Visitation: Where’s the Fire?

Visitation is an annual archdeacons’ outing. 400 years ago it was the “bawdy court” — churchwardens “presented” people for a variety of colourful transgressions including marital affairs and drunkenness. These days such matters are dealt with differently, if at all. All that remains of the court is the swearing in of Churchwardens to what is the most ancient elective community office in England (older than parliament). Every three years, by convention, bishops get to give the keynote.

I was really impressed by our 800+ clergy and churchwardens en masse, with a different kind of feel for what’s going on all over Bucks. Having completed all five events for this year, people have been asking me what I said! So here goes:

We have a problem — people admire Jesus, but not the Church or Christians. We need to take this very seriously. pPeople are supposed to see in Church the life of Christ, corporately lived out among them in acts of loving service, creativity and imaginative renewal. The breakdown of this linkage says something uncomfortable about us. So how, honestly, do we reconnect?

We need to touch the real world — Almost all churches have global links, ways to open hearts and minds to bigger reality. Karen and I recommend a growing trend among clergy, which we follow, to give a week’s ministry every year to somewhere completely different overseas — goes to South Africa and I go to India. As well as the diocese, Missionary societies and other organisations like SOMA are bursting with good ideas. Churches are also doing local events to build understanding of real world issues, and raising awareness of ecological challenges, like Think Local Food Fairs and Ecological events in the Chilterns.

The big resource to bridge the gap is vibrant community. Consider the questions that are asked at Church Council meetings:

• What have we always done?
  — good question for an organisation that lives faith in momentum, often in fabulous historic buildings
  
  
• What have we got to do?
  — get this one wrong and there’s nothing to pass on
  
  
• What do we want to do?
  — the Church has transformed from an arm of state into a voluntary organisation in the past fifty years. It matters very much to take account of the value we add to people’s lives
  
  
• What ought we to do?
  — we need to ask this because we aren’t here entirely to please ourselves, but to proclaim and enact a different way of life according to Jesus’ values
  
  
• What can we do?
  — a good question, because trying to do everything is a sure recipe for ending up doing nothing.
  

None of these questions, good as they are, will unlock the energy in Church or community. With all of them we need, seriously, to ask:

• Where’s the fire?
  — In the communities we serve, in our churches, in us?
  

Where we answer this question things grow fast — like the Wycombe Winter Night Shelter which has grown into one of the largest voluntary organisations in the town in only 3 years, after a year 1 curate got a bug to do something about a problem everybody cared about, but couldn’t somehow engage with. Ordinary Churches also grow — like in Slough where there’s been a remarkable and steady growth in attendance across most parishes these past five years.

In the Oxford Diocese we have been trying to picture what needs to be on church agendas.
Sustaining the Sacred Centre
— right at the middle of what we do
Making disciples
— a way of life, not an hour Sunday morning
Changing the World
— not chasing our tails
Building Vibrant Community
— radically inclusive, earthed and responsive
Shaping confident collaborative leadership
— so Goodbye to the Vicar as Fat Controller of Everything

These could be seen as additional chores — extra carrots on the pile. They don’t have to be that. Rather they are ways of understanding what we’re already doing, and focusing it. Thus Six Days in Lent — not extra stuff to do, but an opportunity to carve out extra free time to feed your soul. Many people had used this really fruitfully and joyfully, including churchwardens.

Putting the act together, I picked a story, which various people at the Visitations gave me parallels to from elsewhere in Bucks, from Turweston. It’s a small village (200 people) with a large medieval Church and, 3 years ago, a struggling small congregation. They have developed what they call “Village Worship” — a monthly meeting point with a decent breakfast, an opportunity to pray together, and simple worship. This brings between 30 and 60 people in, and has brought new heart to the village. Margaret, Andy and Harriet take up the story:

The budget, incidentally, was, er, Zero. Extraordinary things await those who ask “Where’s the Fire?”

He is the Way...
Follow Him through the land of Unlikeness,
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth.
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life!
Love Him in the World of the Flesh
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.

W. H. Auden:

So what are you waiting for?

Sustaining the Sacred Centre 2

Reflecting on our Area Deans and Lay Chairs residential, the thought was that we could go away and talk in the abstract about how to sustain the sacred centre. Alternatively, we could instead go and sustain our sacred centre, with three creative spiritual guides to accompany our group and catalyse thoughts and prayers in ways that would deepen our awareness of God in our lives. I reccomend this approach highly for tired churches and groups.

Our Second guide was Dani Muñoz-Treviño, a wondrfully gifted, creative and reflective priest. Dani has done a curacy at Hazlemere, and is just coming to the end of a time in Marlow, during which he has built an emergent congregation and led a number of arts projects and activities involving hundreds, and sometimes thousands of people. He’s off soon to create a new project in Andalusia, Los Olivos — a two hundred year old hacienda, set in thirteen acres of national park. This will be Spain’s first Christian Art and Spirituality Retreat Centre, opening in the autumn of 2010.

