Ministry Team Letters July – December 2008
Dear Friends
Our Mission Action Planning is beginning to gather momentum. We have had a useful parish meeting on October 19, and an enjoyable and productive PCC Away Day on November 1. Questionnaires have been handed out to everyone we can reach, and have begun to come back, building up a picture of how people who worship at St Mary’s see the life of the church and its future development. This is still only the start of a process that is intended, by the end of next year, to produce a realistic plan for our mission as one part of the church of Christ in Godmanchester.
One or two concerns seem to have cropped up. These are almost always reported to me second-hand. I am told, ‘Some people are unhappy about…’ or, ‘A lot of people are saying…’ People seldom march up to me, and say, ‘Vicar, I don’t like the way things are going.’ But you can, you know! That is part of what I am here for. However, members of the PCC in particular also have the rôle of letting me know what people are really thinking or feeling. So I don’t mind how these matters get reported to me, but if you want to be sure I have heard your worry or frustration accurately, you will have to tell me yourself! I promise not to bite, or even bark.
Be that as it may, the concerns that have been expressed to me can be summed up roughly as follows:
They are going to change everything!
There are two things I would like to say in response to this worry. The first concerns that word ‘they’. Ideally, no church should ever have a sense of ‘them and us’ about it, and if ours does then I am sorry to hear it. We are a body, a community, not a club with inner and outer circles. Obviously, the Vicar and the PCC combined constitute what is, in effect, a governing body for the parish church, and if you are not a member of the PCC it might sometimes feel as if decisions are being taken in which you have only a small and indirect say. But this should not be the case this time. Mission Action Planning is about each one of us having an equal say in where we believe our efforts in mission should be placed. The questionnaire you should have received if you are a regular worshipper is only the first step in this process; there will be repeated opportunities over the next year for your voice to be heard.
Being heard, of course, does depend on speaking up in the first place. We really do need YOUR questionnaire back – so far we have had only about fifty. Without wishing to sound too schoolmasterish, if we don’t know what you are thinking and feeling about the mission of the church, your thoughts and feelings can’t be taken into account at all. Please see Mission Action Planning as something that concerns all of us, not the work of a select group.
Secondly, while most of us fear change at least some of the time, there is as yet no plan to do anything at all. The plan will emerge once it becomes clear what God is saying to us through the collective voice of each one of us. The voices of those who do not wish to see any change will be part of the planning process.
Having said all this, there are two related points I would like to make. The first is that, as the new Bishop of Huntingdon reminded us at the Deanery Evensong recently, my first thoughts as to the way ahead for the church may not necessarily be God’s way. While we all, I hope, have things we want to see happen, or not happen, if we are serious about listening to God we will begin to move away from considering simply ‘what I want’ or ‘what I like’ towards asking ourselves and each other, ‘what, in the life of St Mary’s, will help more people grow more deeply in the knowledge and love of God?’ Planning for mission means thinking first and foremost about the needs of those whom we do not yet know, and about making efforts to get to know them.
Which leads me to my final point. In the end, we are being called to consider not our plans – an old joke says that what makes God laugh is people with plans – but the mission of Jesus Christ. Here is that mission in a nutshell:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.
(Luke 4:18-19)
How do we help that work of Jesus Christ become more of a reality in Godmanchester? What can we do that will bring to others good news, freedom, new vision and an awareness of being the object of God’s favour? These are exciting questions to be asking, and the approach of Christmas is a good time to address them, as we prepare to celebrate the presence among us of the One who is in Himself our Good News, our Freedom, our Light and our Blessing.
May your Christmas be filled with this life-giving Christ, and the New Year bring us and all people renewed trust in the good purposes of God.
