The Bishop of St Albans, The Rt Revd Dr Alan Smith

I want to begin by thanking you for your warm and generous welcome over the past few weeks. I feel greatly privileged, excited and hugely daunted to be here as your bishop. Some of you will know that I have already begun a systematic programme of visits to all the 23 deaneries. I went to Elstow two weeks ago and I visited Barnet last Tuesday. I will be in Watford Deanery on Monday and Luton Deanery Tuesday week. These visits will continue well into next year. I look forward to meeting you both during these visits and also as I come to parishes week by week.

Two weeks ago the Chief Rabbi wrote the Credo column in the Times. He used a phrase which first arose in military circles. Army commanders talk about Mission Drift. ‘Mission Drift’, Jonathan Sacks writes ‘is what happens when, in pursuit of an objective, people forget what objective they were pursuing. You get sidetracked. The territory turns out to be not like the map. On paper it looks easy to get from A to B. But once you are down there, there are all sorts of diversions. The going is harder than you thought it would be and you lose your way. The car breaks down. On the brink of your departure it looked so simple. But then, as someone once said: ‘In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is’’.

One of the wonderful things about the Christian faith is that it embraces every part of life. As a result we have people in the church who are passionate about all sorts of things – nuclear weapons, vegetarianism, race issues, historic buildings, the Authorised Version of the Bible, those seeking sanctuary in our country, apologetics, animal rights, Fresh Expressions. You name it, we have groups of activists who want us all to adopt their agenda and run with it as the ‘Big Issue’. The downside of this wonderful diversity is that it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with all the challenges and opportunities we face and become confused about which way to go. In Rabbi Sacks’ words, we suffer from mission drift, and that leads to exhaustion.

As I travel around the diocese, I want to stimulate a discussion so that we may discern where God is calling us both as individual parishes and collectively as a diocese. Inevitably this will include looking back to Vision for Action and identifying what has failed or not delivered what we had hoped (for which we make confession, we lament and from which we need to learn) and also what has been achieved (for which we give thanks and which we can build on). However, if we are to avoid mission drift there needs equally to be a looking forward together. We need to pray that the Holy Spirit will enable us to dream God’s dreams of what the future might look like. I hope that through our discussions some guiding principles will emerge which won’t inhibit different groups being passionate about some aspect of mission and ministry, but will guide us as we make difficult decisions about how to allocate scarce resources and how to focus our corporate prayers and energies.

There are many examples in the bible and in the history of the church where God’s people have discerned His voice calling them into his new future. Perhaps the most obvious biblical example is from the sixth century BC when many of the people of Israel found themselves in exile. In 587BC Nebuchadnezzar and his troops had surrounded and then conquered Jerusalem. The leaders of Israel were taken back to Babylon and held in captivity. They were a tiny minority in the midst of a people who had little understanding or even sympathy for their beliefs. They must have felt beleaguered. It is almost definitely from that period that we have psalm 137, a song of lament for a lost past:

By the rivers of Babylon -
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.

It is in the midst of their pain and frustration that the prophet Isaiah speaks
(Isaiah 43. 18-20).

18 "Forget the former things;
do not dwell on the past.
19 See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the desert
and streams in the wasteland.
20 The wild animals honour me,
the jackals and the owls,
because I provide water in the desert
and streams in the wasteland,
to give drink to my people, my chosen.

Isaiah is promising that God has not forsaken them, that they are not to be so burdened with the past that they are paralysed into inaction. Rather, he says, God is doing a new thing: he is opening up a way through the wasteland. It is the promise that just as God has been with them in the past, so he is going to lead them in the future. Fundamental to Isaiah’s message is the conviction that God will satisfy their deepest longings and thirsts – back to the word of Isaiah 43: ‘I provide water in the desert and streams in the wasteland, to give drink to my people, my chosen’.

But what about us in the Diocese of St Albans? Where is God calling us? Well, there is a sense that we, like the people of Israel, are living in exile too. Long gone is the time when as a country the Christian faith was at the centre of our national life. Indeed, sometimes it feels as if Christians are being marginalised. As a result we can easily feel paralysed or suffer from ‘mission drift’, busying ourselves with lots of worthy but ultimately fruitless or secondary activities. It is always a good thing to reflect critically and constructively on what we are doing and why. You may know the story of the man who was walking down the street and saw two workmen by the side of the road. He noticed that one was digging a hole in the pavement and when he had finished the other one filled it in. Then they move six metres up the pavement and did the same. The man was deeply puzzled and could contain himself no longer. So he went up to the workmen and asked them what they were doing. ‘Oh, it’s quite simple. There’s supposed to be three of us on the job but the man who plants the trees is on holiday this week’.
This is why, as I visit parishes and deaneries I want to stimulate a conversation about where God is calling us. I want to share some of my passions and convictions, and ask people across the diocese to engage with me and with one another. As I said in my sermon in the cathedral on the day of my welcome, I want us to focus our thinking around three areas that I believe are crucial:

