How many anglicans does it take to change a light bulb? Change!

It is pollarded oaks that live the longest. For up to 1000 years, every Autumn they sew the seeds of their own successes. By contrast, their un-pollarded cousins are short-lived. What lesson here then, is there for the Church of England?

In the village of Ramsbury, near to where I grew up, there was an ancient tree, standing resplendent in the market-place. It was the symbol of the Ramsbury Building Society, and my childhood money –box from the same Society had a picture of the tree upon it. Like our own Great Oak, it was hollow. By the time I was a teenager, the tree had begun to die. Everything was done to preserve it, but eventually the decision was made to cut it down. This, of course, created a bit of an uproar. How could this symbol of the village be allowed to die? The fact was it was already dead. Its branches had gone, and all that was left was a hollowed-out trunk. In its place a sapling was planted. – one that still continues to grow to the stature of its predecessor.
I think there is a message that may be hard to listen to, but never-the-less needs to be heard. There is no point in trying to preserve something that has become a hollowed-out husk of its former self. Pruning and pollarding perhaps postpone that hollowed-out fate.
I don’t know whether the Church of England has yet reached the stage of being a hollowed-out husk, but it seems to me that it is in great danger of becoming just that. It is over 500 years old and it can no longer touch lives in the way that it formerly did.
When I was training for Ministry I was asked when had I decided to go into the church? I answered somewhat pedantically that I had been in the church since 20th August 1967, the date of my baptism. In the end old trees cannot be preserved, and they go the way of things. No amount of preservation can preserve something that is both out of time and out of place. What’s needed is the renewal of new life, and that renewal can only come when the minister, that servant within ourselves. When we receive a service from anyone, we are receiving something from that which is good.
Trees come and go. So too do institutions. Let us not weep over the demise of old trees and tired institutions. Rather, let us continue to rejoice in the life that is within us, and the service to which each life is called. These are the green shoots of May, and these are the things worth nurturing.
Nobody likes change. That’s tough. The impermanence of all things is an unchanging reality. Not even the stones live for ever. Living things change by continuing to grow. Whereas dead things change only through decay.