Alison Milbank, The Once and Future Parish (London: SCM Press, 2023)

reviewed by James Butler

“The question should never start with, are we keeping the church open or are we closing it? The question really ought to be, how will we best be church in this context?” This is a question asked by one of the interviewees of some research I have carried out with Clare Watkins at the University of Roehampton. The question tries to move the discussion of church decline away from a question of economics to a question of theology and pastoral care. Behind this question are the very same instincts that led Alison Milbank to write The Once and Future Parish which seeks to advocate for the Church of England parish in the midst of a perceived turn against the parish within the way the Church of England operates. Milbank seeks to build on her previous book with Andrew Davidson, For the Parish, to provide a theological basis for the Save the Parish movement. However, while challenging a potentially unhelpful tendency towards centralisation within the Church of England, Milbank never seems to reach our asking interviewee’s question, “how will we best be church in this context?” because she already knows: it is the parish church. I think fundamentally this is the problem with the book, the underlying assumption that the woes of the Church of England are broadly all because the Church of England lost confidence in the parish, without a willingness to ask whether being faithful to the parish might look different in 21st-century Britain.

Reading the book I am broadly on board with the critique offered of the Church of England: the centralising tendencies and often uncritical adoption of management theory, along with a concern that the Church of England is losing touch with many in the population. However, the solution offered of having more confidence in the parish church seems to me to not really be interested in actually getting to grips with what is going on. At one point Milbank suggests that the secularisation of the UK was broadly down to the Church of England choosing to withdraw from public life through the decisions it made about structure and parish. The fact that the trends facing the Church of England are mirrored in so many UK denominations, not to mention established churches in other Western European nations, seems to completely pass her by.

The book is laid out logically, beginning with the broad thesis, and then exploring the history and development of the church. Milbank asks really important questions about mission, ecclesiology, the adoption of management methods, the approaches to church planting, and the understanding of the role of the clergy and laity. It feels, though, that there isn’t a desire to really get into the complexity of the questions, as she slips into polemic at quite a number of points rather than developing carefully evidenced argument.

I think there is value in reading this book to get a view of what some think about the ways the Church of England is changing and developing, and I think the questions she asks are important and helpful. Her instincts about the issues facing the church feel right to me. I would have just liked to see a more nuanced engagement based in a more careful study of the present realities of parish in all their complexity – their fruits and their failures. I’m sure the book will be celebrated by the advocates of Save the Parish, but whether it will helpfully open up the discussion, or speak to those who are more sceptical about Save the Parish’s proposals, I’m less convinced.

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