Two Bob solution

THE SICK ROSE
England’s Spiritual Crisis
By Laurie Mellor. Dream Depot. 328 pages. £8.95
ISBN 978 0 954 597 917

‘England is sick. The English are sleep-walking into an uncertain future, sedated by consumerism, affluence, political correctness and indifference.’

There can be little doubt that our country is in a spiritually desperate condition. Taking as its starting point William Blake’s poem ‘The Sick Rose’, this book seeks to describe and assess the malaise, especially of England. I’m torn about it. There are some fine insights and analysis, but Mr. Mellor leaves us in a fog.

He gives a fascinating 100-page review of our national history, beginning with John Wesley and ending with Blair and Brown, describing how we got to where we are today. Then he provides 160 pages of perceptive snapshot essays with titles like Suicide of the West, The Thought Police, The Church of England, Militant Islam, etc., ending with some tentative suggestions as to the way forward.

The problem is that, although, while living in England, he is the director of a theological college in India, his theology is pretty indefinite. He is clear that Islam and shari’a law are to be resisted, but very fuzzy as to what Christians should stand for positively. With his background in the Greenbelt festival (he spends needless space telling us about how he hosted Bono there), Bob Geldof and Bob Dylan are held up as ‘prophets’ to whom we ought to have given much more serious attention. He regards Steve Chalke, N.T. Wright and Rob Bell as champions of orthodoxy and dismisses the African bishops as ‘hard-line’.

It is a read which sparks lots of ideas. But, despite warning us about being too taken up with our culture, he seems himself to be a man who is far too impressed with the cult of celebrity and the impact of the secular media. Meanwhile the unspoken implication seems to be (intended or not) that grass-roots pastors and ordinary churches, doing their best to reach the folk of their locality with the Bible’s message of Christ, are too ‘sub-cool’ and probably a bit of a waste of time.