ADDRESS TO ANNUAL MEETING
29th April 2004
I have very much enjoyed this year’s series of Lent Talks. Speakers came from a variety of religious communities to tell us something about their way of life and spiritual tradition. They varied from the traditional styles of monks and nuns, the third order of St Francis which is a version for ‘ordinary people’ to follow in their ‘daily round and common tasks’, and the series ended with what is broadly termed a new monastic order - the Northumbria Community. This is a gathering of people from different denominations who have been inspired by the resurgence in the Celtic strands of Christianity on these islands.
The monk from the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield spoke candidly about the decline in vocations to the monastic life, as did the sister from the Order of the Holy Paraclete at Whitby. Father Eric mentioned that the community was founded in the latter part of the 19th century with the intention of being the response needed to the then contemporary needs of the church. He went on to ponder on the thought that may be the decline in vocations is God’s way of saying that a new answer to today’s questions and religious, missionary challenges is needed.
The thought from these talks that has been ticking away in my brain since is that they were all held together under the title of ‘Communities of Faith’ and I think that what we need to concentrate our attention on is the understanding that the church, that our church, is a community of faith. Some of this is inspired by the way the members and associates of the Northumbria Community covenant themselves to be actively part of it. They see themselves as being its living expression and indeed as living the community.
The way they understand that community varies from a ‘mother house’, a place where people live together following a rhythm of life that defines them, but they also have people living the life in their ‘daily round and common tasks’. I think they are on to something important for the future life of the church. So I want to spend a few moments this evening reflecting on what it means for us to see this church as a community of faith.
The first thing which seeing ourselves as a community calls us to do is to notice that the church is much more than one or two people. The church is much more than the clergy and we’ve known this for a long time now and it is something that has been said for decades. People tell me stories of Michael Hunter saying this and he left in 1986. But for all that, I still think we have to act as if we believe it and value it as a statement and I am not convinced that we always do. I am very saddened when I hear that someone has been to see a member of the congregation in hospital and then the message comes back ‘no one from the church came to see me’. It means that this person hasn’t made the link. They have been visited by the church and it will have been a good visit too. Someone with the time available when it was needed has made the effort and gone to see them. This community of faith has responded to the need and we need to recognise the value of that more than we tend to do.
So lay ministry is not second best, is not a make do. It is real ministry and the people involved have real skills. It is this community being the church. Actually I have thought for a long time that we could do with moving away from this whole clergy-lay divide and I am becoming more convinced of it. The word which gives us laity, means the whole people of God. We become part of that by baptism and ordination does not take someone out of it. Clergy have functions within the life of the community of faith and ordination equips and sets some apart for certain roles but it does not stop them being part of the laos, the whole people of God.
I think we need to recover this ancient understanding of being the people of God, a community of faith, and value it fully; not undermine it with comments that in effect say lay ministry is second best. That is actually offensive to the people who give of their time and talents.
The second aspect of thinking about being a community of faith is that we need to look at what equips and nurtures that community. We need to be equipped as a faith community and also as a community.
We are fed by our celebration of the Eucharist, by our times of prayerful waiting on God, by our reading of Scripture and deepening our understanding of the Bible, by finding ways to nurture our understanding be it through books, magazine or newspaper articles, the internet, sermons or conferences, TV or radio programmes. The list could be endless. But at the heart is the Eucharist. The word ‘Eucharist’ means ‘Thanksgiving’ and that on its own shapes us as a people with a song of praise in our hearts. It is a thanksgiving that is rooted in the passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In it the ordinary is taken, blessed, broken and distributed. If our lives are to be holy they too need to be taken, blessed, and shared.
If we are to be a community of faith we cannot expect that to happen without giving due time and space to how that faith will be shaped and fuelled.
The other side of being a community of faith is to look at how we are a community. The consensus of opinion is that belonging comes first and then we believe. At the moment as a society we have a residue of belief but not much belonging. The sociologist Grace Davie calls this ‘believing without belonging’. We don’t have much belonging to anything and sociologists tell us that this is a problem which Northern Europe faces. But we have a deep human need to belong and we need to find ways of drawing people into belonging, into the fellowship that nurtures faith, into this community of faith.
So I have looked at what it means to be a community of faith in terms of the whole people of God and seeing ministry as the responsibility of the whole community not just two or three people; I have looked at the faith which gives the community its distinctive shape and how this is nurtured; and also the need to belong to and to foster a sense of community.
The fourth way I want to look at this community of faith comes through commitment, which follows on from belonging. We are not to be a community of faithful spectators. All are called to active service in the furtherance of the gospel and kingdom of God. As I look at the challenges facing the church today, I think this is what we need to connect with. We need our understanding of being a community of faith to lead us on to active service. If it doesn’t then our churches will wither and any church, however strong it’s past, can decline to a point where it fades away. The more I think about it, the more I am concluding that this is the answer to the declining number of paid clergy.
We have inherited a model of church from the past that assumed each area would have its own vicar who would be the primary agent of ministry in that area. I don’t think this is going to be the case in the future, or at least not in the ways it has been assumed in the past. I see the role of paid clergy changing quite dramatically in the next few years, well it has already started. Some have managed to struggle on in the former way at great personal cost, some have broken under the weight of this, some have created the illusion of doing this but actually have left great areas untouched, and some have given up the pretence. Some have worked hard at developing new models.
If you don’t recognise the need for the change today, and I know some don’t, then join with me in looking into the crystal ball for the future. We need to be ready for that to hit, because hit it will. If this church is to have a vibrant future, like it has had a vibrant past, then it needs to develop an understanding of being a community of faith and see mission and ministry as the responsibility of the whole of that community. If we don’t we will implode under the weight of expectations that can’t be met.
