What a clash of the titans we witnessed at the weekend. The Lionesses vs Divine Worship on a Sunday morning. An unfortunate conflict of timings meant that just as the England women’s football team were limbering up to kick the first ball in Australia, church services in England were launching into their first hymn.
The Church of England knew which side it was on. ‘I know lots of people will want to watch the match live. That is fine from the Church of England’s point of view. Others will prefer to go to church and avoid knowing the score until they can watch the match on catch-up, and that is fine, too. Church services happen at different times in different places, so people can choose one that is right for them.’ So said Libby Lane, the CofE’s first woman bishop, now appointed the church’s spokeswoman on sport.
It isn’t difficult to see why. No one wants the church to look like a bunch of miserabilist killjoys. In this, Bishop Lane might be channelling Charles I. His Book of Sports, published in 1633, rebuked the Puritans for their ‘prohibiting and unlawful punishing of our good people for using their lawful recreations and honest exercises upon Sundays’.
His reasoning might also feel familiar to the bishops. He feared a ban on sports would lead to ‘the hindering of the conversion of many, whom their priests will take occasion hereby to vex, persuading them that no honest mirth or recreation is lawful or tolerable in our religion, which cannot but breed a great discontentment in our people’s hearts’.
And yet, at the risk of being a vexatious priest, there was a key factor missing from Bishop Lane’s statement, which Charles I did not miss: that church comes first.
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