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RW
I think the main thing in terms of specific structures, programmes and hopes that’s emerged in the last year or two has to do with what’s summed up in Bishop Graham Cray’s report on the “mission-shaped Church”. How do we find the kind of structural flexibility that doesn’t undo what’s good in how we do things at the moment, which responds effectively and fairly promptly to new expressions of Church life that are around, tries to keep proper channels of communication of what’s new and to give permission? And actually I think although that’s happening slowly, the ownership of that kind of vision of how the Church might move has happened surprisingly fast. Implementing it is another matter, but I think the idea that we move away from a purely monolithic Church of England where only the parish system is taken seriously – there’s a lot of head of steam behind that. So that’s one obvious change. It’s got to be a Church which can travel fairly lightly in terms of its structures and respond quite flexibly to where its new needs arise. I think it’s happening.

MAS
How would you like to be judged at the end of your tenure?

RW
Mercifully! [laughs]

MAS
What would be your measures of success?

RW
Two things, and they’re both quite ambitious. And yes, I’m setting myself up for judgment here. They are, I suppose, a Church that is looking more flexible, which is able not simply to regard its numerical strength in terms of who’s in a pew on Sunday morning, but to think of all the networks of Christian activity that are springing up. I’d like to be judged on how far I’ve enabled that to happen.

Secondly – this is much more ambitious – I’d like to be judged on whether I’ve managed to persuade anybody out there that the Christian religion is worth taking seriously intellectually and imaginatively and spiritually, pushing it back a little bit towards the cultural mainstream. Or maybe even drawing the cultural mainstream back towards Christianity. What it means in practice isn’t, of course, instantly straightforward. But when I spoke when I was appointed about the need to capture the imagination of the culture, that’s still a phrase which comes back to haunt me, and it’s thrown back at me from time to time!

MAS
How do you capture the imagination of the culture?

RW
I guess that trying to take the debate out of the Church context, you know those television programmes I did last autumn where I suppose I attempted to say, “Let’s go and engage people thinking hard about practical problems in our society and its future and seek to address them in conversation from a Christian perspective.” I very much enjoyed the engagement with Philip Pullman earlier this year. That seemed to connect with at least some people’s interests and concerns. So I do want to keep up that kind of engagement with the cultural and intellectual life, as opportunity presents.

MAS
It seems such a shame that it’s got to the point now where it’s almost embarrassing to admit that you believe in God. I met someone the other night who was absolutely aghast when I said I did. She couldn’t believe it.

RW
Yes: “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a religion like this?”! [laughs] Yes, there’s a lot of that, and I think reading some of the opinion-forming literature – the weeklies, the broadsheets – I don’t at all subscribe to the idea that there’s some kind of secularist conspiracy out there, but there is just that assumption that this really is not worth thinking about and it surfaces only as a set of problems, the religious Right, say.

One of the things that interests me a lot is how we get to talk about the lives of religious people in a way that doesn’t instantly reduce them to cliché and stereotype. I’ve just been dipping into the journals of Etty Hillesum, the Dutch Jewish writer who died in the concentration camps and thinking as I read that here is a profoundly religious person whose life, whose way of speaking and writing about herself, whose personal circumstances and intellectual horizons are not at all what most people here would think of as religious, in the sense that she’s somebody who’s engaged on the cutting edge of intellectual and cultural debate in Holland in her time, her private life is that of a Jewish intellectual mid-century in Europe, it’s not conventionally Christian and moral. But, as the journals go on, as they move towards her deportation from Holland to the death camps, you see how slowly, a very vigorous seed of religious understanding and aspiration and practice is growing, growing all the time and blossoms as she goes towards her death. Now, a life like that, it seems to me, says, “This is what religious faith might be.” Don’t assume it’s either just a conventional worshipping pattern or a rather repressive and monochrome set of practices. Look at how it’s lived. Look at how it’s lived. And actually the 20th century gives us a huge range of examples of religious lives lived in critical, dramatic situations, testing situations.

MAS
I think a lot of people don’t start to think about religion until they’re tested.