Current Editorial
PAST EDITORIAL 15.2
The W.I.M.P. Syndrome - and the Fragility of Parishes
It is a sad little scenario, that has been acted out too many times: an urban or suburban parish apparently prosperous, with strong lay leadership, apparently attached to the Christian religion and the Book of Common Prayer: but when it comes time to choose a new priest, all common sense seems to desert them, they cravenly succumb to the institutional mentality, and end up with an institutional yes-man, "a moderate". In today's polarized church, the word "moderate" has a reassuring sound, but in an ever more radical theological climate, it has an ever more radical content. In the context of the revolution, "moderate" means moderately radical.
In practical terms it means the introduction, willingly or unwillingly, of the new religion. Doubtless the taste for the old religion is indulged--out of nostalgia, or out of political realism--but it is not nurtured, promoted, and built up. It is granted its place--as yesterday's faith in a church hell-bent for tomorrow. Occasionally, very occasionally, this experience has a salutary effect: the parish wakes up, realizes that it does not want the new religion, and rediscovers the old religion with a new vitality. More usually there is only a willing or unwilling embrace of the new religion of communal solidarity and warm fuzzies, sexual liberation and new language for God.
Call it the W.I.M.P. syndrome--for it is most dramatically manifest in parishes that are largely Well-educated, Intelligent, Middle-class, and Pragmatic. Apparently strong, and well-equipped to provide leadership in the church, they instead end up drifting with the institutional tide, even when that is leading them where they do not want to go. Enervated by cultural liberalism, they do not have the sense to see through the sophistry of the new theology. Some will hate it and are miserable under it but will do nothing but complain; others will throw themselves into it, deluding themselves on their progressiveness and sophistication but actually just making fools of themselves. Perhaps there is a kind of bourgeois complacency at work in this W.I.M.P. syndrome, a smug sense that being Well-educated, Intelligent, Middle-class, and Pragmatic, is enough. Preening themselves on their strength, they nonetheless exhibit a slavishly institutional mentality.
There are at least two deficiencies in it. First there is a deficiency of understanding, a failure to teach and learn that the Church is not merely a human institution, but, first and last, the mystical body of Christ, the blessed company of all faithful people, the inheritors of the kingdom of heaven--a society founded, sustained, and fulfilled in God. Instead the Church is understood (often unconsciously) as a kind of bureaucratic organization, a service club with an odour of sanctity.
Though they may have a sense of the Church as something more, that sense has not been developed or articulated to the point where it can challenge worldly assumptions about the Church. So when the bureaucratic authorities crack the whip, the bureaucratic and institutional mentality of such parishes is all too ready to obey. Thinking of the church in purely human terms, they end up with a purely human church, with a purely human religion.
Together with the deficiency of understanding goes a deficiency of will: often coddled by past clergy, and shielded from the realities of the Church's identity crisis, the laity have grown accustomed to the church as a warm cocoon and will give up everything rather than leave it behind. They will do anything rather than fight about religion. And although fighting about religion is indeed to be avoided, sometimes the time comes when one must fight for one's religion.
In today's revolutionary climate, the virtue of fortitude is absolutely necessary. To put it a little brutally: You can have true religion, if you really want it, if you are ready and willing to fight for it. But if you are not, then you won't be allowed to keep it. It will be taken away from you, and you will have no one to blame but yourselves: for he that hath, to him shall be given; and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath (Mark 4.25 cf. Matthew 13.12, 25.29, Luke 8.8).
A sad little scenario, indeed: but full of instruction for those who wish to avoid that fate. For parishes can avoid this fate, and some do. There are churches that have learned these lessons, have fought their fights, and are ready and willing to do so again, if need be. They stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath set them free, and refuse to be entangled again with the yoke of bondage. Churches militant, not churches embattled, they are ever vigilant to maintain the liberty which they enjoy. And they do enjoy it. Against all the odds, the work of the Church is done. But there is no reason why many other parishes cannot do the same--none but the spirit of institutional slavery. +
A note on our Editor:
The Rev'd Gavin Dunbar was Rector of the Parish of Ecum Secum, Nova Scotia, and now serves as an associate priest in the parish of St. John's, Savannah, Georgia.
He is the editor of the Anglican Free Press, and past Vice-President of the Nova Scotia / PEI branch of the Prayer Book Society of Canada, and a former instructor at the Atlantic St. Michael's Youth Conference. He has written and lectured extensively on a range of topics, and has many god-children.