Shop Window, Flagship, Common Ground: Metaphor in Cathedral and Congregation Studies

By Judith A. Muskett 

‘Shop-window, flagship, common ground’ views the rich ministry and innovative mission of cathedrals through the novel lens of metaphor; and it offers comparative insights on cathedrals and cathedral-like churches.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SCM Press
• Release date: Nov 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9780334058434

Judith A. Muskett 

Judith A. Muskett is a Visiting Fellow at York St John University.

Book preview

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Cathedral Studies and Greater Churches

Introduction

Cathedrals are ‘the shop-windows of the Church of England’; they are ‘flagships of the Spirit’; and they are ‘common ground’. These are just a few of the metaphors employed in the last two or three decades to illuminate how these iconic buildings can function. In 2018, the first ever National Cathedrals Conference took place, when around 400 delegates (including some from as far away as Australia and South Africa) gathered in Manchester to facilitate development of a strategic vision for the future direction for cathedrals. The adoption of ‘Sacred Space, Common Ground’ as the title of that landmark conference brought metaphor to the foreground of efforts to reflect on the future role of cathedrals. There are many more cathedral metaphors. Sometimes they can be controversial, especially if the words could be used equally to describe major, or indeed most, parish churches.

The significance of cathedrals

In a time of growing secularization and marginalization of religious structures, sociologists of religious life and practical theologians are interested in exploring the capacity of religious structures to survive, propagate and develop. Heralded as a ‘success story of the Church of England’ (Inge, 2006), with buoyant attendances when some other parts of the Church are in numerical and financial decline, cathedrals are undoubtedly structures that have drawn particular interest in recent years. Their relevance rests on their claim to be ‘one area of the Church’s life where increasingly the unchurched and the half-believer encounter God, and where the institutions of our society instinctively engage with the Christian gospel’ (Platten, 2017a, p. 1).

The special significance of cathedrals, not only in England but worldwide, was manifested by the devastating fire that raged through the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris on Monday 15 April 2019, causing its nineteenth-century wooden spire and much of the roof to collapse. While around 400 fire-fighters tried to limit the spread of the flames that night, hundreds of people came out to keep vigil as close to the burning cathedral as possible, praying, singing hymns and sometimes weeping: ‘They formed a congregation in the streets more vast than any church could hold’ (Kidd, 2019). As Notre Dame burned, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, said ‘The shock at the outbreak of this fire is spreading around the world. It is an iconic building visited by millions but more importantly is the symbol of faith which is at the heart of Europe’ (Bremner, 2019).

Just like the famous photograph of St Paul’s Cathedral standing intact while everything around it burned on the night of 29 December 1940 during the London Blitz, photographs of Notre Dame in Holy Week 2019 served as a reminder ‘that some buildings embody a powerful feeling of shared identity and emotion’ (The Times, 2019). Valérie Pecresse, head of the Paris Regional Council, said: ‘We are devastated by this. Notre Dame is not just any monument, it is the heart of France and all French people love this lighthouse of Paris’ (Sage, 2019). Notre Dame was revealed as ‘the beating heart of the city [of Paris] for nine centuries’ (Steafel, 2019, p. 6) and ‘one of the beating hearts of France’ (Moutet, 2019).

On the evening the fire broke out, Emmanuel Macron, President of France, cancelled a planned television address to announce reforms, after five months of the grassroots protests by the ‘gilets jaunes’. Instead, Macron went to Notre Dame to salute the bravery of the fire-fighters and he vowed that the cathedral – owned and maintained by the state, like other church buildings in France – would be rebuilt. Summing up the role the cathedral plays, he said: ‘Notre Dame is our history, our literature, part of our psyche, the place of all our great events, our epidemics, our wars, our liberations, the epicentre of our lives . . . So I solemnly say tonight: we will rebuild it together’ (Becket, 2019a, p. 2). Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris, declared that Paris would find the strength to rebuild the edifice from its motto ‘Fluctuat nec mergitur’ (‘Tossed by the waves but does not sink’) (Samuel, 2019). By Tuesday night, 16 April 2019, more than €700 million had been raised for the restoration effort from the rich and members of the public alike. An international architecture competition was to be launched to redesign the cathedral roof: speaking on Wednesday 17 April, Éduoard Philippe, the French Prime Minister, said the competition would be for ‘a spire suited to the techniques and challenges of our time’ (Becket, 2019b).

