ADDRESS TO ANNUAL MEETING
21st April 2005
There is a story about a lecturer, who began one morning by putting a large clear basin on the table. He then placed some large rocks inside and asked the students if the basin was full. They all replied that it was. He then poured in some smaller pebbles, which filled in the spaces between the rocks. He asked the students again if they thought the basin was full. They all replied again that it was. He then poured in some sand to take up the small spaces between the pebbles. Again he asked the students if the basin was full. They were getting a little cautious now, but couldn’t see how any thing else could be added, so they said that it was. This time he produced a jug of water and poured that into the basin, taking up the minute space between the grains of sand. “Is it full”, he asked? They couldn’t think what he could possibly produce this time so thought now surely it must be.
The lecturer asked them what this taught them about managing their time. One brave person ventured the comment that it is amazing how much you can cram in if your really try. The lecturer replied that the really smart message is that if you put the big things in place first, the smaller things can be fitted round, but if you fill up your time with small things there is no space for the big things.
This year the PCC has been spending some time thinking about the big things. Two years ago we took some timeout to look at the church’s vision. A veritable shopping list emerged from this. When it was presented at an open meeting, not particularly well attended it has to be said, last year, comments were made about how some items had been on previous lists and had got no further. So in September we gave up a Saturday to look at this again, particularly to explore what might be the blockage. Some may have felt that this meeting didn’t get any where, but it did. What it did do is become the moment when we moved from fantasy to reality.
Out of this awakening, came another Saturday morning conference in February. This time we set ourselves the following aim:
“To conduct a ‘reality check’ of where we are as a church by
“The Church is an expression of God’s missionary activity in creating and redeeming the world. It therefore exists to proclaim the good news of the kingdom in all it is and does.
It does this through
“St Mary’s aims to proclaim the good news of the kingdom through
We have placed our rocks into our basin. We have decided that these are the rocks - Prayers and worship; Trust in God; Teaching, baptizing, nurturing in faith; Fellowship and acts of loving service; Stewardship and concern for justice. This may sound unimportant hot air, but it means that when we feel we are being run ragged by too much we have something to fall back on and decide if the thing that is running us ragged is actually a core activity of a church (a rock) or a small thing: a pebble, a grain of sand, even the water.
This exercise will stand us in good stead in the weeks and months to come. The next stage is to look at some of the major functions and jobs that running our church requires and decide to whom they do or should fall. We started that exercise in February by looking at what goes on and formed quite a breath-taking list. When we have done that we can decide if anyone is overloaded and if so what we are going to do about it. Are there some jobs not being done and if so does it matter? We will decide that by placing them next to the mission statement.
This will bring out into the open some of the causes of frustration that some feel at things not moving forward at the speed they might have hoped. We can only do what we have energy for and if we are going to target our energy it is important to be clear of our aims and objectives as a church community. People will then choose to and continue to volunteer their time in accord with their abilities and interests.
It will also give us an important tool to take a fresh look at how we respond to some of the requests that come our way. Where do the weddings and baptisms, funerals and churchyard management come on our statement of mission? Nurturing perhaps, acts of loving service, teaching maybe? This then raises questions about how we do actually work with these contacts. We are clear that we are not merely a provider of a ‘service for celebrating life events’. What we offer is the proclamation of the gospel and help to people to celebrate life events within the Christian gospel. When we get tempted to just provide a venue to be booked because it might bring in an income we need to reject that one off venue ministry. This can be difficult because many of those who come have assumptions about booking a venue for their event.
We actually spend quite a lot of time with those who come for these celebrations exploring where God is in this moment. By we, I mean the clergy and those who give of their time to share in this ministry through the baptism team and those who welcome visitors to the church at the services themselves. We try to open up a new or refreshed option for them for the future which will give God a more prominent place than has been the case in the past - with, it has to be said, varying degrees of success, but then who can tell what seeds are sown and mere statistics are hard to gather. Some people take years to embark on this journey as all of our confirmation candidates this year could attest. The confirmation candidates are quite a remarkable group of people and I am enjoying working with the adults.
