Statement on the death of Pope John Paul II

MISSION-SHAPED CHURCH

+Richard, Bishop of Bedford at the St. Albans Diocesan Synod on 11 th June 2005

Accompanying Power Point Presentation can be found here

Introduction:

Mr Chairman:

We’ve called this debate ‘Mission- shaped Church’ because as many will know that’s the title of a report produced by the Church’s Mission and Public Affairs Council, which has been commended by the General Synod for study in the parishes. But we’ve couched this presentation and debate in the context of our own situation of the run up to the launch of ‘Vision for Action’ - a project which I believe could have a huge effect on the life of the church in this Diocese.

It will act as an umbrella under which all sorts of different initiatives and activities in our parish can flourish, providing resources, providing enthusiasm, providing vision, providing new life. Of course, it won’t achieve that without the whole-hearted commitment of the parishes, but it will be an incentive to put the mission imperative at the forefront of our church life, and a resource to help folk step out in faith - faith in God.

What we need to address is what the future of the church might be, here in UK in the next decades. What for example will the church look like (say) at the turn of the next century, in 2105? Will it still be here in a form which would be familiar to us, or will exist in a completely different style, or will it have simply died out?

But I don’t say this to depress you, because you can easily get into that sort of depressive mindset which then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You’ll remember the story of Elijah fleeing from the wrath of Jezebel. God says to him, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’ He replies, ‘I, only I, am left’, he says, ‘and they seek my life.’ But God says that there are more left than he thinks and encourages him to get on with the job; to fulfil his calling to be God’s person in God’s world. The call to us is the same. We are not to be depressed; nor to sit down and mope and moan, but to catch once more a vision from God.

When I was first ordained, my sister gave me a devotional book. She wrote in the flyleaf a verse from Revelation - words of the risen Christ reported by John: ‘Look, I have set before you an open door, which no-one is able to shut.’ There is always an open door for mission; the challenge for us is to walk through it.

Needless to say the report ‘mission-shaped church’ has come in for some criticism - but I think often misguidedly. People have seen it as presenting a complete alternative to the way the church is at present. But if you actually read what it says, it’s clear that the authors see the quite radical ideas they discuss as just alternatives alongside what is good and is working at present. My mantra in speaking about fresh expressions of church, is this: It’s not either/or but it’s both/and. No one is trying to sweep away what’s good and effective and much loved, but rather trying to find ways of opening up the possibility of faith and worship for the vast majority of our land for whom what we offer to them is quite clearly not effective and relevant or accessible to them. In a survey done in Huddersfield a few years ago, it was found that 53% of those interviewed hadn’t ever been in a church - not even for one of the occasional offices. It may not be that bad in Herts and Beds, but it’s a measure of our alienation from vast swathes of the population of this country.

At a recent meeting of the Policy sub-group of the Bishop’s Council, Alan Winton mentioned one fact mention in ‘Mission-shaped Church’. The people who are coming into our churches in their late 20s to early 40’s are ‘returners’ – people who have been churchgoers in their youth, have a period away but return when they start their own families. The disturbing thing is that by comparison we have so few children and young people now that that won’t be a feature of church life in 20 years time.

So what I want to do now is to look at four suggestions for action for us as a Diocese and each of us as members of individual churches. I’ve called these 4 areas - ‘Understanding the changing context’; ‘Reacting to the changing context’; ‘Considering fresh approaches’; and ‘Catching a vision for action’.

1. Understanding the changing context

The report has a first chapter on this. It’s an important issue because the way we function as individuals and society have changed dramatically over the last 50 years or so. We have moved, to use the jargon, into the post-modern age. Time will defeat me if I mention all the changes that the report outlines, but here are just a few to give you a flavour.

Housing
Fewer people in households; more ownership; more DIY – usually done on Sundays; less community awareness. For example, can you name the people who live five doors away from you? I could when I was a child; I say to my shame I can’t now, despite living in a village.
Employment
Most people in their middle years now work outside the home. This has had a huge effect on people’s lives. There is less time for volunteering of all sorts; for example, people are less willing to take on regular commitments in our churches, such as youth work or being an organist.
Mobility
This is a huge change - in the time I’ve been ordained, the number of vehicles on the road has doubled. My father walked the half-mile to work for the whole of his working life. Had his work moved him to the next town, almost certainly he would have moved house. Now people simple commute greater and greater distances. In addition, weekends away are the norm for many people, because family and friends are more often at a distance than ever before. Church attendance therefore may be regular, but regularly twice or perhaps three times a month.
Modus operandi
Most of us here organise our time in a modern (rather than a post-modern) way. We book things; we expect to be at certain places at certain times. But if you are in your teens or twenties, you set off on Friday evening with your mobile in your hand, not knowing where you are going. It’s all done on the hoof. This has huge implications for our work with the younger generation - and getting them to commit to some activity more than a few hours ahead.
There are many other features, but the final one I especially want to mention is:
Networks
I think this is the most important thing of all to grasp about our changing world. It relates precisely to what I’ve just been saying about young people, but it’s true of us all. What matters now are the networks to which we belong rather than the geographic place we live. Networks include work colleagues; personal friendships; sporting ties (golf, gym, football); leisure interests and so on. For most people, these are much more important than people we live near.
For some churchgoers, the church is just one network amongst others to which they belong. The task for the church surely is more than that. The image of the kingdom of God being made evident by the presence of Christian people means the church must be more than one network amongst many; it should rather be a permeating network which penetrates many of the ordinary networks of our society - and church members need to be alert to their responsibility for the networks to which they belong, in the same way that in the geographic model, church people have felt responsible for the parish in which they live. (But again note that this is again not an either/or but a both/and.) We need to work towards a flexible church for a changing context.