The event prompted various individuals to discuss the power of church buildings (see, for example, Clark, 2019). Interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on Tuesday morning, 16 April, Cardinal Nichols explained the significance of cathedrals in these words:

Right at the heart of religious experience, especially the Jewish-Christian experience, is this word ‘remember’ . . . Buildings do that for us, cathedrals especially. We know our lives are ambivalent, they’re not particularly brilliant, but our hopes are always expressed in things like cathedrals. They take what’s deepest in our hearts and give us an eternal representation. (Becket, 2019a, pp. 3–4)

A comment piece in the Church Times newspaper published on Maundy Thursday, 18 April 2019 made the point that, even though we recognize that the Church is primarily the People of God, ‘it is impossible to avoid investing ancient churches and cathedrals with great significance – not least because they were designed to convey something of the awe felt when entering God’s domain’. The piece continued:

The key message is permanence: the survival of our great churches through the centuries – despite threats and mishaps, some as disastrous as Monday’s fire – has represented the survival of the faith. It could be argued that the People of God rely too heavily on stone and brick to signal the presence of God; but church architecture is effectually symbolic. A lofty, calm, beautiful church interior makes a difference: it reminds the faithful about life beyond their own concerns, humbles them, and draws their vision away from self. (Church Times, 2019)

The flood of donations for the restoration was testament to the enduring status of Notre Dame. In the British media, parallels were drawn with the blaze in 1984 at York Minster, which took four years and over £2 million to restore. Some commentators asked whether there might be unease at the scale of the funds required to restore a building when, for example, natural disasters affecting millions of people tended to attract less money.¹ On Wednesday morning 17 April 2019, John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that Notre Dame was an icon of God’s glory and he declared that ‘we all need a home in order to be hospitable’. When challenged by his interviewer John Humphrys about the need for magnificent buildings to worship God and whether money pledged for the restoration of Notre Dame would be better spent on feeding hungry children, the Archbishop argued that both can be done; and he expressed the hope that Notre Dame would galvanize people to show the same spirit of generosity in other circumstances. Interviewed by Humphrys straight afterwards, the sculptor Antony Gormley endorsed the Archbishop’s sentiments about the need for a home to extend hospitality and he stressed that works of art such as Notre Dame belong to everyone. Gormley said he asked himself why people wept on the streets of Paris on the Monday night. He suggested the answer lay in Notre Dame as an expression of identity; and he recalled how the survival of St Paul’s Cathedral during the Blitz spoke of our own survival.

The power of metaphor in cathedral and congregation studies

Discourse about the relevance of cathedrals and churches today may draw on metaphor without necessarily fully appreciating its nature, not only in describing sociological and ecclesiological phenomena, but actually shaping and transforming them. Are metaphors used consciously and deliberately, or are they used sometimes without speakers or writers being conscious of their metaphoricity? Shop-Window, Flagship, Common Ground focuses attention on analysis – both conceptual and empirical in nature – designed to illuminate the power of metaphor in relation to cathedral churches and also greater churches (that is, churches broadly comparable to cathedrals in terms of size and reach, and with broadly similar civic and cultural roles). To do this, Shop-Window, Flagship, Common Ground explores in depth some commonplace metaphors mobilized for explanatory purposes, to shed light on the multiplex roles of cathedrals and greater churches. The analysis shows that metaphors illuminate not only the physical reality of such iconic places of worship but, more importantly, also their complex social significance in our changed religious landscape.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines metaphor as ‘a figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transferred to an object or action different from but analogous to that to which it is literally applicable’ (Simpson and Weiner, 1989, IX, p. 676). Study of metaphors is vital not only to comprehend how they can be understood, but also to grasp new inferences that might otherwise not have been reached. Such endeavours focus on what Naomi Quinn (1991) called the ‘productivity of metaphors’ and they regard metaphor as a generative tool that aids imagination and creative thinking (Inns, 2002). In the sort of complex and dynamic organizations that may be difficult to observe, metaphor also has the capacity to nourish the process of theory construction (Weick, 1989).

