The Emissionary Position

Many will now be aware that government routinely publicises bad news on Fridays, knowing that we’re too busy trying to slip away for the weekend to notice.
Similarly, Radio Cowshed, our nation’s only publicly subsidised broadcaster, has little or no professional staff and no newsroom at the weekends. A skeleton staff hangs about long enough to collate Saturday sports reports from club secretaries then hands the keys to the religious correspondent. This explains why the Sunday ‘news’ items are so often dominated by faith-based tittle-tattle.
Today’s features a report on the future of Anglicanism ( see http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=37924), which confirms much of what I’ve said over the last year – i.e. that it’s flogging off the spoons, laying off the professional clergy and finding ways to hand the everyday stuff over to lay volunteers. Nothing there but good management sense for a business whose traditional market has gone, in fact. Almost makes you wonder if they’ve roped in the Tourist Board or Manx Heritage. The problems, navel-gazing cluelessness and solutions are so similar, and it would at least explain why government agencies are flogging gigs like Songs of Praise at Rushen Abbey.
What might be interesting, considering that rural deans are professional clergy and at least nominally in touch with their congregations, is to see if (as I suspect) these ‘Mission Partnerships’ will be controlled by locals notorious for a dislike of transparency and the democratic process who have skulked in government broom-cupboards for years.
The stuff about the website is no news either. I was told months ago who will run it and the horse-trading that went on first, but that can wait for another day.
In fact, my only concern, given a long history of shady dealings between Manx government and the ‘Established Church’ which is almost a pocket history of the denial of Manx democracy, is who, exactly, is this ‘mission’ to?
Is a self-selected elite trying to preach to congregations who have few problems with women, gays and folk of other cultures and creeds, and who just won’t get with the right wing agenda? If so, we shouldn’t care less as long as we are not asked to subsidise a fatuous tiff between devotees. However bizarre it is to the rest of us, people freely choose their faith and should live with the consequences.
Or is a church which already gives moral approval to shady politicos in return for privilege coming for our children through compulsory school activity? As both many of us and our kids now see that church as an amoral, anti-social hate joke we’re sick of listening to, that just might be a problem.