Last updated 11:12, Friday, 10 October 2008

When the Reverend Canon Dr Richard Pratt closes the door to his vicarage in January and heads to West Cumbria, Carlisle will surely seem a quieter place.

The Revd Canon Richard Pratt

A familiar figure around West Walls, the 52-year-old has been at the head of a church with an open-door policy, smack bang in the city centre. He has supported arts festivals and the Fair Trade initiative and even allowed teenagers to come and worship their own gods: pop sensations McFly, who played a secret Sunday night concert in the church.

Sitting in his large kitchen, eating toast with homemade marmalade in between answering the phone – which hardly stops ringing – the energetic 52-year-old thinks about particular highlights of his time here.

And as chaplain to the city council, a regular visitor to James Rennie school, an anti-racism campaigner, chair of governors of the former North Cumbria Technology College in Harraby and communications officer for the Carlisle Diocese there is, unsurprisingly, a long list.

“A big change has been Tithe Barn, which is now used much more than it used to be,” he smiles. “It’s a fantastic building for the whole of Carlisle [and is used as a place of worship for the Methodist Church]. I’d love to see it being used so much that there is a waiting list for six months to get a booking.

“We have become more flexible in our worship, more innovative. For example we celebrate Tenebrae on Good Friday evening, where you extinguish candles until you are left with just one. We’ve done a lot of renovation work too and put the railings back so the churchyard is now framed.”

Then there’s the children’s activity afternoons he introduced, run between different churches in Carlisle. He has also worked with children with special needs, at James Rennie School. “I started doing it in Northampton and it has been a theme of my working life. It’s just something that grabbed hold of me. When I came to Carlisle I got involved with James Rennie. I love that school. It’s the best school in town by a long way.

“Anti racism... there’s another theme of my life. I helped bring the Anne Frank exhibition to Tullie House in 2002 and I was very proud to be part of that.

“I’ve also enjoyed my links with the city council. It’s been an enormous honour and really interesting. You know they are such good, decent, public-spirited people. They make mistakes and I don’t always agree with what they do but they try their level best and that’s great.”

The son of a vicar, Richard was born in Cheltenham. Initially he didn’t follow in his father’s footsteps and studied law at Oxford before switching to maths and computer engineering. He taught in Ghana, then decided to follow his faith and moved to Lincoln, where he was ordained as a priest. He worked in different parishes in the East Midlands before moving to Carlisle with his wife Diane, a teacher and their three sons.

And he has seen many changes in Carlisle in his time here. “It’s become more of a modern city and more multi-ethnic, which is fantastic,” he smiles.

“There’s more of a cafe culture, with pavement cafes everywhere. There was none of that when I arrived. There are lovely streets here but the weather’s hard work, people tend to walk head down against the rain and that can make you a bit closed in attitude. That’s changing.”

Another indisputable trend has been the long-term decline in the number of people attending Church of England services.

Richard says the number of worshippers at St Cuthbert’s increased for the eight or nine years after he started but the number has stayed “static” for the last two or three years. “It is important to note that people die, some people move away, so to stay static rather than decrease means we have been getting new people,” he adds.

Still, the wider picture shows numbers are continuing to fall. “Life seems to be more pressurised and only on Sundays can people stop and draw breath,” he muses before jumping up to make more tea. “That’s a bad thing I think. Also as a society people don’t join things as much: WIs, Rotary Clubs, political parties. People have pressure on their time, on their energy and have different commitments.”

But could it also be that Christianity is less relevant to people’s lives these days, when divorcees, single parents and civil partnership couples make up an ever larger part of society?

“I am unashamedly old-fashioned,” he admits. “I would never attack anyone else’s family set-up but the empirical evidence shows the most stable set up to bring children up is a married couple.

“The Church should be saying yes to people as often as possible but people need to look at themselves too. We admire hard work, commitment and patience and people should aim to stick together.

“I’m not saying people should therefore live a life of misery and no-one being abused should stay in a marriage. But the solution is not always to jump ship. It might be to get a hold of yourself and change yourself. We can influence our emotions.

“People think love is something out of our control, that will switch itself on or off. That’s not true. If it shrinks, it can grow again. If I am in a bad mood, I can’t blame my marriage. I need to ask why I’m being grumpy and work on that.”

He finds it all comes down to discipline, something entrenched in the Christian faith and a trait he strongly believes in.

He also believes that these days we have a culture where religion can be attacked and is viewed either as ridiculous, or as dogmatic and extremist.

“Some see it as ridiculous, because science has proved it to be ridiculous,” he says, his passion rising. “Actually people like [Richard] Dawkins may be great scientists but they are rubbish at philosophy. They accuse people like me of making assumptions but don’t examine their own view and in fact they are making as many assumptions as I am.

“They say you can’t prove the existence of God – but equally you can’t disprove it. So you are left with an existential choice: believe and act, or disbelieve.

“I’m not saying Dawkins is wrong. I’m saying that he hasn’t examined his own assumptions. And the Bible is not meant to be a scientific discussion of the origins of the universe. If you look at it in that way you miss the moral and spiritual points it is making.

“In fact biblical times allowed science to be possible. Think of the Middle Ages before Christianity. The world is random, people simply hope things will turn out ok. Then along comes the Christian view: that the universe is ordered by God. This was the start of science in the west, unlike the east where things are random and mysterious and mystical.

“Science says do an experiment and do it again and again, to discover something. You are only going to bother doing that if the universe follows a pattern. In that way, it’s only with a Christian understanding of the universe that science becomes possible at all.”

And what about those accusations of extremism and dogmatism? “It would be stupid to deny the existence of extremists, within Christianity or Islam and to deny we have chequered histories,” he says. “But then Stalin and Pol Pot were anti-religion and they got rid of a lot of people. You can’t say violence and fanaticism is down to religion; it is something you find in human beings, that is the truth.

“And in fact religion is better at facing up to the complexities of human nature, its dark side as well as the good, than other beliefs, for example humanism.

“Built into the Bible and Christianity are the ideas of humility, kindness and generosity. Therefore far from religion producing extremism or dogmatism, Christianity produces the opposite. Where you see Christians being dogmatic and so on, I think you can accuse them of being unfaithful to their calling.

“Without Christianity, our world would be much poorer in so many ways. Indeed much of it would be incomprehensible and we would not have the same architecture or Shakespeare, for example. But we would be morally poorer.”

Richard was appointed Archdeacon of West Cumberland by the Bishop of Carlisle and in his new role Richard will cover an area from Silloth to Millom. He will live in Workington and be licensed to his new responsibilities on January 20, at St John’s Church in Hensingham, Whitehaven.

Is he looking forward to moving? “I am. I’ve actually stayed in the house before, because clergy do house swaps for holidays. And the west is beautiful.

“The role as Archdeacon is partly to be the Bishop’s eyes, ears and mouth. I will help run the Diocese, to support parish churches in their work; to care for buildings. I will take care of the whole legal side and encourage churches to grow.”

It sounds like quite a challenge but undoubtedly one that will be relished.