Metaphors in the discourse of cathedral and congregation studies originate in many different places. For example: cathedral websites and diocesan publications; straplines of strategic plans; introductions to guides on British cathedrals; newspaper articles; radio broadcasts; collections of scholarly essays exploring aspects of the purpose, life and use of cathedrals; academic research; speeches during debates in Parliament; and reports of commissions and of other formal inquiries² into the function, impact, governance and funding of cathedrals. In his foreword to one of those reports, Spiritual Capital: The Present and Future of English Cathedrals (Theos and The Grubb Institute, 2012), Dean Adrian Dorber of Lichfield remarked that cathedrals had been the subject of ‘a flurry of recent academic research’ in a growing literature that was ‘proving to be interesting and important’ (p. 9). In the short span of time since the publication of Spiritual Capital, the flurry has not abated. Among the latest work on cathedrals and greater churches are the following: a series of theological reflections in Anglican Theological Review by deans Gary Hall (2014), Jane Shaw (2013) and June Osborne (2016), the first two written from the US perspective; four articles in a special issue of the journal Theology in 2015 (Volume 118, Issue 6) focusing on the public role of Anglican cathedrals; Anglican Cathedrals in Modern Life, a collection of ten empirical studies edited by Leslie J. Francis (2015); publications from the three-year Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded research project, ‘Pilgrimage and England’s cathedrals, past and present’, a set of articles in a themed issue of the journal Religion in 2019 (Volume 49, Issue 1), and case study reports on four cathedrals (Canterbury, Durham, York, and the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral) (www.pilgrimageandcathedrals.ac.uk/reports); one of the Church of England’s Church Growth Research Programme reports (Holmes and Kautzer, 2013); Holy Ground, the third collection of essays on a wide range of cathedral topics, edited by Stephen Platten (2017a); the report of a government review of cathedrals and their communities (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2017), the culmination of a year-long tour by the Faith Minister of all 42 Anglican cathedrals in England; and the report by the Church of England’s own Cathedrals Working Group (2018) on the adequacy of the current Cathedrals Measure. It is notable that among many of these most recent contributions there has been a reliance on empirical data to inform analysis, discussion and theological reflection. Such data have been gathered within and about cathedrals and, in the case of Holmes and Kautzer’s report, greater churches too.

Shop-Window, Flagship, Common Ground

Against this background, this book Shop-Window, Flagship, Common Ground is marked out in part by a different approach, where analysis of the purpose and use of cathedrals and cathedral-like churches, as captured in metaphor, stimulates some novel avenues of enquiry. The volume not only teases out how metaphors used of cathedrals and greater churches are understood and what inferences they might carry, but also demonstrates how metaphors mobilized to enliven the discourse of cathedral and greater church scholarship have the capacity to become the building blocks of academic theory (cf. Weick, 1989) and stimulate empirical investigation around the function of iconic buildings, thus benefitting academic and church communities alike.

The work here is set against the backcloth of two developing fields – cathedral studies (Francis, 2015) and congregation studies (Hopewell, 1987; Ammerman, Carroll, Dudley, and McKinney, 1998; Guest, Tusting, and Woodhead, 2004; Cameron, Richter, Davies, and Ward, 2005) – and of a growing interest in ‘major’ and ‘greater’ parish churches (Holmes and Kautzer, 2013; Burrows, 2016).

Cathedral studies

The term ‘cathedral studies’ was coined by Leslie J. Francis (2015) in his edited volume Anglican Cathedrals in Modern Life: The Science of Cathedral Studies. The field that Francis identified embraces many different approaches and disciplines, and its modern development was anchored in a survey of literature starting in the 1990s (Francis and Muskett, 2015). During that period the Archbishops of Canterbury and York set in motion a commission on cathedrals that examined ‘the future role in Church and nation of the Cathedrals of the Church of England’ and made ‘recommendations as to how best that role could be fulfilled’ (Archbishops’ Commission on Cathedrals, 1994, p. 1). The scope of the recommendations included proposals for government and support of the cathedrals. The Commission’s landmark report, Heritage and Renewal, gave rise to renewed interest in reflection not only on the role of cathedrals but also on various aspects of their ministry and mission. Emblematic of the revival of scholarship were three collections of essays: Cathedrals Now, edited by Iain MacKenzie (1996) on the basis of a lecture series delivered at St Martin-in-the-Fields in London in 1994; and two volumes edited by Stephen Platten and Christopher Lewis, Flagships of the Spirit. Cathedrals in Society (1998a) and, nearly a decade later, Dreaming Spires? (2006). Also in the new millennium, Mark Rylands (2006) reflected on cathedral ministry in one of the Mission-Shaped series published in the wake of the Mission-Shaped Church working group report (Archbishops’ Council, 2004); and Grace Davie updated her landmark Religion in Britain (1994b), including discussion of cathedrals in the second edition (2015).

