Losing ground: reading Ruth in the Pacific

Introductory chapters discuss ‘northernness’, the relationship of gospel to any culture, and the assumption that we now live in a world ‘after Christendom’. So, what did the research reveal? Unsurprisingly, they found leaders and new Christians in the northern churches visited to be ‘down-to-earth, honest, real, inclusive and vulnerable’. They tell us also, using a phrase of the Brazilian Bishop Pedro Casaldálgia that God ‘speaks only dialect’, and go on to search for these characteristics in the conversations they recorded. A very different chapter five is an imagined description of what one Sunday might be like in the communities visited. From morning to evening formal and informal services are described, designed to illustrate that fuzzy churches have the characteristic not of ‘wooliness’ but of ‘something which is happening’. That something is set out in the findings of chapter seven. Merging their wide reading with the research findings, the authors conclude that healthy relationships between a congregation and its surrounding community produce spiritual capital which in turn, ‘creates relational capital at the fuzzy boundary between the church and the world’ (p. 112). Readers of this journal will be interested to know that the grouping of rural parishes visited resented losing their independence and displayed characteristics of increased rivalry. There are some heavy sentences which a rigorous editor might have removed. What would our imagined Yorkshire person make of, ‘It is possible, we believe, to hold a view in between the essentialist and the evacuated simulacrum’ (p. 45)? The authors accept that they did not find one ‘Northern gospel’ but were able to identify energised attempts to embed Christianity in diverse local communities. That those northern communities have been disproportionately scarred by poverty and deprivation is acknowledged but not explored in any depth. A further book is promised. It might address recent distinctively northern political promises and the responses of church leaders to them.