This is not going to be a religious piece, I promise, but my early experience of Methodism was as a child in a “Prim” (Primitive Methodist) chapel and so – I suppose – my childlike view of being a grown up was inflected by men, (they were always men), shouting at us and going on a lot about fornication a decade before I needed to know. When I was eventually overcome by the hormones I also had to overcome the gift of embedded guilt – a trick that fortunately I learned pretty quickly.
Anyway, this pilgrim’s progress took me through the Wesleyan tradition because they had a brilliant youth club, run by the most patient people I ever met – although Mrs Round cracked once before a fancy dress party and said the expected I’d be ‘coming as the devil‘. After that I sank into the lukewarm waters of the Church of England where I was lost to the elect, as it were. God gave up on me about 100 yards above this stretch of the river Wye under a concrete bridge. It happened quite unexpectedly. I was a bit shocked but – like any failed relationship someone had to say something.
So to get back to Jabez Bunting, and I’d really rather not, but in my Wesleyan Days I really admired John Wesley. He had to manage with doubts and when he went to America he lost his faith altogether; fell out with the C of E because they stood in the way of his work of growing new leaders. He was a charismatic who must have had the loudest voice you ever heard and he made it all seem possible, even to the Cornish miners at Gwennap Pit and the now forgotten colliers of Kingswood and the North Somerset Coalfield. You might think he represented something of the enthusiasm and fire of Jeremy Corbyn (stop that hissing immediately! – they never asked you on to the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury). Wesley was succeeded by Jabez Bunting who grew the infant Methodist church into a powerful force by driving his steam roller over any charismatic or independent thinkers. Methodism became a monocultural institution which had some good bits but lost much of its founding enthusiasm.
Actually there seems to be a bit of a pattern here. When St Francis of Assisi died, having been pretty much driven out of the order he founded, he was succeeded by Giovanni Parenti who was – wait for it – a lawyer who tidied the order up, stomped on all that nonsense about not having possessions and grew the order into a mighty force using more force where necessary.
So now I come to Brother Keir Starmer who comes across as a worthy successor to Giovanni Parenti and Jabez Bunting; cheerlessly obliterating hope whilst imposing order and discipline on a much depleted congregation.
But there is always a point of light. Back in the day I took a funeral service as a favour for a family from the South East who had no church connections in Bristol. As I left the crematorium an elderly woman hurried up beside me and said “Hello David it’s lovely to see you, how’s Jenny”(My sister) I made the usual lame excuse about not recognising her and she said “I was your Sunday School teacher in Staple Hill” (The Prim chapel). I do remember a teenage girl from the Sunday School, but mostly I remember the shouting of the preachers and the noise of the cattle and sheep awaiting slaughter behind the butcher’s next door – a brilliant and inexpensive soundtrack to the hell and damnation we were being promised. It was so nice to make her acquaintance after all those decades and the nicest thing of all was that in spite of all that dark religious stuff she’d evidently lived a full life of ordinary, everyday goodness.
As I said once in the Cathedral to an ordinand standing in a long line waiting to process in to kneel in front of the bishop – “You know this is only alright as long as you don’t take it too seriously”. She looked terribly shocked, so I hope she figured it out before it was too late.