As we suggested in Anglican Cathedrals in Modern Life, all those contributions can reasonably be said to fall within the field of cathedral studies. Francis contended that Anglican Cathedrals in Modern Life took cathedral studies in ‘a radically different direction’ from the previous literature (Francis and Muskett, 2015, p. 19). What marked out this brand of cathedral studies was ‘a scientific approach . . . drawing on insights, theories and methods employed and developed within the social scientific study of religion (including the sociology of religion and the psychology of religion) and within empirical theology’ (p. 2). Academic rigour was the hallmark. On the basis of quantitative and/or qualitative data collected from and within a range of English and Welsh cathedrals, each study reported in Anglican Cathedrals in Modern Life set out to address a specific research question (on topics such as cathedral carol services, cathedrals’ engagement with young people and cathedral prayer boards and visitors’ books).

I have argued elsewhere that, using approaches developed and tested in adjacent established fields, the recent style of cathedral studies ‘seeks to adopt rigorous methods to evaluate the impact of cathedrals as key points of growth in the Church of England’ (Muskett, 2016, p. 276). As a category, cathedrals have provided notable growth points in the Church in recent years. The main source of growth is a rise in midweek service attendance, such data reported for the first time only in 2000: ‘The availability of accessible worship in open cathedrals throughout the week is attracting spiritual pilgrims at times that are more convenient to contemporary lifestyles’ (Barley, 2012, p. 84). Over the decade to 2017, almost all of the overall increase in usual cathedral attendance could be attributed to a rise in numbers at midweek services; and in 2017 weekly attendance at usual cathedral services was split evenly between Sunday (50%) and midweek (50%) services (Research and Statistics, 2018a, p. 2). A total of 36,200 people per week (82% adults and 18% children under 16) attended usual cathedral services in 2017, an increase of 10% on 2007; and although attendance reported at Easter services in cathedrals in 2017 was 52,000 (the same as in 2007), total Christmas attendances in 2017 (135,000) was the highest since first reported in 2000 (p. 2). Cathedral visitor numbers tend to fluctuate year-by-year, but there was a small increase (2%) from 8.7 million in 2007 to 8.9 million in 2017³ (p. 15). Intrinsically, cathedral growth is an important avenue of inquiry and, as scholars often find, the analysis of data evidencing increases in attendances, visits, events and so on has a particular utility in opening up discussion of the wider impact of the life and activity of cathedrals. There is, of course, more to the field of cathedral studies than ‘an inquiry into the increasing profile and popularity of cathedrals within a specific denomination’, as pointed out by researchers on the AHRC-funded project ‘Pilgrimage and England’s cathedrals, past and present’ (Coleman and Bowman, 2019, p. 11). They hoped that the introduction and papers in the special issue of the journal Religion would contribute to ‘a new agenda or at least a new urgency in the study of cathedrals’ (p. 20).

As indicated above, there can be a range of disciplinary approaches to the field of cathedral studies. Prime among the disciplines employed in Anglican Cathedrals in Modern Life were the social scientific study of religion (including the sociology of religion and the psychology of religion) and empirical theology. Coleman and Bowman advocated focusing on the question of how history has made, and is made by, cathedrals; so they argued that ‘a challenge for developing any agenda in cathedral studies must be to find a way to combine historical and ethnographic sensibilities’ (2019, p. 18). Their particular point is that a blend of insights from history and ethnography offers an opportunity to track and analyse ‘the shifting trajectories of religious activity in broadly the same civic space over the longue durée’ (p. 18).

Ethnography, as a method of data collection, is utilized in Shop Window, Flagship, Common Ground; and the resulting case study (reported in Chapter 9) illuminates the system of meanings in one congregation when members reflected upon its development, albeit over a relatively short span of years. In the chapters of Part 2, I adopt a hermeneutic approach where textual analysis is the predominant method as the spotlight falls on discourse employed by and about cathedrals and greater churches to capture aspects of their role within the Church’s ministry and mission. By employing textual analysis as the research method, I follow an example set by Grace Davie (2003), whose analysis of letters sent to The National Gallery following its ‘Seeing Salvation’ exhibition (February to May 2000) was employed as data to evidence the state of religion in modern Britain. Treating metaphors as data is an extension of the qualitative, narrative approach (Brink, 1993).

