The Church of England has been having a hard time of it recently. Attendance levels are falling precipitously, women are leaving in massive droves, and hip outreach programs don’t seem to be making much of a difference. So the Anglican bishops have decided it’s time to get back into the old-school conversions business.

Anglicans were commanded to “go forth and evangelise” yesterday in a dramatic assertion of missionary fervour that could jeopardise carefully built-up relations with Muslims, Jews and other faiths. The established Church of England put decades of liberal-inspired political correctness behind it in a move that led one bishop to condemn in anger the “evangelistic rants” … The Church’s General Synod, meeting in London, overwhelmingly backed a motion to force its bishops to report on their “understanding of the uniqueness of Christ in Britain’s multifaith society” and offer guidance in sharing “the gospel of salvation” with people of other faiths and none.

If you think this move is going to cause some internal tensions, you’d be right. While some vicars see every person they meet as “a potential convert”, others are worried that a renewed stridency will only further hinder efforts at evangelistic outreach.

However, the Bishop of Hulme, Stephen Lowe, who leads the Church’s mission in urban life, told The Times that he was “saddened” by the debate. Condemning the “evangelistic rants” of some members, he said: “There are one or two contributions that worried me because they did not seem to have any understanding of the nature of relationship that precedes good evangelism.” He added: “There’s an element of people who have not got experience of living and spreading the gospel in a multicultural, multifaith context telling those who do have that experience how to do it. That makes me very uneasy.”

Will this re-evangelization effort bear fruit? Or will it simply further alienate those already dissatisfied with the church? Whichever the case, I can’t imagine this will do wonders for relations between the CoE and an increasingly multi-religious Britain. While some vicars complain that British Anglicans need “to recover our nerve” and get back to proclaiming the “truth”, they may find that doctrinal correctness could come at the price of an ever-shrinking audience of believers. As for British Pagans, they now know who to avoid at parties and other social functions.

BBC News has run a story on the Church of England’s efforts to reach out to “spiritual but not religious” people, complete with hipster missionaries sent out to psychic fairs, and alternative meeting and worship services. But do these experiments in boosting church attendance really work? Not so much, according to reporter Jolyon Jenkins.

Ian Mobsby, an emerging church guru, argues we live in the age of the “spiritual tourist”; a “world driven by individualism… where people want to experience something that brings peace, centredness and depth.” He sees parallels between today’s post-religious culture and the early days of Christianity, a time of prevailing mysticism in Europe. “We are entering a world where people aren’t interested in whether something is true or not, or whether they believe it or not, but whether it works,” says Mr Mobsby. In other words, if an emerging church can offer a sense of community and give a feeling of inner peace, that may be enough – belief will follow. But three years into his mission in Telford, Mark Berry’s core community is not spiritual-but-not-religious recruits, but already-committed Christians who use his gatherings to deepen and provide new perspectives on their faith. There may be a hole in people’s lives, but there’s not a great deal of evidence that it is God-shaped.

This isn’t scientific, but my own experiences with alternative Christian outreach programs have backed this up. While the  curious may drop in from time to time, the committed members are usually self-identified Christians already. So psychic-fair outreach programs, Church-led extreme-sport events, and goth masses,  act more as retention programs than anything else. Not that there is anything wrong with trying to lure estranged church-goers back into the fold, but I agree with “emerging church guru” Ian Mobsby’s claim that were moving into a results-based religious future. A future that doesn’t necessarily favor large institutional religions.

If your faith is losing members, a new marketing plan, no matter how effective, won’t stem the tide. Who knows though? Maybe hanging out in psychic fairs and doing extreme sports will end up changing the outreachers more than the (potentially) outreached. Perhaps these new “hip” emerging-churchers are simply becoming the change they want to see, and that may wind up being a more effective ministry than any sort of “alternative” event. (Thanks to Mike for tipping me off to this story.)

My semi-regular round-up of articles, essays, and opinions of note for discerning Pagans and Heathens.

The Staten Island Advance reports on a dispute between neighbors that involves a Pagan family and charges of religiously-motivated harassment.