• Going deeper into God
• Transforming communities
• Making new disciples

This morning I want to reflect on the first of these: going deeper into God. In the Anglican calendar we remember today Thomas Traherne, the 17th century Anglican priest and metaphysical poet who died at the age of 37 on this day in 1674. For ten years he was vicar of Credenhill near Hereford, and he represents one of the countless thousands of clergy who have served quietly and faithfully in their parishes, most of whom are unacknowledged and whose ministry is known alone by God. Traherne was almost totally forgotten until this poetry was accidentally rediscovered more than 200 years after his death and published about a hundred years ago.

One of the characteristics of Traherne’s writings is the sense of undiluted joy and sheer wonder at the world and at God’s love. Some of you will know his words:

‘You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars, and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world.’

Recent scholarship has been reassessing Traherne and his work. For a long time he was considered to be predominantly a poet whose views, some argued, based on a love of nature, were almost pantheistic. Others claimed he was a Pelagian. But a lot more of his writings have come to light recently. In 1967 the manuscript of Commentaries of Heaven was rescued from a bonfire in Lancashire. Then during the 1990s forgotten manuscripts were discovered in Washington DC and in Lambeth Palace Library. It is now clear that in Traherne we have an orthodox Anglican theologian of considerable stature. His sense of joy and wonder was based firmly on his understanding of God:

‘We are to enjoy communion with God in the creation of the world, in the government of Angels, in the redemption of mankind, in the dispensations of His providence, in the incarnation of His Son, in His passion, resurrection and ascension, in His shedding abroad the Holy Ghost…All these therefore particularly ought to be near us…being those delectable things that adorn the house of God which is Eternity; and those living fountains, from whence we seek forth the streams of joy, that everlastingly overflow to refresh our souls.’

For Traherne joy flows from Jesus’ passion and resurrection. For him going deeper into God is not a life-denying exercise that can only be achieved by asceticism. Instead it is a grace-filled process in which our eyes are opened to perceive the presence of God all around.

Now there is a strong ascetic tradition in Christianity and to ignore it would be to give a one-sided view of our faith. There is a fundamental stream of theology and prayer which is about ‘dying to self’. But unless that dying to self is a response to the overwhelming grace of God which cascades down on us from the cross, unless we hear the gracious words of Christ’s invitation to life, unless our hearts, in the words of John Wesley, are ‘strangely warmed’, then our seeking God will be a joyless struggle, one more burden to go along with raising money for the new church roof and sorting out the guttering.

One of my convictions is that we need to give the highest priority to nurturing our own spiritual lives and reinvigorating the worship in our parishes, chaplaincies and church schools, so that we can draw on the deep resources which are to be found in God and, in the words of C S Lewis, be ‘surprised by joy’. Because of this, Bishop Christopher, Bishop Richard and I are writing a Lent Study Course, which will be available for free download during the autumn. The course will be based on the Sunday gospel readings set for Lent.

I am also inviting people around the diocese and beyond to share in a daily challenge during Lent.

Challenge is a simple concept, both for those who are already committed Christians as well as enquirers and seekers who are willing to try something new. It is based on the idea of inviting people to discover or deepen their understanding of the teaching of the most influential man who has ever lived, Jesus Christ. There are two core things, and a third optional step:

1. First, I am asking as many people as possible to sign up for a daily email, a daily text message on your mobile or you can download a hard copy to be distributed around the congregation or youth group. Each day we will all focus on a verse containing the words of Jesus from Luke’s gospel.

2. Secondly, the challenge is to ‘Read it, learn it, pray it, do it’. Having learned some of the words of Jesus we pray for the grace to put them into action that day. We can do this individually or with friends. For those that want it we will be recommending a commentary on Luke, but primarily we simply want the words of Jesus to speak and guide us - and then see what happens! I have a suspicion that if we dare to live out the words of Jesus we will find times when we will be caught up in God’s joy and God’s purposes.

3. Thirdly, anyone who wishes can record a 30 second clip on your phone camera and send it in to our website to tell us what you did that day.

I am hoping that thousands of people in our churches, our church schools, our chaplaincies and many other who would not necessarily want to call themselves Christians will be up for the challenge to allow the words of Jesus Christ to take hold of our hearts, minds and imaginations afresh, so that we don’t suffer from mission drift but instead plunge ourselves afresh into the God who calls us to go deeper and to discover his joy.