I have another reason for this kind of evaluation about what we are about. It is because we seem to be continually reducing the number of paid clergy in the Church of England and I wonder where it will stop. I am told that by 2011 this deanery will have to lose a further 3 clergy posts. This is on top of those that have been cut in the last few years. We now have to ask some radical questions about how the church is going to function and having a clear statement of our purpose will be vital in this. We are therefore ahead of the game on this.
The next stage of looking at who fulfils what roles will be equally valuable because we will find ourselves having to draw up clear job descriptions for paid clergy on a wider brief that they have at present. Wider in this sense means less day to day contact with the running of churches. I can’t see how the functions can be fulfilled without that. The job is to my mind too ill defined and lacks clarity of function. That lack of clarity creates the climate for conflicting expectations to clash. Write down a list of tasks and functions and then ask a group of people to prioritise them and we will get very different and not always realistic answers. The Roman Catholic writer Eamon Duffy has talked about a naïve cruelty in expectations and I would broaden that to include the whole set up.
So I think we need to do some work now to prevent what I would call an implosion of ministry in the years to come. And I would put it that dramatically, because I can’t see how we can reduce paid personnel without changing our expectations of the role and function of those personnel as well as ensuring that there isn’t a gap in the pavement of ministry for people to fall down! A managed demise of certain models of ministry is not necessarily bad to my mind, it is just change. But if that happens through an implosion, then that will have destructive consequences both for the life of the church and in personal terms for individuals caught in the collapse.
Clergy are fundamentally ministers of the gospel; they are set aside through ordination to be a sign and symbol of living that gospel. All Christians share this in baptism, but clergy are given a job of being visible and offering spiritual leadership in this. We are a visual aid to remind the rest of the church of what they are to be too. We are not meant to be there so that others don’t have to bother, but like the Church has a priestly vocation to the world to remind it of what it is called to be, so clergy have the priestly vocation of reminding the Church what it is called to be. We have to agree the distinctive role and function, the rocks if you like, that it is right for them to concentrate on in order to do this more effectively and this needs to be done in a realistic way. I think the proposed changes in clergy terms of service with the accompanying job description are an opportunity to do this, but it can’t be done in isolation from a wider discussion of the mission of the church and the functions and roles that need to be fulfilled to meet that mission.
So being clear on what the rocks are that we need to have in place before we pile anything else in is a crucial piece of work and we have more to do on it. Some of this work needs to be done on our own, but some needs to be shared with our colleagues in other churches in the deanery and ecumenically. The Church of England has, after all, signed a covenant with the Methodist church.
That covenant and wider working together brings me to some of the celebrations over the last year. In the autumn we hosted the first joint Youth Service. The bright idea was mine and as the date plumped for grew nearer I confess to having had some anxious moments, wondering what I had done. ‘Why did I open my big mouth?’ But it was a success. We opened an invitation to the young people at Manston and Colton Methodist church and put on a service with a very different flavour. Part of the success was that we learnt some lessons. The second one was held by Manston in February and we will host the third on Pentecost Sunday in May. This kind of working together means that the load is shared and the young people get chance to meet with others in a larger group than we could offer on our own. This initiative is in its early days and needs your prayers as it develops.
The last year has not only seen a Sunday School start, but it has been expanded from once a month to twice a month during the 11 o’clock service. The children’s space seems to be taking much longer to progress that we’d hoped, but it is in hand. We were at capacity this year at the Good Friday Children’s Activity morning with 95 children attending. Many have said how much they like the Easter Garden which the children made and placed under the altar. It provides a focus to remind us of the major rock on which our faith is based - Christ risen to glory.
