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?

Six Days in Lent

Even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat. As Lent goes on, feedback is beginning to emerge about Archdeacon Karen’s and my idea about clergy taking six days in Lent to feed their souls.

I feel faintly compromised in mentioning this, since this week’s day off has just got eaten up (in a good cause) leaving me only the London art day planned for tomorrow. I’m sure the same sort of thing is happening to clergy colleagues much better than me, but at least the Lent day gave me some recharging time this week, and it’s the spirit not the letter that gives life.

So, thanks to Lesley Fellows for describing here how trying to do this has been impacting her work as a parish priest:

On the one hand I have been dropping balls.. people have not been visited who I used to visit, I have had reminder emails to do stuff I promised to do and haven't got around to, and I feel mildly out of control as I forlornly move tasks to do from one day to the next, my desk is untidy, my emails unanswered and my in tray is too full. Moreover when my friends ring me to go out for lunch I can't find a single slot in Lent. So why do it to myself?

Well the other side of the story is that I was getting more stressed than I would like to admit. I was getting stroppy with the kids, feeling vulnerable to dark moods and generally not thriving. I now feel happy. I feel better about the world, I laugh more, God is a good guy, I even love the church at the moment, I am more optimistic, I even think I am more effective in some ways.

I seriously don't want Lent to end until I get this in balance. It is now clear to me that my markers of success were in terms of getting the work done, the do list ticked and not letting anyone down. I am not even sure that the solution is a case of stopping some activities, perhaps it is worth me taking a hatchet to my diary in general, prioritising restorative time, and then accepting that the rest of the work may or may not fit.

But a special Big Wet Sloppy Digital Mars Bar goes to David Harris. He would probably get one anyway, as a lay person who heard the clergy call and decided to give it a whirl himself. David has been trying out a few of our starter ideas every week: follow his adventures here.

The story I liked, however was here, about David going all the way to France to visit the Antony Caro Chapel of Light, finding it closed, explaining to the caretaker that he had been asked by his diocese to visit as a Lenten exercise, and getting red carpet treatment.

With these reflections come a mental note that blogs help improve the quality of unsolicited feedback I can be aware of from around the archdeaconry, and solicitation to anyone else to let me know of how they're getting on this Lent with the quest to sustain the Sacred Centre...

Images h/t Plattenspieler Design Blog

Six Days in Lent

Image via Wikipedia

This year our diocese is encouraging everyone to rediscover ways to sustain the sacred centre. This could induce Narcissism and Tea Light Overdrive, but it’s an important task. Humanly speaking, the whole life of the Church is powered by passion, prayer and spiritual conviction. If faith becomes thin and stringy, we will soon lose the plot, and with it, the means to be a transformative community.

It’s an encouraging phrase, but how do we sustain the sacred centre? My archdeaconry close colleagues (Andrew, Caroline, Karen, Rosie and Roy) and I tried to think this through last autumn. There’s a lot of hype about spirituality, and we were trying to be realistic.

We needed to find something we could recommend, in the light of various complications:

1. Everyone is sustained in different ways by different things, being at different stages on their journey. Even if we could work out the perfect Universal Spiritual Centering Wheeze (shades of Monty Python’s funniest joke in the world) some would be more ready to take it on than others
   
   
2. Our colleagues are busy people. If we simply download one extra thing we think might help onto them we could actually be making the problem worse — This morning you had 45 things to do. Now you’ve got 46. This is hardly a spiritually energising prospect.
   
   
3. If bishop and archdeacon model extra overload people may think we think spiritual development is a job, or an optional extra job, or something that can be accomplished by doing even more of the same — A wise and experienced priest in another diocese told me his turning point was when he had realised that the less he did, the more of value seemed to happen. That’s not an absolute principle, but 99% of vicars err on the side of overwork not underwork.
   

So we came up with the notion of Six Days in Lent. This is official permission to spend one day a week in Lent out of your trench, doing something you believe will nourish your soul. Even if you’re wrong, it was worth the risk. You can block the day out as assiduously as you would a funeral or Church meeting, and write it into your schedule. What kinds of things? Karen, Andrew, Caroline and I brainstormed 40 starters to get the creative thoughts going:

In this spirit, this first week of Lent, I headed for somewhere I’d never been, Pelagos in Latimer. This is a new and innovative Spirituality development centre in the best countryside on the Underground, near the River Chess. Various events go on there, and it’s available to people and groups for all sorts of different purposes, including, last Saturday, a day exploring Jesus’ wilderness experience with 30 others. It struck me how much of our feeling and thinking is shaped by a crush of immediate externals. In a desert the externals are much more basic. I was interested by parallel between what happened to Jesus in the desert and Richard Rohr’s concept of how men to grow up, or don’t, which I’ve described elsewhere. The wilderness is a crucible in which we engage with greed, ego, and possessiveness, set apart from the toys and concerns that feed those old friends.

Next up? I’m taking a session to read The Horse and His Boy — the only Chronicles of Narnia children’s book I’ve never read. Then van Gogh or Chris Ofili, I wot... Watch this space.

Women’s Ministry & Servant Leadership — NOT Oxymorons

Great joy, today, as I welcomed the Ven. Karen Gorham as new Archdeacon of Buckingham. This appointment, created in the eleventh century, has now for the first time been filled on an equal opportunities basis! I wonder about the Ecclesiastical Women’s Leadership Labyrinth. How can those of us with headline responsibility for the wellbeing of the Church engage seriously with that?

We inaugurated Karen’s ministry near the Dove window in All Saints’ High Wycombe. In 1896 Frances Dove (1847-1942), educationalist, founded Wycombe Abbey, the highest performing academic school in Britain. As a woman, she was blocked from election as mayor of Wycombe, and retaliated in 1933 with a stained glass window, designed and executed by women, illustrating the core contribution of women to the English church over 1,000 years, strategically placed near the council pew!

All Saints’ is an interesting reference point in the story of women's ministry in England, as home parish of the first English woman priest in modern times, the Reverend Joyce Bennett, ordained in Hong Kong in 1970.

Plainly women's ministry began way before the Chatterly Trial and the Beatles' first LP. But what have we done with women’s senior leadership? However much more faithful and realistic, however less blokey C of E culture may be this century, to what extent have we managed to match gifts to calling and potential, and to what extent, and why, do we still tolerate a lot of idiotic Father Ted gender stereotyping?