“Ivy Colmer Vanderborgh, her husband and her mother live in one half of a duplex on Oceanview Avenue. Their Annadale neighbors say they are disrupting the neighborhood. But the Colmer Vanderborgh family claims those same neighbors are persecuting them because of their religion. Ms. Colmer Vanderborgh and her mother, Marlene Colmer, both practice Wicca. They contend that since their appearance on a Staten Island Community Television show about their religion in June 2006, neighbors have they have been verbally harassed, their car has been vandalized, their property damaged and their dog poisoned.”

The neighbor charged with masterminding their harassment denies any wrongdoing, claiming the family is loud, obnoxious, and paranoid. At this point all evidence in the case is circumstantial, so we have no idea if these Wiccans are truly being persecuted, or if they simply have a persecution complex.

It is reported that The Church of England has “serious reservations” about the looming abolishment of Britain’s blasphemy laws. While the archbishops, Dr Rowan Williams and Dr John Sentamu say they won’t oppose abolishment, they are “concerned” about the meaning and timing of the move.

“[The archbishops] say the government needs to be clear as to precisely why the offence is being scrapped. They argue that it should not be seen as a “secularising move” or as a general licence to attack or insult religious beliefs and believers. They say it is still too early to be sure how the new offence of incitement to religious hatred, which applies to all faiths, will operate in practice and that laws which carry “a significant symbolic charge” should not be changed lightly.”

These laws, while rarely invoked today, were once used to persecute Quakers, atheists, Unitarians, and other groups who threatened (or appeared to threaten) the Anglican Church’s primacy in England. They belong in the dust-bin of history along with laws against “witchcraft”.

Slate.com explores the history of the crotch-grab in Italy.

“It’s the seat of fertility. The crotch grab goes back at least to the pre-Christian Roman era and is closely associated with another superstition called the “evil eye” – the belief that a covetous person can harm you, your children, or your possessions by gazing at you. Cultural anthropologists conjecture that men would try to block such pernicious beams by shielding their genitals, thus protecting their most valued asset: the future fruit of their loins. Over the centuries, the practice shifted. Men covered their generative organs not only to defend against direct malevolence but also in the presence of anything ominous, like a funeral procession.”

The article also explains the ever-popular “corno” necklaces and the corna hand-sign (aka the “devil sign”) in the same context.

Groundbreaking Gaelic film “Seachd: The Inaccessible Pinnacle” has finally acquired international distribution through Altadena Films.

“Young Films has secured a deal with Altadena Films, an international sales agent, to sell Gaelic feature film Seachd – The Inaccessible Pinnacle, around the world. Altadena will represent the film at the Berlin Film Festival then at markets and festivals around the world thereafter. For the international market the English title will be Seachd – The Crimson Snowdrop.”

For those who can’t wait that long, the DVD has been released in the UK, which means that Americans will need a region-free player to watch it. For my previous coverage of this film, click here.

Nobel Prize-winning Irish author Seamus Heaney has lashed out at the Irish government for their road construction through the sacred Tara Skreen valley (home of the Hill of Tara), calling it a “ruthless desecration”.

“I think it literally desecrates an area – I mean the word means to de-sacralise and for centuries the Tara landscape and the Tara sites have been regarded as part of the sacred ground … If ever there was a place that deserved to be preserved in the name of the dead generations from pre-historic times up to historic times up to completely recently, it was Tara … Tara means something equivalent to me to what Delphi means to the Greeks or maybe Stonehenge to an English person or Nara in Japan, which is one of the most famous sites in the world…”

While it looks like nothing can stop road construction now, campaigners are still working to halt construction and limit further development in the area.

In a final note, The Hamilton Spectator reviews a new e-book by Neil Jamieson-Williams entitled “A Field Guide to Modern Pagans in Hamilton, Ontario”, which resulted in an angry reply from the author over errors and “yellow journalism”.

“Ms. Fragomeni made no attempt to contact me either by telephone or email to inform me of when the article would be printed – in all probability, she boldly lied to me in our last phone call, knowing full well that the article would be in the Saturday paper. The presentation my book and myself in the article was a smear campaign. No mention is made of the publishing company or where the book is available. Finally, it is clear to me that Ms. Fragomeni has, at best, only scanned portions of the book — she has written an article about a book that she has not read.”

Maybe there is such a thing as bad publicity? In any case, I suppose that should be a warning to be careful where you send promotional copies.

That is all I have for now, have a good day!