In this blog to mark the fifth anniversary since the outbreak of Covid, Jonathan Hustler, Secertary of the Methodist Conference, considers how the Methodist Church responded to the pandemic and the changes that it accelerated.
I remember well the strange sense of foreboding when, on 19 March 2020, Doug Swanney (the Connexional Secretary) and I took the decision to ask all the staff at 25 Marylebone Road to work from home until further notice; we knew that it was likely that HM Government would initiate a lockdown (as, indeed the Prime Minister did a few days later). As we reached the bottom of the vast staircase of the empty building, Doug went to set the alarm and I said to him ‘see you on the other side’.
Five years on, I write in our splendid new office in Tavistock Place Connexional, but I am not sure that we are yet ‘on the other side’. It is, I suspect, too early yet to say what the effect of the pandemic on the Methodist Church in Britain has been. We know that we are smaller than we were five years ago – our membership is approximately 40,000 (or 25%) less than it was in March 2020. We know that a significant number (about 500) churches have closed and that in the last few years the numbers of sale transactions going through TMCP annually have been up to twice what they had been.
We know that our patterns of worship attendance have been changed by livestreaming and our ways of engaging in business meetings by the ease with which we now use Zoom or Teams. We know that our concern about hygiene has made us more careful about how we take the collection, share the peace, and administer communion. However, we don’t know how much of those changes is due to the pandemic.
I have argued elsewhere that what pandemics have done throughout history is to accelerate rather than initiate change. The Black Death transformed the relationship between labourer and landowner in the 14th century, but the plates were shifting before the plague-carrying rat disembarked on these shores.
So it has been with the Church in the aftermath of Covid-19. We have shrunk, but we were shrinking before 2020. We do more online, but I was already having the occasional meeting on Skype before the start of 2020. We have seen churches close, but circuits were already seeking to be intentional in rationalising their plant. The pew by pew collection has been dropped for a plate (or card machine) by the door in some places, but 30 years ago I was minister in a church where so many gave by direct debit that there was sometimes nothing in the offertory bags.
What is more, the pandemic has not been the only possible cause of some of the changes we have seen. Turbulent economic weather and rising energy costs have played a part in some decisions and a small percentage of the reduction in members and the numbers of churches might be due to people leaving us because of the decisions we have taken on marriage and relationships.
In these strange and still changing times, it can be easy to focus on the negative and on what we have lost. The story is also one of affirmation of the Methodists who have lived through this age. In one of his hymns, Fred Pratt Green offered a prayer if ‘times of testing should lay bare what sort we are, who call ourselves Christ’s own’. The lockdown revealed what sort we are. Sam Monaghan testifies to the support that MHA received from the Church and we were proud of the way in which that charity spoke truth to power throughout pandemic. Churches prayed for and supported members and neighbours who courageously worked through in the health and other essential services. Our ecumenical commitments in places led us into a natural working with others to support communities in need.
Our then President and Vice-President exercised a remarkable online ministry throughout 2020/1 and in smaller ways we connected those who would otherwise have been isolated through telephone or printed services. The Connexional Team invested in the technology to enable services to be streamed from Central Hall, and we discovered there were congregants all over the world. At least one circuit developed a service using teleconferencing, and friends many miles away will still ring in.
The narrative of Methodism’s beginning will often include John Wesley’s proclamation that the world was his parish. Five years on, we have not fully emerged ‘on the other side’ – but we are discovering anew what seeing the world as our parish means.