Some might wonder why Australia should welcome Don Cupitt, arch-heretic and bane of the theological establishment in Britain for the last two decades. Or why, indeed, it should welcome Sea of Faith or Pilgrim Network. Do any of these off-the-map radical little networks seriously think they could tickle a hair in the nose of this robust Christian nation? Can they not see that the Australian Church is a big, healthy muscular giant? Have these middle-aged, middle-class, white liberal intellectuals really nothing better to do on a Saturday morning than parade their spiritual angst in public? Members of my own evangelical tradition, who could fill a stadium or two on a Sunday morning, would certainly view an event such as this as rather sad - little knowing that evangelical Christianity's own salvation may depend on the likes of it.

In spite of loud protestations to the contrary, it’s actually all over for ‘The Faith’ as-we-know-it. Forget the evangelical razzmatazz, the fundamentalist bluster, the catholic arrogance - the situation for faith is so desperate I seriously believe a ‘state of emergency’ should be declared in the Church. Anyone who thinks The Faith is doing just fine, thank you, has been living on Mars or in Alabama. Here on earth things don’t look so good. A total paradigm shift has taken place in the global culture that will have dire consequences for religious faith and practice…

I am going to suggest, in my anecdotal way, why I believe a radical response is the only appropriate one for the survival of faith and to place Sea of Faith and Pilgrim Network in this context. 

The whole ‘Religious Planet’ is in deep crisis. I am certain that this is not just another crisis in religion. God knows we’ve had any number of these since Galileo looked through his telescope and did not see doctrines orbiting Heaven. No, what we are witnessing is the crisis of religion itself - all religion, from the most self-critical to the most bolshy - because the ‘crisis’ is not about something rotten in the state of religion, but about the religious state itself being rotten.  

This, of course, is the culmination of a whole series of crises that have battered the ‘Religious Planet’ like a hail of comets since the Enlightenment: in philosophy, natural science, politics, psychology, historical criticism, biblical criticism et al, with the Darwinian comet coming dangerously close to throwing it off its axis. This relentless onslaught has finally reached catastrophic proportions in its head-on collision with the post-modern world. Until now, religion in general and Christianity in particular have survived largely because strong conservative forces have led the struggle back to some kind of workable equilibrium. 

And I mean ‘back’. The only areas where Christianity hangs on by more than its fingertips are where it has created historical Theme Parks isolated from the culture. Here supernaturalists and traditionalists huddle together like doomed dinosaurs trying to catch the last rays of a retreating sun. This is a sad place of desperate measures.  

This desperation is exemplified in the Alpha Course - a vacuous enterprise, but one viewed by many churches as the cavalry charging over the hill to the rescue. Never has so much been owed by so many to so few for so little. This much-trumpeted ‘discover the meaning of life’ initiative is little more than Sunday-School with nuclear weapons and a Pentagon budget. The ‘course’ itself is designed for evangelism, but is being used in sheer desperation as a revival tool for the faithful. The church is eating its seed corn. And still it is starving.  It is not ‘reviving’, nor will it, because the culture has no residual religious oxygen left in it to revive anything of the sort. Any movement you see is merely the herding of the sheep from one denominational pen to another. Only a truly radical response to the crisis facing religion has any hope of rescuing religious faith from extinction.

All Church Establishments are, of course, in an acute state of denial. The ecclesiastical machinery clanks away from the Vatican to the Bible-Belt, churning out its business-as-usual message to a dwindling constituency. But what is its business nowadays? The Church is now largely part of the entertainment or heritage industry with residual, mainly administrative, care-taking roles in education, health and social services. One by one its powers have been stripped by the state and it is left with decaying shrines and a collection of culturally disembodied rituals. In the popular mind it has been largely reduced to a Gothic prop for Hollywood’s latest supernatural fantasy. Even in non-Gothic countries like Australia, the majority see the Church as a place for rather sad people who don’t get out much. More ominously for Christendom, as the entire cosmology of Christianity disintegrates before our eyes, the post-modern paradigm shift establishes itself as the global post-religious culture.  I’m not saying this is bad news for the planet, just the end of the road for traditional Christianity. 

The Old Time Religion has simply become unbelievable. Not just ‘out there’ in the big bad world - where ‘Church’ represents bum-numbing boredom and brain-dumbing twaddle - but also on its home turf. Even in ex-priest-ridden Ireland the seminaries are all but empty. And it is not just the more sinister bum-numbing that has emptied Mass of the vast majority of its youth, but the collapse of credulity by an educated and prosperous population.  