Dani took us through a journey together around the ways people engage with God in a time of change, accompanied by movie clips and community art. His presentation built, very much, on Ernesto’s in which we entered an Old Testament narrative at depth, connected with the soundtrack of our lives in Christ, then crystallised th learning into an image. There’s a sense in which this is an area where the first are last and the last first. Some well established churchgoers have real difficulty engaging with God through art and creativity, where people everyone might think of as being complete outsiders sometimes get it instinctively.

I was also struck by the way that high energy arts projects such as Dani has been encouraging in Marlow seem to generate the energy to sustain themselves in new ways, sometimes by the seat of their pants, but well enough to survive. This said something powerful to me about the possibiities if we think we are short of resources; one response is to go round weeping need until someone feels sorry for us and shells out. Another is to kindle more energy at the heart of the project, so that a kind of mutual firestorm develops between people who understand and feel passionate about it. If nobody’s passionate about it, this could be divine guidance to give it your best shot, then try another project. If people get passionate about it, energy and all kinds of resources seem to flow from that shared commitment.

That’s the theory, and the gubbins of getting Los Olivos up and running will certainly test the theory. If Art is many people’s route to spiritual awareness, what matters is to unlock that potential in everybody, churchgoer or not. Gospel, good news, in an age where so much popular imagiation is locked down by sterile rationalism and superficial manipulation, is partly about refreshing the whole culture by releasing imagination. The Church’s role is not primarily to dogmatise at people from its own little bubble, but to celebrate and share images and experiences that create openings to God for hearts and minds and free the Spirit...

Sustaining the Sacred Centre 1

What kind of business do we think we’re in? The Church’s business is as much to know God and enjoy him for ever, delighting in Scripture and prayer, as it is to undertake organisational and administrative indoor games. The latter matter too, but only in relation to the former, because if all we ever do in Church business meetings is secular Church business, we lose our capacity to do anything after a while.

Our first diocesan prioirity for next year is what we call “sustaining the sacred centre” — nourishing our roots of faith, cultivating our imagination and openness to God, using poetry, song and and art, and releasing creative energy that can only come from deep encounter. Therefore, recently, inspired and organised by Archdeacon Karen Gorham, we replaced a regular area deans/lay chairs business meeting with a day enneagram workshop together.

This revealed the extent to which we have gotten into the habit of trying to transact complex business together with a less than adequate understanding of each person’s God-given humanity to sustain our process. Getting to recognise, articulate and enjoy our differences and particularities has helped us forward immensely. Suddenly we found we could frame and reframe our business questions in appropriate personal as well as theoretical terms. Thus more productive gets done.

Building on Karen’s brilliant idea, therefore, we have just been away with 22 area deans and lay chairs to Glenfall House, Cheltenham, for a 24 hour residential. We took with us some resource clergy — Ernesto Lozada-Uzuriaga Steele, Dani Muñoz-Treviño, and Ian Adams. All content was fantastically rich, and I’ll try and get to blog all three, but I’ve just got space for one today. Twenty Four hours seemed like a much longer time (in a good way!), and we all left feeling energised and revitalised spiritually.

Ernesto serves in Milton Keynes, and is an artist and priest. He has developed a knack for leading others into biblical stories, especially from the Old Testament, to explore them and enjoy them, then open themselves to creative possibilities in them. We took two stories — Jacob’s Ladder and Jacob wrestling an angel. Interacting individually and together with the text, themes of Solidarity and Struggle began to emerge, and really got us humming as we began to recognise resonances in our own stories from which we identified songs from the backing track of our lives. Using this we tried to identify, personally, symbolic objects and experiences that seemed to capture what God was saying to us about faith as solidarity and struggle. Tim Norwood’s doodle, here, captured some of the images that were spelled out around the room b y the end of our time together.

This may sound slightly weird, but it really opened a lot of spiritual doors for our group. You just explore the text in its own terms, suspending the question “what does it mean?” until you have really interacted with the story at a deep level in its own terms, and played with it and entered into it emotionally and imaginatively. Then you identify a song from the backing track of your own life and experience, and see what images God opens in your mind in response.

For anyone wanting to try this kind of thing in the privacy of their own home, Ernesto has a new book out, Five Stones and a burnt Stick. This takes the reader imaginatively into the Moses story, exploring his intimacy God against the counterpoint of his relationship with his wife. It made me realise how rich the Biblical tradition is, especially once we release it from the tyranny of being rationalised off into abstract ideas, and just let the narrative work on us, like the people did who originally told these stories around iron age campfires...