Congregational studies

Recognition of congregational studies as an emerging field of study came several years before the recognition of cathedral studies as such a field. The first comprehensive introduction to work in the UK, published by Matthew Guest, Karin Tusting and Linda Woodhead (2004), revealed the field of congregational studies to be a rich and growing one, now of interest to those involved in the life of congregations and to scholars in a variety of disciplines. One year later, Helen Cameron, Philip Richter, Douglas Davies and Frances Ward (2005) published a handbook on Studying Local Churches, directed at a range of different audiences (students, those in training for ministry, church leaders and policy makers). Hitherto, such practitioners had relied on US ‘how to’ material, such as Studying Congregations: A New Handbook (Ammerman, Carroll, Dudley and McKinney, 1998) to guide their endeavours.

In their opening chapter, Woodhead, Guest and Tusting (2004) took stock of the field of congregational studies, as did Cameron, Richter, Davies and Ward (2005). The two sets of authors traced the present-day interest in studying the local church to literature on both sides of the Atlantic. A shared point of reference was James Hopewell’s (1987) influential US volume, Congregation: Stories and Structures where, on the basis of Stephen Pepper’s (1942) four world hypotheses (contextualist, mechanist, organicist, and formist) and the root metaphors underpinning those understandings, four types of congregation studies were distinguished. The four types of congregation studies identified by Hopewell (1987) are: (1) contextual (sociological studies probing the parish as a social organization); (2) mechanistic (uncovering how effectively a congregation fulfils its functions); (3) organic (treating the congregation as a living entity); and (4) symbolic (considering the congregation as a discourse, an exchange of symbols expressing the views, values and motivations of the parish). Hopewell’s own particular interest lay in shaping and advocating the fourth perspective. Likening congregation studies to the process of searching for a new home, Hopewell shed light on the symbolic approach with the observation that house-hunters contemplating the symbolic language of a potential dwelling want to find one that ‘expresses the self-understanding of its occupants and their transaction with the world’. Such house-hunters ask: ‘What, in any circumstance, does this place say about us? What does it express about our values and the way we engage the world?’ (1987, p. 29). Hopewell argued that narrative (then a neglected perspective among those who studied congregations) can be ‘a means by which the congregation apprehends its vocation’ (p. 193). He claimed that narrative alone is ‘sufficiently sensitive to amplify the unique accents of a congregation’s idiom . . . and sufficiently comprehensive to link congregational events and meanings’ (pp. 50–1). It is Hopewell’s symbolic approach to congregations that has been adopted for the case study reported in Chapter 9 of this book.

Woodhead, Guest and Tusting’s more recent survey of work in congregational studies modified and developed Hopewell’s four-fold typology, dividing congregational studies into two broad categories and listing examples of work in sub-categories of each. The two categories are: extrinsic studies (studies of congregations with some broader good, e.g. a concern to assess the role of congregations as generators of valuable social capital) and intrinsic studies (the study of congregations for their own sake and for the sake of understanding them) (2004, p. 2). Their conclusion was that, while the priority of congregational studies in the US (where funding streams are different, and there continues to be a keener interest in patterns of social capital) had continued to be extrinsic concerns, the orientation of British congregational studies moved from more extrinsic studies in the 1950s and 1960s to more intrinsic studies in the 1970s onwards (p. 18). The ethnographic research reported in Church Watch (Francis, 1996), where descriptions are offered without comment, was cited by Woodhead, Guest and Tusting as one of the best examples of an intrinsic congregational study. Noting that practitioners in the field of British congregational studies now found themselves ‘at a unique historical moment in which many congregations face collapse and extinction’, Woodhead, Guest and Tusting urged them to face up to the following challenges: ‘to study how congregations face this situation; to understand and explain why congregational decline has occurred; to illuminate the ways in which congregations maintain their distinctive life in the face of hostility or indifference; to explain why some congregations (and other forms of spiritual group) are managing to survive better than others’ (2004, p. 19).

As well as studying local church congregations, it is equally important to study how cathedrals face up to this unique point in time, to illuminate ways in which cathedrals maintain their distinctive life in the face of hostility or indifference, and to explain why cathedrals often manage to survive better than local churches. The distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic studies could equally be made of the field of cathedral studies, where certain work has been carried out for a broader good (examples would be the reports by Theos and The Grubb Institute, 2012, and Holmes and Kautzer, 2013), while other research has tended to be pursued