially with regard to his political intentions. About such an important matter as whether he was the Messiah, the messaging was, at best, just a little oblique. Yes, there was an encounter with a Samaritan woman whom many would have regarded as an unreliable witness. “I know that the Messiah is coming, the one who will proclaim all things to us,” she says. And Jesus replies: “I am he.” But even the woman wasn’t totally clear: “He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” she mused immediately afterwards. And then there is that funny theme in Mark’s Gospel — the so-called Messianic Secret — where Jesus goes around telling those who see him as the Messiah to keep quiet about it. But in the absence of clear messaging, stories spread. This was the one, they whispered.
But what was their expectation? The Messiah had long been a figure of myth. Part-religious, part-political, he was to be the one who would take Israel back to the glory days of David and Solomon. Akin to those Trump MAGA hats, the Messiah was the leader of the Make Israel Great Again movement. Messianic success meant kicking out the occupying Romans. It meant big temples and cheering crowds. Messianic success is national pride, power and popularity. The people of Israel wanted someone a bit like Samson. He too had some heavenly intervention associated with his birth, and he killed 3,000 Philistines with a donkey’s jawbone.
It’s not exactly when and how the crowd cottoned on to the fact that Jesus wasn’t into any of this. But whenever and however the murmurations of the crowd shifted shape, very soon the over-hyped, ramped-up excitement of Palm Sunday collapsed into acrimonious disappointment. This odd man from Nazareth, with his northern accent and dubious choice of friends, was a fraud. A failure.
When I was studying at a theological college, we were asked a terrifying question. Should a “successful” priest be fêted by his congregation, or end up being crucified by them? Those who are called to hold a mirror up to others are never going to be popular.
I remember reading the extraordinary 1948 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis called Christ Recrucified. It tells of a Passion play put on in Anatolia, where a popular shepherd boy, Manolios, is chosen to play the part of Jesus. During rehearsals, a group of starving refugees arrive. They are from a nearby village that had been devastated by the Turks, but they are turned away. And the cowardly clergy fear that if it stands with the refugees, the village will turn against the church. So it too rejects the refugees and turns against Manolios who supports them. Manolios had taken his new role as Jesus a little too seriously. He is murdered by the villagers. “Two thousand years have gone by and men crucify you still,” says Father Fotis, one of the few remaining godly priests.
The Church of England is a dying church. Everybody says so. Numbers are down, churches are being turned into luxury flats, vocations abandoned. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury has resigned in failure. But what are we to make of this failure from the perspective of Holy Week? Throughout his preaching, Jesus was keen on the language of inversions. The first will be last and the last will be first; those who lose their life will find it; take down the mighty, lift up the lowly. Should we not think of success and failure within a similar inverted frame?
Some of the most irritating churches I know are ones that are just a little too pleased with themselves, particularly about how successful they are (yes, mea culpa). They tick all the right boxes. They attract lots of enthusiastic, successful and articulate young people, they have sound finances, slick advertising, beautiful buildings, and amazing choirs, they do lots of good work in the community. Heaven spare us from cocky, successful churches. They so depress me.
Conversely, some of the most important churches in which I have been a priest are what others might — and do — think of as failures. They look terrible to the Diocesan statistician. People sometimes squabble with each other. The organist is a bit rubbish. The church is not a looker. The heating breaks down, the roof leaks. People can have some very strange views. I love these churches because they are me. I too am a bit rubbish. I too am a failure in the deepest parts of my being. And the only thing that keeps these places together — the only thing that keeps me together— is reliance on something other than me.
“Some of the most important churches in which I have been a priest are what others might — and do — think of as failures.”
Which is why my own ecclesiology — what I think a church should be like — is Alcoholics Anonymous, but with incense and vestments. At AA we have to admit our weakness, and accept that we have no power within ourselves to help ourselves. These are the big theological must-haves… along with a trust that God will do the rest. Everything else about church is aesthetics and solidarity, which I like a lot, but as a second-order concern.
The Reverend Richard Coles, a friend of mine, often tells me he thinks of church as “organised goodness”. It’s a lovely idea, but I don’t exactly buy it. Not least because I don’t think of Christians as being especially good (atheists have long complained about this association, and rightly so). If anything, Christians are the ones who know we are not especially good. Or, to borrow Jesus’ words: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” That’s the whole problem with the successful church — they don’t really understand that they, too, are sick.
Now let me row back on something. I don’t actually think that there are distinct things called “successful” and “unsuccessful” churches. All churches are complicated mixtures of both. No church — evangelical, Catholic, liberal — has a monopoly on smugness. But nonetheless, success as an ideology is absolute kryptonite to the Easter story. Nietzsche was right in a way: Christianity is for losers.
That’s why I hope the next Archbishop of Canterbury will shrug his shoulders a little when asked — as he inevitably will be — how he will revive the fortunes of the Church of England. He must scorn cheap routes to numerical success. And I beg him to forget about all those centrally devised initiatives that your predecessor was so keen on: money redirected to big successful churches, greater enthusiasm breathlessly heralded as the latest route to growth. Jesus was down to a tiny handful of followers when he changed the world. Of course, if I were the Archbishop’s media adviser I’d advise the Archbishop not to say any of that too openly. People like success. The media likes success. Best not to encourage the crowd to turn upon you right away. That will happen in its own time and there won’t be much you can do about it when it does. The last Archbishop failed disastrously, and so will the next. Remember what Samuel Beckett said: “Never mind. Fail again. Fail better.”
But, whisper it: Jesus played chicken with total and absolute disaster, and he won. The resurrection is not about the magic — though I grant that’s the eye-catching bit. The resurrection is about how love transforms failure into genuine triumph. The abandoned man covered in spit and blood, stinking of death — yes, Ecce Homo — is the site of a renewed humanity. And that’s exactly why I love failed churches. Because they remind me that there is hope for us all, even losers like you and me. Happy Easter, losers.