With love,
David
Dear Friends
October is the month where both in England and in Canada we traditionally give thanks for all that the Lord has provided; in Canada families and communities gather to celebrate Thanksgiving and here in churches and schools we celebrate Harvest. In both countries in recent years we have witnessed that as technology and cities and towns grow we have become distanced from the land. As many of you know I have recently returned from a trip to see friends in Toronto. While there I visited a farmers’ market in the town of St Jacobs, a community largely inhabited by Old Order Mennonites, individuals who in their dress and habits might be mistaken for being Amish. What a spectacle it was! As we approached the area, horse drawn buggies driven by ‘plain clothed’ families joined the 21st century traffic of pick-up trucks and cars. The market itself was a show place of the best seasonal produce, bushel baskets of red and green peppers, quart baskets of peaches, beans, tomatoes, summer sausage, and baked goods, all alongside handmade quilts and crafts. Here in the market place the 21st century travelled back in time to savour the produce and skills of a community of another age. The Mennonites who live in North America are descendants of individuals who fled Europe because of religious persecution, the first settling in Canada in 1786. They believe that God is loving and just and they feel called to live lives that reflect this reality. At the heart of their faith is a belief in Jesus. They aim to lead lives empowered by the Spirit in a way that reflects the life and teaching of Jesus, believing that worship is your daily life. Their dress and lifestyle are a testimony to their religious beliefs. However, their living testimony goes further as they are renowned for being peacemakers and are practically involved in voluntary service, especially supporting communities affected by natural disasters. To us looking in it may be hard to fathom anyone wanting to live their life in this way, and I would imagine that there are few converts to the Old Order Mennonites. But at the same time they have much to teach us. We as practising Christians have, for all intents and purposes, become a minority within our society. Everyday, however, just like the Mennonites, we interact with those outside our faith in the wider society. But do we in our lives bear witness to our faith? Some might argue that perhaps it is easier for the Mennonites because they live lives to a large extent separated from society, choosing a lifestyle where God remains central to their existence. But yet, despite ridicule, they continue their witness and remain faithful to their beliefs. So at this time of Harvest let us be thankful for the bounty of the Lord living lives which bear witness to God’s blessings in words and actions.
With love,
Mary
Dear Friends,
As I write (I always seem to begin these pieces with that phrase) the Busk family is waiting for the birth of our third child, due on 10 September. Yoko is waiting with a mixture of frustration with the discomforts of late pregnancy and anxiety over the rigours of labour, while Simon and Karin can’t understand why the baby isn’t here already – quite often the first words of one of them as they come into our bedroom in the morning are, ‘Has the baby been born yet?’ All of us, of course, are also waiting with that suppressed excitement that we call ‘looking forward’.
This phase in our family life has set me thinking about waiting in general. We tend to regard waiting as, at best, a period of empty time to be somehow got through, at worst a torment to be avoided when possible and endured when we have no choice. We wait with longing for the things we desire, with dread for the things we fear, with a mixture of longing and dread for some great challenge or an uncertain outcome, with varying degrees of calmness or irritation for things we regard as simply necessary – for a train to arrive, for food to be ready, for the day’s work to be over. The waiting itself is not welcomed, because waiting makes us dependent upon whatever or whoever it is we are waiting for – nothing we do will make the train (or baby) arrive any sooner, nothing we do will now change the result of that exam or blood test. The less waiting we have to do, we usually feel, the better.
However, this attitude says something about those who have no choice but to wait. If that time of waiting is simply dead time, then the lives of those who wait are, in a certain sense, on hold. A life on hold is not a full life. If someone has to wait for years, to recover from an illness, say, or to overcome grief or depression, or if there is no hope of recovery or if a person is waiting to die, does that life become less full of value and meaning because what they are mostly doing is waiting?
For anyone with faith in God, the answer to that question must be ‘no’. No life, made in the image of God, can be considered diminished by circumstances. There is a wonderful book by W.H. Vanstone called ‘The Stature of Waiting’, which has helped me re-consider what it means to wait. Vanstone shows that it is when Jesus is handed over to his captors, when in other words he stops being active and becomes someone who is acted upon, that he reveals the full meaning of his life. For as Jesus, the human face of God, waits to see what will happen to him, he shows us God waiting to see how we will respond to him. God, who makes the universe happen, has made himself vulnerable to our actions. God waits for us, and so he has given us a dignity beyond comprehension. When we wait, we share the viewpoint of God.
If you are waiting for something, or someone, whether the wait seems relatively trivial or absorbs the whole of your life, may you know that God, who is in everything, is exactly where you are, and sees the world through your eyes (whether your eyes work well or not at all).
