Ministry Reality Checkpoint

A very busy weekend, mainly because of five presentations in 48 hours! Great pleasure, but it does restrict time a bit. Today brings a leavers session at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford. Putting it together, I remembered these words from an ordination address delivered by Hensley Henson, Bishop of Durham, in 1936. Some of the ways of putting things may have dated, but I think the main point is worth considering, even today:

Nearly fifty years have passed since I was myself ordained in Cuddesdon Parish Church on a lovely summer morning in 1887.

How well I remember the tumult of conflicting thoughts which raged in my mind, and perhaps hindered me from entering as fully as I would have entered into the solemn yet exalting service! How little I guessed what lay before me! 
The immense failures 
which would overtake my too-ardent beginnings; 
the disappointments which would shadow 
my later course; the growing sense of inadequacy 
which would become a settled resident in my mind...

The happiest years of my ministry were those in which, as the vicar of a great industrial parish, 
I was nearest to the people. Faces look out at me from the past — toil-worn faces radiant with love and confidence. Nothing of what men foolishly call success is worth comparison 
with the experiences which those faces recall...

I say to you then — love God and love your people. Count nothing excessive that you can do for them. Serve them in your office for the love of Christ, 
and they will surely give you back more 
than you can ever give them.

GAFCON future: not quite Jerusalem?

Looking at the GAFCON statement from Jerusalem, it all looks fair enough to me. Very few faithful Anglicans will disagree with anything positive the statement affirms. It's pretty much what we all thought we were doing anyway. What disturbs is its claim to have the exclusive franchise on “orthodoxy” and what this implicitly denies about those it tars with the “heterodox” brush. Powerful Conservative instincts don’t equal truth. Mugabe-speak about “Colonialism” feels a bit rich, as it started from Lambeth’s refusal to weigh in and discipline former New England “colonists”.

From the Conservative side, I was very much struck by the clarity and sincerity of Sarah Hey. She compares being a Conservative US Anglican to being a daughter of dysfunctional parents, torn between loyalty to the family and collusion. I’m not sure I’d follow her all the way home, but I bet she’s expressing exactly how things feel for people who lost the ECUSA domestic debates on sexuality in the nineties.

I believe heaven is about far more than the current social mores of either Nigeria or San Francisco, but can be fully incarnate in both. My eyes fell on a letter of Hensley Henson from 12 July 1920:

No ideal of unity can satisfy us which fails in range or in quality, i.e. which leaves outside the visible church any genuine disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, or which sets before the world a partial or distorted conception of Christian fellowship. Whether the attainment of that ideal would imply the organization of the visible church as a single polity is a point which neither the New Testament nor the experience of the Christian Society enables us to determine.

The true parallel to the spiritual society of Christ’s Church is not a single government, however effective and extended, but the human race. The Church is ultimately equivalent to redeemed humanity, and the nature of its unity will have its analogue in the unity of mankind.

History is continually revising the definition of the Catholic Church. We are called to recognize the teaching of history (i.e. the Mind of the Spirit disclosed in Christian experience), and to extend our definition of the Catholic Church until it covers the facts.