One of our youngsters is representing the diocese on the National Church of England Youth Council. Hannah Scholey has been on a couple of weekends and it is a privilege to have one of our number serving on this body. The youth club celebrated its 25th Anniversary this year and it continues to provide not just a place of fun but also a space for the nurture in their faith, even a place for some of them to explore faith in the first place. We often hear how secular a society we live in and how the young are not interested in religion. This is not true. The RE staff at Temple Moor tell me what a positive attitude there is within the school to the subject. This was born out recently when a year 10 group - 15 year olds - visited the church and were captivated as we talked about the faith that is celebrated within the building - again the true stones of what the church is about, the living ones.
We have to be careful about statistics, because it is the long term patterns that matter more than year on year comparisons. But this is my 4th annual meeting and our electoral roll has increased from 291 in 2001 to 307 this year. That rise is a net figure because others have died or moved away, so even standing still on paper represents a growing church. In one sense we do seem to be holding our own at the moment, but I don’t want to encourage complacency. We know the future will bring many changes and growth has a tendency to feel fragile for quite a while.
This has also been a year when one of the great sadnesses of parish ministry has been apparent to me. I have had to face conducting the funerals of people I have come to know well. In the last year 10 members of the congregation or housebound former members have died. A number of others have stopped being able to attend because of infirmity or bus routes not meeting their needs. Some of these have been expected and some have taken us by surprise, even been a great shock. We need to be aware of the cumulative effect of this, because we know that there will be others in the near future. It can leave us reeling if we are not careful. It is at times like this that we need a firm hold on our Easter faith and the second mark of mission - our trust and confidence in God.
We need to continue to find appropriate ways of engaging with the great spiritual quest that there is in our society. The 2001 census told us that 68% of the population in Leeds regards itself as being Christian. A recent survey commissioned by the Archbishops’ Council asked people if they could have the answer to any question what would they ask. The surprise was that the majority of people’s questions were spiritual ones. Now that is very encouraging, because it gives us something to work with, if we can only find the energy to connect with it. Being focussed on the big rocks will help us.
I briefly mentioned earlier the list which the PCC drew up of all of the things people are doing for the mission of this church now. From administrative background jobs, to the public ministries, from taking communion to the housebound to ensuring that maintenance jobs are picked up, from flower arranging and cleaning to working with young people in imaginative ways. It is a long list and much of the work is reflected in the Team Reports. One of the functions of this meeting is to celebrate all that goes on in the life of this church.
There are some people that I would like to single out for thanks. Trevor Sirrell works very quietly taking notes at meetings like this one. He has remained attentive to what is going on and has written up the notes with discretion and accuracy, certainly making my job so much easier when checking the minutes before they are circulated. He has decided after 6 years that in the spirit of the rule that people can only remain on the PCC for 6 years, he should stand down. We should note our thanks to Trevor.
Keeping tabs on the finances of a charity has become a big job over recent years with changes to Charity Law and there are further developments on the horizon. David Scholey has a good grasp of the rules we have to work to and keeps our finances in good order.
I have thanked the Churchwardens already. Both Brian and Francis readily give of their time and talents and it is good to be able to mull things over together. I enjoy our conversations and the sense of partnership in ministry that they foster.
Keith has been with us for a year and quickly made his mark. This last year has been very difficult for him and I know he has been deeply moved by the support and care he has received from so many. We in turn have benefited from what he has brought to the worshipping and pastoral life of the church. He has taken over looking after the monthly Sacred Space service and many value this time of quiet reflection. He puts a lot of thought and preparation into these. He also has his own fan base. I answered the door to someone the other week who wanted to speak to Keith. He had seen his pieces in the Evening Post and while he wanted to talk about something completely different, he mentioned how much they were appreciated.
We also benefit enormously from David and Norman’s ministry. Both bring a depth of experience that I personally appreciate, but they are also so willing to be involved in the worshipping life of the church, which literally enables a number of things happen or continue to be possible.
There is much to celebrate in the life of this church community, what last year I called a ‘community of faith’. As we face the challenges of the future, some of which can be quite unnerving and make us anxious, we will be aided and strengthened by keeping our statement of mission before us. These are the rocks that need to be in place before we add anything else. They are the rocks that count more than any others and determine how we assess anything that we do or don’t do.
© Ian Black 2005