And it is not only in the traditionally angst-ridden Anglican-Quaker-Unitarian-liberal tribes that I encounter spiritual trauma and an anxiety of faith, but also in my own full-bloodied evangelical tribe. For many, evangelical culture has replaced evangelical experience. Testimony is thin and unconvincing. Spontaneous prayer is often forced and clichéd.   Sermons are often homilies on feel-good spirituality – sermonettes for Christianettes. The ‘I was far in sin’ songs no longer reflect the experience of the largely middle-class singers who are now only ‘honorary sinners’ (as Robert Funk calls them), and Salvation fatigue is setting in. If, even here, in the heartland of Protestant Evangelical Christianity, the old spells are no longer working, surely ‘The End is Nigh' after all? 
This is not only a serious situation for faith but also for the world. We still need a usable myth to define our world and give us meaning, purpose and even the will to live. Humanity is a religious creation. We are structurally religious animals with a ‘transcendental gene’. Spirituality is as much part of our humanity as our sexuality. Religion has survived previous crises because religion is itself a survival tool. But can it survive this mother of all crises?  I think so. 

After writing his seminal Taking Leave of God one could be given to wondering why Don Cupitt didn’t. Why did he not go off and write, instead, about the mating habits of Tasmanian marsupials, which at least have the decency to exist? But no, many books later this so-called ‘atheist priest’ is still wrestling with God.  Beyond belief, it seems lies the kind of radical faith the Sea of Faith is proclaiming. It might seem a pretty Spartan, minimalist creature compared with the baroque splendours we have known - but it can survive the near zero climate of the religious void into which we are moving. It is very robust. 

I believe there is another constituency waiting for this new faith to emerge. As Sister Wendy Beckett remarked, Christianity is renewing itself from those who have fled to the margins. A new religious life form has been evolving in the cold intellectual regions of the ‘Religious Planet’. While those exotic religious creatures that depended for their spiritual life on the heat from the supernatural sun ‘out there’ are facing almost certain extinction, the time has come for those evolved creatures that can generate their own spiritual heat to emerge. 

The trick is to survive the transition. Some argue that only a truly radical response to the faith crisis which includes an embracing of the death of supernaturalist, realist religion in all its forms will succeed… [However], the Pilgrim Network still feels that a visible, radically reformed Christianity is possible. It will require subversive ‘loyal disobedience’ on the part of those who value the Christian tradition if the Church is to have a place in the new order. Although the Church wants radicals like a hole in the head, that is precisely what it needs if it is to survive…

I am indebted to Bishop Richard Holloway for the following comments, taken from his recent farewell charge to the Scottish Episcopal synod in Edinburgh:
 

The duration of a tradition is important to societies that prize stability and continuity, but the price they pay may be a level of stagnation that ends by threatening the safety of the tradition itself, because they inhibit its evolution and development. 

….. it is precisely those who deviate from the tradition, because of their proneness to doubt and reflection, who provide the means for its development and continuance. The very people who are persecuted for their heresy may be the agents that preserve whatever is enduringly sound in the tradition in question.  A deeper aspect of the same paradox is that the founders who became the passionate focus of fundamentalist loyalty in a later era were almost always heretics in their original context, as was certainly the case with Jesus.

I’m not sure if Don Cupitt thinks there is a place for conservatives in the process of radical change. He moves rather quickly and his faith is very much a ‘work in progress’.  Personally, I do… I believe – Lord help my unbelief – that the Church can facilitate the whole spectrum of religious need.  It can be all things to all men – and women. 

The Church can be a kind of Spiritual Health Service. Yes, literal at point of need - rather like the twelve-step programme for people who feel ‘powerless before the mystery of life’.  A vehicle for the lost sheep to hitch a lift back to the ninety and nine ‘that need no repentance’.  Real suffering can’t be doing with a virtual God - despair, pain, grief, panic don’t respond well to abstract theories. But, when health is restored, there is no longer any need for supernaturalist drugs. They will then only produce spiritual hypochondriacs and religious junkies.

The Church can be a kind of Spiritual Education System where stories of the Christian myth can be told to the children - without qualification. At six years, a literal Father Christmas or Father God, Noah’s Ark or Jack and the Beanstalk is not a theological problem. At sixteen years, it is a mental health problem. So there must be process, on Paige’s model, from concrete realism to abstract non-realism. 

The Church can be a Spiritual Theatre where metaphysical drama allows the emotions to have full play. We don’t have to keep putting inverted commas around the script and continually remind ourselves that the actor on stage isn’t really Hamlet. We can enter unselfconsciously into the agreed reality of the drama. Of course if anyone starts to think he really is Hamlet, it's time for the lights to go on. 

There are many models we can use to show how the Church can facilitate the transition from baby talk religion to grown-up spirituality simply by allowing process itself. There is no need for radical Rambos to ‘take out’ every non-radical enterprise. If individuals want to baby-talk with the Almighty and have a big cosmic cuddle, let them. If teenagers fall in love with Jesus and want to sing and dance a Rave in the Nave, let them. And if some people want to stay romantically involved with a Mills & Boon deity, let them. If others want the grand opera version of religion, with outrageous costumes and the whole theatrical bit, fine.