With Love,
David
Dear Friends,
As I write this – and perhaps as you read it, if you do so by August 3rd – the Lambeth Conference is taking place in Canterbury. As you probably know, this conference takes place once every ten years, and all bishops in the Anglican Communion are invited by the Archbishop of Canterbury to attend. More than 800 are there this time. The conference has been in the news on and off over the past couple of weeks, often for dispiriting reasons. There are deep and possibly unbridgeable rifts in the communion, which is composed of all those churches which regard themselves as being “in communion with the See of Canterbury”, or in other words in the same tradition of reformed catholicism as the Church of England. (It is worth remembering that the Church of England only exists within the borders of England itself. All other churches in the same tradition, including those in Scotland, Wales and Ireland, have their own national or regional leadership and look to the Archbishop of Canterbury as a symbolic head only.)
The divisions are ostensibly over how the church should treat homosexual people, and over the leadership of women in the church, but at their root they are to do with how we understand God. We all agree that God is love, but how is that love expressed in the church? Does God rejoice in faithful sexual love between people of the same sex, as He undoubtedly rejoices in similar relationships between men and women, or does He not? Does the Spirit of God call and anoint women to lead His church, or does He not? There are those who are passionately convinced that they know the answer to these two questions very clearly, and it is very hard to see how a passionate ‘yes’ and a passionate ‘no’ could remain united in the same church. Just so you know where I stand, my answer to the first question would be ‘yes, I think so, but it has taken me quite a while to come to this point of view, and I am aware of doubts and prejudices still within me’, and to the second, ‘yes, surely He does.’ But I am passionately convinced of this: that division in the church is a grave sin, and that all must be willing to compromise to avoid it, and also that there are voices crying out to us in despair that we are willing to throw away our unity on these matters while much of the world struggles simply to live.
When Bishop Gabriel from Japan visited us last week, we went together to Ely Cathedral. He was very struck by the Lady Chapel, in which every single statue has had the face deliberately chiselled off it by religious fanatics at the Reformation. He said this to me: ‘You can see the story of our church in this chapel, can’t you? Doesn’t it show how wrong it is to be an extremist?’ I agree. There is enough unyielding absolutism in the world – can we not offer a gentler way, even at some cost to ourselves? That sounds more Christ-like to me.
With Love,
David
Dear Friends,
By the time you read this, our new curate Mary Jepp will have been with us officially for just a few days. It is such a joy to welcome Mary and her family to the family of St Mary’s, and a great privilege to be able to work with her as she begins her ordained ministry. I know we are all going to enjoy Mary’s company and benefit greatly from her many gifts. I am also very confident that St Mary’s and the wider Godmanchester community will take her and her family to their hearts and give her all the encouragement and support she needs. This will obviously be a new experience for Mary – and it should not be forgotten that it is a new experience for all her family, not least for her husband Mike, who never expected when he married her to end up as what he calls ‘a vicar’s wife’. It is also a new experience for me. I am fairly sure that we have been lucky enough to ‘get’ Mary not so much because of anything I can offer as because this parish is used to receiving curates and can give them a warm welcome and show them a vibrant slice of Church of England parish life ‘in the round’. So I hope no-one will mind too much if I remind you what a curate is, and is not.
The main thing to remember is that Mary is here to continue her training in ministry, not as an ‘extra pair of hands’ for me. All newly-ordained ministers must spend a few years as a curate before taking on the responsibility for a parish, or moving on to some other kind of ministry. Mary, in common with all beginning their ordained ministry, is first made a deacon, not a priest. A deacon is a member of the clergy, addressed formally as Reverend and wearing a dog collar, but is not able to celebrate Holy Communion, pronounce blessings or absolutions, or (normally) conduct weddings. He or she can lead any other kind of service, preach, take funerals and baptisms, and do all the other things that might be expected of any member of the clergy. Almost without exception, a deacon is ordained priest after a year. Mary will probably be with us for three full years. Sometime in her fourth year, we will have to release Mary to her next appointment, whatever that might be.
Mary comes to us with a great deal of experience, as a Christian, a teacher, and a Reader, besides all that has gone before in her life to bring her to this point. She is not starting with a blank slate, by any means, but it is an overwhelming and life-changing experience to receive ordination, and she will need the support and love of us all to help her become the minister God has called her to be. Mary, God bless you and Mike, Robin and Toby. We are delighted you are here, and look forward eagerly to sharing with you in the life of God in Godmanchester.
With Love,
David