IT'S Easter week and the Archbishop of Canterbury has had an idea. It's also probably the first white elephant of the new millennium. Dr Carey has suggested a huge international congress of Church of England lay people for the year 2003. Early planning envisages four or five delegates from every diocese throughout the world meeting for at least a fortnight in South Africa: a total of some four thousand people. Dr Carey says: "It's something I want to give my support to. We'll have to wait and see what emerges."

There is a stack of questions to be asked of this projected junket - like who's going to pay for it? The Church has a long history of chastising secular governments for their wastefulness, for their diverting scarce resources into international conferences which turn out only to be publicity stunts. Consider the air fares, the accommodation costs and the enormous expense to provide support for the media. This last consideration is all important: for a publicity stunt that generates no publicity is only a damp squib.

Another accusation made by the Church over the last 30 years is that the world's governing institutions are organised and staffed almost exclusively by members of the middle classes and that, consequently, the poor are "marginalised and unvoiced". Just what class of people do those conducting the Archbishop's feasibility study imagine will be able to get at least two weeks off work to nip over to South Africa for his churchy talking shop? Or will they rely as usual for their delegates on those genteel members of the middle class who do not need to be in work: retired officers and civil servants, vacationing academics and maiden aunts?

But what is this African tea party supposed to be for? It's not as if we haven't been here before. There have been two international Anglican congresses since 1945 and nobody remembers anything about either of them. Can you recall the subjects discussed at either Minneapolis 1954 or Toronto 1963? By their forgotten fruits do ye not know them.

But Canon Peterson says that the congress would "tackle new issues" and "address the question at the start of the new millennium: How do we set our agenda for the next decade?". Of course, it is the perpetual business of ecclesiastical bureaucrats to trot out deathless hand-me-down phrases and imagine they have said something exciting. We have been setting agendas and addressing issues for 50 years and all the while congregations have fallen relentlessly and the secular world, whose ear these stunts were designed to catch, has gone on its way, alternately ignorant and contemptuous.

To be of any use, ideas must connect with the world of everyday. The Archbishop's basic idea that there is such a thing as the worldwide church is only a fiction, offering spurious consolation to a man whose own national church seems to be in unimpeded decline. We know that when prime ministers and presidents face intractable problems at home, they resort to dabbling in global politics. It does no good. Human nature consists of national, local and even parochial interests and most people consider that worrying about Timbuktu while living in Darlington to be the first sign of madness. If a man knows nothing of North Yorkshire which he hath seen, why should we believe him when he pretends to tell us of Central Africa which he hath not seen? The infallible sign that we are in the presence of "fresh ideas" is always the same: a pretended understanding of complex events in faraway places combined with a profound ignorance of what is under one's nose.

Published: Tuesday, April 17, 2001