So I think there are pragmatic arguments for developing our understanding as a community of faith - even self preservation ones - but also there are reasons which stem from what it means to be the church in this place, to be the people of God who live the good news of Jesus Christ.
Some people find this sort of discussion frightening, and not least clergy, because it starts asking questions about what we want certain roles for. And for clergy that means we start looking again at what we want clergy for. Clergy are, after all, the most expensive item on the diocesan budget. The central admin and specialist support offered from diocesan office is very small in comparison. If the diocese is going to say that it doesn’t want or can’t pay for the existing structure then it has to do some hard thinking about how it re-organises itself. I think there is an argument for drawing up properly assessed job descriptions. But we also need to know what clergy are doing at the moment so that if we suddenly re-deploy them we don’t just find chaos looms because we haven’t taken account of who is going to do what they currently cover.
From time to time I am asked what I do. Some ask it out of genuine curiosity, like the year 5 class at Whitkirk Primary who wanted to understand what my role is in the community, and some are ruder in their questioning believing I don’t do anything! So for the last 2 or 3 months I have been keeping a time sheet to analyse just where my time goes. So that you know, this is how it pans out and some of you may find this a bit of a surprise, as it was for me. This represents a snap shot of the last 3 months.
| 28% | Worship & ‘Sunday’: preparing and leading, incl sermons |
| 18% | Oversight of parish: planning, meetings, general enquiries and admin., supervising and supporting other ministers |
First two items = 3 days
| 9% | Pastoral offices |
| 9% | General church activities, affiliated groups |
| 7% | Daily prayer, interceding for the parish, spiritual resourcing |
| 6% | Wider general community and Schools - including preparing assemblies etc |
| 6% | Diocesan and deanery commitments and involvement |
| 5% | Specifically pastoral conversations and spiritual guidance |
| 5% | Study groups/confirmation preparation |
| 5% | CME, Reading and study |
| 2% | Heritage, buildings and churchyard |
= 100%
Average working week = 55 hours
Susan thinks 55 hours is an under accounting of time. I only started doing this after Keith joined us and so this may represent the dividend which his presence has brought. In other words my time has come down to 55 hours not gone up to it.
I don’t have any more time to give to anything. So if anyone wants to argue that my time should be differently spent, they are welcome to do that, but they need to do so by addressing this list. They also need to do so by approaching this from the angle of us being a community of faith where we each have different gifts and functions. We need to ask what we want paid clergy for and to do within the life and mission of a community of faith. I think this is the most helpful way of addressing a number of pertinent issues at the moment: the ever spiralling upwards of parish share; the criticisms of what I do or don’t do; the anxiety about the future of this church and the wider church; the reducing number of parish clergy. As with the Mirfield fathers, perhaps God is saying through the crisis of clergy numbers that we need to find a new way of being and doing church and I am concluding that the key to this will be through embracing the notion of the church as a community of faith.
There is a further tool I want to offer to this reflection on our being a community of faith and it is the 7 marks of a healthy church. You have probably heard them before, they are not new and certainly I have mentioned them before to the PCC. They come from the Springboard stable, but I think they are a helpful lens to hold up to any community of faith for a health check.
A healthy church…
I hope it has been clear as I have been speaking that there is a community of faith here already. What I am calling for is for us to recognise that this is what we have and this is what we need to build. We have many people doing a great deal already and this is shown by the team reports which celebrate the work and shared ministry of the past year.
I have mentioned the teams of people who further the work of ministry in its variety from the housekeeping sides of the church’s life to the pastoral ministry. There are so many teams that beaver away behind the scenes. But to single a few people out by name:
Brian Hudson, as well as being churchwarden, has looked after the grounds faithfully for a number of years and stood down at the end of March. We have a new contractor looking after this and the other day I counted 6 people doing the work he did largely on his own. They seem to be working well but we know that they will not do the job that Brian did because he went beyond his remit in so many ways. So we should record our thanks to Brian for his work in the churchyards.
Syd Dean has decided it is time to stand down from the verger’s duties at the end of the year. A church this size needs someone to ensure the church is in good order and things are prepared well for the services. It also involves quite a bit of clearing up other people’s messes, a bit like trying to keep a child’s bedroom tidy. Of course children need to learn to tidy up after themselves, but we all know they don’t and church congregations behave in a similar way! It has been good to know that things would be prepared well and would be tidied afterwards. So we thank you for what you have done.
Pam Dean has known this place for so long now that she has an invaluable knowledge of people. She takes on the lion share of our pastoral ministry. She does this as a volunteer and I think sometimes people take her for granted in ways that are not acceptable. We are very fortunate to have her playing such an active role in the ministry of this church.
Keith Hanson joined us at the end of January and his warm personality has endeared him to many straight away, as was clear at Pat Brewer’s funeral yesterday. The search for a colleague has been a tortuous one, but Keith has proved to be just the right solution to the problem we faced. The bad news is that we share a similar sense of humour, which causes havoc during the psalms and more obscure bits of the Old Testament at Evening Prayer.
We are also fortunate for David Grice and Norman Burton who share in leading services, but also with Keith Williams in the weight of pastoral offices that would otherwise overwhelm us. They also offer words of wisdom and support and it is good to be able to tap their experience.
I think the future is very uncertain for the church. We are living through a time of great social change and the church cannot expect to be exempt from that. But I was reminded recently that we believe in God’s grace and this is what our ultimate hope and trust relies on. With that there is no obstacle that cannot be overcome because we have a divine commission that will not be thwarted, indeed has shown in Christ rising that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God. There is no surer rock on which to build a church, indeed there is nothing else worth building a church on.
© Ian Black 2004