The COVID-19 Experience

The lockdown saw a rapid and incredibly smooth transition to remote working for me and all my team and many of us found our skills and experience deployed at the front line of the Church of England’s responses. This is where years of hard work on questions of medical ethics and healthcare policy paid off and gave us the capacity to evaluate the advice that was being put out in public from various sources. More widely, the churches at local level made a massive transition to on-line services while still maintaining practical initiatives for people in the parishes who were especially marginalised by the crisis. This hasn’t been without cost, as the loss of access to church buildings, and the loss of face to face encounters, has been felt keenly. But who would have guessed that an old and traditional institution like the church could adapt so readily? Personally, my work has intensified, but my impact on the environment has shrunk wonderfully. I miss mobility, I miss London (and Birmingham, and Manchester) and the regular office banter – but I am one of the luckiest ones in many ways. But that is what it feels like after ‘only’ three months. Further down the line, we now know that there is no return to the old status quo. The economic impact will hit everyone, one way or another, even colleagues at the centre of the pandemic response are anxious for their jobs in the medium term if the institutional income falls away. And I see my adult children’s – and possibly my infant grandchildren’s – life prospects closing down in ways that make them distinctly uneasy. Even in my own life and work, it is clear that the better-off come out of this lightly and the most vulnerable end up even more marginalised. My team’s job is always to look for ways to work for a better society – how to enable this crisis to be a catalyst for stronger communities, greater generational and social equity and so on, is on everyone’s lips, but the power structures seem to be avoiding it so far.

The Revd Dr Malcolm Brown, Director of Mission and Public Affairs for the Church of England