But, and it’s the big 'but', the Church must allow the radical alternative. It must also let its children grow up. It must let the healed leave the casualty ward. It must let the actors exit stage left. It must not withhold permission. It is on this point that a New Reformation must be uncompromising. 

This is where radicals must get political, because the religious establishment will not gracefully grant the said permission. Religious dependency is big business. The princes of the church, the evangelical fat cats, the fundamentalist Mafia, will need to be faced in battle. In this war, the Pope has many more divisions than the radicals and it will require guerrilla tactics by those who want to liberate people from the tyranny of inferior knowledge and emotional bondage.

It will also need martyrs, and martyrdom is not the career move it used to be - which is why most clergy have not passed to their people what they learned at theological college. It gets worse the further up the totem pole you go. You can be sure the New Reformation will not start at the top. In my recent tour in the UK with Robert Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminar, I witnessed ecclesiastical and academic privileges that were worth lying for. One forgets. 
No, the New Reformation will be fought at street level, as Jesus fought his reformation and radicals must fight theirs. I know Don Cupitt despairs of the Church’s ability to reform and I share his vision of a Kingdom Come where ‘no man will ask, where is the Lord, for the knowledge of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea’. But I think this is a vision still afar off. 

I believe the Church can re-mythologise. I think the global culture will force it out of the Nineteenth, Fifteenth and maybe even the First Century. It might come kicking and shouting, but I think those who love it can persuade it, especially those who are already on the far side of belief. 

Two Radical Initiatives
I offer now a brief thumbnail sketch of two radical networks that have been inspired by the theological insight and moral courage of Don Cupitt and which, I believe, could set a model for the Church of the modern era.  

The Sea of Faith explores and promotes religion as a human creation. It is a space for honesty, a forum for debate, a community of outsiders, a half-way house for those in transition to and from religious positions, a magazine for radical expression, a conference for communication: in short, a network that allows exploration of non-realist, non-theistic, critical, post-modern, post-everything faith. Sea of Faith emerged spontaneously in the UK following Don Cupitt’s TV series of the same name about twelve years ago and attracted mainly clergy, isolated, vulnerable and nearly demented trying to reconcile their integrity and their job. It quickly grew to include all sorts from all traditions, though it retains a distinctly Anglican-Quaker-Humanist flavour in the UK and Presbyterian-Quaker-Humanist character in New Zealand. Both Networks hover at about a thousand members apiece. It is a dynamic network, full of freethinking, searching people. It is difficult to characterise Sea of Faith members: if the church is a community of sheep, this is a community of cats - outsiders together. It is not a Don Cupitt appreciation Society, though Don has been its inspiration and has supported it faithfully through its formative years.  

Sea of Faith has no doctrines, creeds or rituals, though its theological ambience is positively non-realist. Some would accuse it of being a talk-shop, but talk is not cheap if it is honest: it is a cure for lies, illusions, distortions and misinformation. The Network also works as a sort of self-help group for people in religious transit. Whatever it is, it is taking root throughout the world and, here in Australia, can offer an honest community of faith for those of a radical disposition. 

Pilgrim Network explores and promotes humanity as a religious creation  – which is the other side of the same coin. It is a kind of evangelical Sea of Faith with emphasis on the pragmatic and experiential rather than the intellectual. It is primarily a do-cure rather than a talk-cure. Its agenda is to offer practical support to radicals, facilitate radicalising experiences and expose people to radical thinkers: for instance, through the six-week ‘Honest to Jesus’ tour of the UK we did with Robert Funk earlier this year and Don Cupitt’s present ‘Radical Faith’ visit to Australia. We are in discussion with other leading thinkers and visionaries with other ‘consciousness-raising’ (and perhaps some ‘hair raising’) tours in mind. 

However, the main item on our agenda is the Omega Course - the radical answer to Alpha, or Alpha with both frontal lobes. Many other activities are planned around this, including the (free) Pilgrim Library, Writers Workshops, Retreats, and Buddy Programs for those suffering from the trauma of religious loss. Also Specific Reading Programs introducing people to a radical position starting anywhere, and Spiritual Backpacker round-the-world pilgrimages… All activities are designed to help support, emotionally and intellectually, those making the difficult journey to a more honest and informed faith. 

The network is really still in the birth canal and it will be a couple of years before you hear us screaming. Eventually Pilgrim Network hopes to provide the resources to empower individuals to radicalise their own traditions rather than opting out of them and see them go down the fundamentalist sewer.

Pilgrim Networks’ ‘pilgrim theology’ - if we had one - (and using Sea-of-Faith-speak) would go something like this:  first we must leave the steamy underworld of naive realism; next, hack our way through the tangled jungles of critical realism; then we must brave the treacherous high pass of non-realism. Finally, we move on to the sunny uplands of a post-realist faith where we can experience the living myth in all its radical serenity.