Well, I've finally put my money where my mouth is. I've signed up for a week-long trip to Taize. This won't be my first religious-themed trip, but it will be the longest and most intense - not to mention the only one to involve camping. And there will be no escape. Far from being a retreat into private prayer and silence, there will be nothing but a piece of canvas between me and five thousand fully paid-up Christians - from many nations and many churches but all of them under thirty.
From everything I've heard, this should be an incredible spiritual experience. But I have to admit to a certain amount of trepidation. At least fifty per cent of this is the deeply trivial question of where I'm going to plug in my hair dryer. I am a profoundly shallow person, and I'm faintly terrified by the possibility of finding myself surrounded by happy campers who can throw up a tent in two minutes, fit their worldly possessions into a rucksack, and whose love of God is all they need to keep them warm at night. My heathen credentials may be betrayed less by my unorthodox theological opinions than my unsuitable shoes. On the other hand, Taize worship is incredibly moving and hypnotic, and often involves the use of candles and icons - not something I normally associate with the earnest, wholesome type of Christian!
What most intrigues but slightly concerns me is the community's emphasis on "young people". The Taize project itself is in no way new or immature - it is a brave experiment in ecumenical monasticism, born out of the experience of the second world war, and it has been spectacularly successful. Given that people often find it hard enough to get on with other people in their own churches, whom they see once a week on Sundays, the fact that men of different religious traditions are living the religious life together is truly admirable. And, until his death at the age of ninety, it was led by the same man who founded it in the 1940s (Brother Roger, who did not die peacefully in his bed, as a nonogenarian might have the right to expect, but was murdered in full view of his congregation). Nevertheless, the community's website does somewhat give the impression that anyone over thirty is rather past it.
In the case of Taize, I think this emphasis on youth may be a hangover from hippy influences in the 'sixties - a new generation finding free love in chastity and obedience and in the shadow of mediaeval Cluny. Its worship seems to owe more to the idealism and Eastern-inspired mysticism of the Summer of Love than the slick down-with-the-kids trendiness of the modern megachurch. There has obviously been a lapse of architectural taste at some point - its church looks like the misbegotten bastard of a swiss chalet and the Taj Mahal - but on the whole it seems to avoid novelty for novelty's sake.
The same can't be said of all churches, though. There is a worrying pressure on churches to make themselves more modern, more accessible, more youth-centred. The result, in my opinion, can be horribly patronising. Youth pastors wearing jeans as if neither their congregation nor God deserved the same respect they would show to a business colleague; Alpha course posters asking if there's more to life than your mobile phone (well, oddly enough, yes); or the campaign by one church a couple of years ago (as seen on TV) entitled "Church Lite - it's better for you". If somebody offered me Church Lite, I'd wonder why they didn't think I could cope with the real thing.
Worse than that - the aim to be accessible can often have the opposite effect. Margaret Hodge recently complained that the Proms are not sufficiently 'inclusive' or accessible - not because of their price (about that of a cinema ticket) nor because of their location, but presumably because they're full of classical music. Now I write as somebody who finds eighty per cent of classical music impenetrable and I have an attention span of five minutes tops, but it seems to me that it begs the question - what is it that you want people to have access to? It's all very well including everyone, but what are you including them in?
In the world of 'culture', we are in danger of entrenching class distinctions, creating cultural ghettos. If so-called 'high art' - opera, ballet, Shakespeare - is seen as elitist and inaccessible, and children and the general public are no longer introduced to it, then it will be restricted to precisely that 'elite' who go on their own initiative. Young people from backgrounds that aren't associated with 'culture' will grow up feeling that it's 'not for the likes of them'. The drive towards accessibility will lock people out from the very world it is meant to be providing access to.
Perhaps the same is true in the world of faith. In some churches - the churches that don't try to be accessible to "the youth" - there is a real sense that this is something different, something special. It's something worth wearing a hat for, worth looking a bit silly for, worth putting some effort into trying to understand. I'm a young(ish) person from a non-christian background, and those are the churches that I love. But it doesn't surprise me that many people view them with suspicion and feel intimidated. I've heard it said numerous times that certain traditional aspects of worship are "distancing" or "exclusive" - always, of course, from people who don't do it themselves and haven't tried to understand it. If people are always being told that the church is elitist and unwelcoming, is it surprising that they think they won't be welcome?
The premise of Taize is that "young people" will want to spend a week chanting, looking at icons, and talking God - and it appears that they do, in vast numbers. Perhaps the key to making faith accessible to a new generation can be found in a remote field in France and the legacy of a ninety-year-old monk.