2. Reacting to the changing context

How should we react to these changes? I want to look at three possibilities.

(a) Try to recreate some golden age

This is outwardly very attractive, but fails to taken any account of the way the times have changed, society has changed and the world has changed. It was summed up for me recently by this little vignette: at a vacancy meeting, someone said that what the people of the village, who didn’t come to church, really wanted, was to see the Vicar about the village, walking his dog across the green, and so on. This is wholly romantic and ignores entirely the fact that the majority of the population of the village aren’t there in the daytime anyway. But it’s trying to recreate some mythical golden age.

So that’s one reaction to the past. The second is equally destructive.

(b) Live with no sense of history

There are those who want to disregard everything from the past and try to build a church afresh for this generation. But the Christian faith is an historical faith; it is based firmly in the history of God’s dealings with humanity; it’s defining events are historical ones, namely, the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ; and the history of the church provides us with examples to follow and errors to avoid, if we only have eyes to see them. We neglect history at our peril, but, as some wag once said, ‘The only lesson of history is that we don’t learn the lessons of history’.

We are part of the ongoing history of God’s dealings with his people and we must conserve and build on what is good in the past. We cannot live without a sense of where we have come from and the history that has formed as God’s people.

So that leaves us with a third option:

(c) Draw on what is good, but develop approaches which are relevant to a new context

This leads us, in turn to third main area.

3. Considering fresh approaches

(a) Think differently

I use this example (and some may have heard me use it before), because it typifies for me the way that new thinking is actually often very simple. The Vicar was conscious that there were huge groups of people who were never going to come to the parish Eucharist at 10.30 a.m. on a Sunday morning. To say they ought to, or to say that what’s been good enough for the last 50 years should be good enough for them, simply didn’t wash. Society, in that relatively small town, simply didn’t work like that. Sunday morning was for lying in bed, and then later, the husband expected his dinner on the table between 1 and 2 p.m. when he got back from the pub.

So the Vicar stood outside his town centre parish church, and watched to see when people were actually passing. He came up with two main times - 3.55 p.m. as the schools emptied and around 7.20 am as people arrived for the commuter trains to Halifax, Bradford and Leeds.

So he put on Monday at 3.55 p.m. a Family Eucharist (modern catholic tradition) and at 6.55 am Friday mornings. In one case it was parents, mainly mothers, and children - and in the other people going to work. When I was last there, there were 90 people at the afternoon service, and 20 at the 6.55 a.m. Now there are more communicants midweek than on a Sunday morning and he has 120 then. These are new congregations of people for whom that is church for them. Those women and children are never going to make it on Sunday - but they want to be part of a worshipping community. It’s simply nonsense to say that they should be integrated into the Sunday Eucharist. Either we unchurch people or we provide for them.

In one tiny village in Bedfordshire, a family service has started in the unthreatening venue of a front room. 17 people pack in. A new venue has brought new life.

(b) Thinking ecumenically

By this, I don’t mean 5th Sunday in the month 6.30 p.m. services rotating round the churches. Another example will illustrate what I do mean: Imagine a large village - really a commuter suburb. As is often the case the Anglican church is right on the edge of the housing. There’s a Methodist church on the prime site next to the shops and the school. Both are trying to work with children, the Methodists very successfully so. The Children’s work leaders at the Anglican church are heard to say, ‘How can we stop the Methodists attracting our children and taking them away?!’ Surely we must start thinking about working together. Imagine how even more effective joint work in the Methodist buildings - billed as both Anglican and Methodist – might be. More leaders, more resources, means even better children’s work. Everyone benefits.

(c) Thinking collaboratively

Sometimes you’d never guess we were on the same side, when adjacent churches fail to share strengths and share resources. Children’s and youth work is a case in point. But administrative resources, worship resources, music resources, all should be seen as gifts from God, not just for us in our small corner in our parish, but resources for the whole church to be used imaginatively and across these often very artificial boundaries.

(d) Thinking radically

I was very struck at the last Synod by Mark Russell’s point that we shouldn’t be ‘putting things on’ for young people. You wouldn’t expect to have things put on for you by them. Rather we should be encouraging creativity and letting them put on things for themselves – and taking a risk.

(e) Thinking ‘network’

I hinted at this sea change a few minutes ago. Thinking networks rather than geographical areas. A few examples – of very different sorts are:

Schools are hugely important networks. The school gate is the present day equivalent of the parish-pump. They are the only geographic meeting place in most communities in our car bound society. We need to help our members who are part of that to see it as one of their mission networks.
Common interest groups. The chaplain at Luton University puts on Movie nights. He shows a film and then there is an optional discussion afterwards of any issues raised - human; moral; and spiritual. Almost every film can be used in this way.
Network churches – there are examples of Anglican network churches in ‘mission-shaped church’, but these are non-geographic churches who are seeking to use the networks of their members as their prime focus, rather than a geographic area.

Corollaries:

Think what you are going to stop doing
Allow yourselves the possibility of failure, and allow other people the possibility of failing too.

(Avoid Christian shadenfreude – revelling in the misfortune of others!)

4. Catching a vision for action

Make ‘Vision for Action’ a priority locally and for the Diocese
Think through the challenges of our changing society
Catch a fresh vision for your church in mission - every one will be different
Step out in faith with God.

Conclusion:

The motion standing in my name is inviting us to encourage the parishes of this Diocese to face the challenges and to discover a vision for action which is right for their setting, and I now formally move it.