This strategy involves a massive diversion of funds away from struggling rural parishes -- traditionally the church's backbone -- towards new evangelical congregations in city centres. This is a do-or-die attempt to reverse the church's catastrophic decline -- the latest figures and forecasts predicting that within thirty years only 1% of the population will attend church. Percy comments: "It will take more to save the Church of England than a blend of the latest management theory, secular sorcery with statistics and evangelical up-speak."

A cure for the failing church, he says, "would require a much deeper ecclesial comprehension than the present leadership currently exhibits. There seems to be no sagacity, serious science or spiritual substance to the curatives being offered. The church is being slowly kettled into becoming a suburban sect, corralling its congregations, controlling its clergy and centralising its communication. Instead of being a local, dispersed, national institution, it is becoming a bureaucratic organisation, managing its ministry and mission -- in a manner that is hierarchically scripted. But those who declare themselves to be non-religious will not be won over to return to the church by increasingly organisational, theologically narrow and vogueish sectarian expressions of faith. Instead there needs to be a broad church -- capacious and generous. Narrow Anglicanism is a contradiction in terms. It is breadth that defines Anglican polity. And it is breadth that will save it."

Percy claims his scepticism is shared by a largely silent majority in a church increasingly dominated by evangelicals of a particular hue. His criticisms go to the root of the problem. Supporters of the Archbishop's programme point to the spectacular successes produced by church-planting which funds and promotes trendy charismatic-style worship in unconventional settings -- disused warehouses, factories and the like. True, this is growth of a sort, but it only shows isolated flourishing in a vast wilderness. To the enthusiasts, the sight and sound of several hundred mainly young and terrifically excited people waving their arms about and belting out so called "worship songs" is proof that Renewal and Reform is reviving the church. But it is an illusion. For these antics alienate far more people than they attract and most people see it as a sort of holy club for the likeminded. And they shun it. This conspicuous performance of trendy, sectarian zeal is a fatuous in-group and the very opposite of what our national church is meant to be.

Sustainable church life -- like agriculture - requires a continuous historical tradition, but this new project is merely a phenomenon, a sensation and a flash-in-the-pan. The comparison is with factory-farming. It is all so one-dimensional and one-track. The enthusiasts who operate it have things in common only with those of a particularly restricted ethos which is frothy, trivially emotional and anti-intellectual. It is the pop festival planted in the nave. Only now the show is being organised by an elite of ecclesiastical bureaucrats, really a managerial clique of Welby groupies. It might look good to those who think such things look good, but it lacks substance and organic roots. Yes, here and there, it is drawing the crowds. But what is it for?

I'm not suggesting that the answer to the church's relentless decline is Sung Matins at 11am, with the solemn elevation of the collecting plate, or even High Mass with all the trimmings to Byrd a-5. But no one except a cultural zombie could be sustained by the doggerel choruses, the Lloyd Webberish music- as-pap and the latest rap version of the Bible. A people without history is not redeemed from time, but where is the connection between this screaming drivel and the church of George Herbert and Richard Hooker, or even C.V. Stanford and Harold Darke? We do not have to aspire to the Academy before we are allowed to enter church and say our prayers, but a rudimentary appreciation of what will go into ordinary English and pass for a tune that is a measure or two above the plinky-plonky banalities is necessary for the conduct of worship and the communication of the faith. Christian realities are not encountered in the mush perpetrated by Renewal and Reform.

So what will happen to the Archbishop's project? If the past is anything to go by, it will be a nine days' wonder, something bad to be succeeded by something worse. Today's adherents will fade away, looking for something even more exciting and immediate. It will all be just the latest phase in the unstoppable dumbing down of the last fifty years. The analogy is with cricket: one day games are preferred to the county championship and these are followed by Twenty20 -- a mindless parody of cricket interspersed with fireworks and blasts of pop music; the whole thing fuelled by binge-drinking on cheap lager.

Why should Justin Welby imagine that the church can be revived and nurtured on stuff that is anathema to the church? Because he is that perfect mixture of excitable trendy and management guru.

May we have out church back, please?