We have just been on the canals of Burgundy. One day we visited the vast and impressive abbey church at Vézelay. Here Bernard of Clairvaux preached the second crusade in 1146. Twenty years later, the exiled Thomas à Becket pronounced God's anger against the king of England, Henry II. From here, pilgrims set off throughout the Middle Ages on their way to the distant cathedral of St James in Compostela. And here today tourists flock to wonder at the buildings and at the detailed and expressive Romanesque sculpture.
Another day, we marvelled at the light and airy spaciousness of the Cathedral in Auxerre, erected to the glory of God almost 800 years ago, on a site where, a further 800 years earlier, it is said that Gervaise, Bishop of Auxerre, had used a clover leaf to illustrate the Trinity to a young missionary, Patrick, who was setting out to convert the Irish.
And every morning at seven, from riverside village churches, we heard the Angelus bell ring across the water, to remind us all of the message of the angel foretelling our Lord's birth, and to bind all the faithful (no matter how sinful) together in prayer.
Centuries ago, men and women would have thronged to Vézelay to worship, to listen and to learn They would have learnt about God from the magnificent sculptures above the doorways and at the capitals of the pillars. The same in Auxerrre. And every morning, everyone in the village would have stopped for a while to pray when they heard the Angelus.
But today, churches in France usually stand empty and neglected, a heavy burden on the state, which largely finances them. Officially only 4% of French people attend church, mainly female and over 50, and the number is still declining. For historical reasons, France is a special case, but the same tendency can be seen in many other countries in western Europe.
This does not mean that religion in France is dead. The religious orders there organize a great range of spiritual activities, and most of us have heard of the Protestant religious order at Taizé, to which people young and old flock from afar. It has been said that the best country for holding a Christian youth congress is France. What is dead is the old parish system.
Some people say that a village's life revolves around three places: the shop, the pub and the church (for a long period one would have added the village school too). Yet the village shop cannot regularly compete with the prices and the variety of choice in the large supermarket or a specialized store. When school classes fall below a certain threshold, it makes sense to bus the children to a larger establishment nearby. Telebanking, email and mobile telephony have all changed the way we do things. So have television, public health care and modern transport.
Jesus' story about the unjust steward (Luke 16:1-12) is hard to understand. On one level, it seems to suggest that Jesus is commending dishonesty. But the unjust steward is far more like the manager who removes half a country's letterboxes so that the postal service as a whole will survive - not fair on the people who have to walk further to post a letter, but in the long term, an effective way of coming to terms with changed circumstances and declining volumes.
Christians today are like sheep among wolves, and need to heed Jesus' command to be "wise as serpents and innocent as doves" (Matt. 10:16). The great revival movements of past centuries, the movement towards conventions, rallies, retreats and pilgrimages, all show how we might be bringing people closer to Christ today. Our God is the God of the living, as much as the dead, and our church is the church of the future as well as of the past.
Just as the village shop has taken on a new rôle now that people shop at Aldi, and just as Aldi is far from perfect, and not even to everyone's taste, so the church in the future will change the way we worship together. Maybe we should concentrate on more "centres of excellence", maybe the future lies more with the internet (though not necessarily with either www.ship-of-fools.com nor with www.cofe.anglican.org!). Where we are now is never perfect, but with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we can be led further into a more effective faith, until we arrive at last beside him who is the way, the truth and the life.
HD