The Bishop’s Charge to the 2009 Diocesan Synod

Published: Wednesday 18 March 2009

Here is the text of the two addresses constituting the Bishop’s Charge to the 2009 Aberdeen and Orkney Diocesan Synod, which took place on the 13 and 14 March:

Friday, 13 March 2009: ‘Personal Holiness’

The Bishop’s address on Friday 13 March 2009:

Last year in my Bishop’s Charge to you I said this:

‘Prayer is crucial for church growth. Prayer, on its own, won’t make a congregation grow, though it is a necessary precondition of growth. If people individually and collectively don’t pray then any growth that does take place will lack deep rooting and will risk drying out in heat or being frosted away.’

The purpose of our gathering together this evening is to focus our attention upon mission. Mission was the principal driving theme of my Bishop’s Charge to you at the Diocesan Synod a year ago. On that occasion I did little more than set the agenda for you. The time has now arrived for us to begin delivering on the agenda.

The whole evening tonight is therefore given over to mission. A number of priorities will be unfolded. A number of projects will be outlined. And the results of significant planning will be shared with you. Amongst these will be the new website. More of that later.

Many of you will have been at church meetings before when mission has been the topic of conversation. Or it might have been that mission was the main theme of the meeting. The sad feature of many of those occasions is that people hear what has been said, duly benefit from it but then receive no follow up. And then are left wondering ‘so what is mission?’

Sometimes as well people actually fear mission. Correctly, they realise, that if mission is successful not only they but their church will change. And that’s something they either don’t want or can’t face. For whatever reason.

I recognise that feeling for I too have both known it and sometimes if I’m to be honest I’m occasionally a victim of it still. And unless you confront it that fear won’t go away.

And the best way of challenging the fear of mission is to recognise that the first person in need of being converted is oneself.

Before you ever pluck up the courage to give out handbills at Somerfields in September advertising your 100th Anniversary Service or your Back to Church Sunday, or your timid approach to a neighbour to get them to come to an Alpha course with you there’s someone closer at hand in need of conversion.

My point is that before you can go out, or reach out, to somebody else to help them to a closer walk with God you somehow need to go in to yourself and what it is in your own heart that needs God’s converting grace.

Before you reach out you have to look deep into your own soul and see what needs God’s cleansing love. Mission quite literally begins at home. By looking deep into oneself and seeing what needs conversion in me before I look for conversion in others.

Conversion of stiffness into agreeable warmth; conversion of fussiness over detail into wisdom over essentials; frantic busy-ness into calming contemplation and so on.

A personal testimony if I may. At the mission day conference back in January Malcolm Round offered, very simply, the opportunity for people to pray with one another at the end of the day. It hadn’t been planned. But it was a natural thing, indeed an obvious thing to do. Christians should want to pray for one another and be prayed for. For me that simple action on Malcolm Round’s part offered a personal conversion to someone who I thought was in no need of conversion. And I thank God for that opportunity he gave the Holy Spirit to work its work.

Mission needs to come from the depths of a life of personal holiness. Others need to see the love of Jesus in us before we should expect them to respond to our advice and counsel that they should adopt the love of Jesus in their lives. If they can’t see Jesus and his love radiating from us how on earth can they be expected to take our advice that Christlike living is a good thing.

A life of personal holiness is one that:

• Embodies personal prayer and regular worship.
• Sees personal life as part of God’s unfolding plan.
• Imitates the life of Christ in such a way that living his way just becomes second nature.
• Wants others to share in it too.

With all of this in place and with a life of personal holiness as both our aim for the future as well as our life in the present we will want others also to have this personal holiness as a part of their life too. And once you have this desire in you all fear of mission and its consequences evaporates.

I’ll now hand back to John Walker who will steer us through this evening of mission.

And tomorrow I’ll say more about leadership and relationships as core elements of the local church as it engages in the task of mission.

Saturday, 14 March 2009: ‘Affection, Trust and Loyalty’

The Bishop’s address on Saturday 14 March 2009:

Yesterday evening I spent a few moments trying, I hope, to encourage you to recognise that the first movement in mission is inwards. Before one can offer a relationship with Christ outwards one has to look inwards and towards one’s own relationship with Christ.

Today I will deliberately broaden this approach. I suspect I will say many things that will be familiar to most of you but I will then go on to say a few things that will I hope, deliberately challenge.

One of the approaches that congregations have done in recent times when considering mission is to draw up a mission statement. Having a mission statement on a board outside your church was one of the emphases in the MISSION21 programme and was something that was good to do and had a very visible end product.

The term ‘‘Mission Statement’ came into recent currency in our churches through secular business circles where it denotes an enterprise’s core purpose and intention. I’ve helped draw up a number of these in different locations, thankfully not in this Diocese. I say this because as I look back on them I see many were variously trite on the one hand or not specific enough on the other.

For example there was: St Bloggs’ is here to (1) Worship God (2) Deepen Fellowship (3) Bring Christ to the World. I have no problem with the first and the second but it is surely too ambitious for any church to think it can bring Christ to the World. It’s an admirable aspiration but it lacks specificity and therefore fails to bring reality to that congregation’s sense and understanding of mission.

It seems to me that the process of producing a Mission Statement should be a deliberate discipline of restriction and limitation. Catholicity means in our context that we are each liberated from having to be everything to everybody. A sufficient demand is that we are actually a few things for a few people. This allows room for flexible movement and visibly successful outcomes.i

In this regard I am very encouraged by the witness of St Peter’s Torry in its Tuesday afternoon venture with the Sheltered Housing Complex that completely obscures any view of that church from the road. The only people who know that there’s a church there are the people who overlook it. Therefore to target those people in mission is an entirely laudable programme.

Likewise our tiny congregation in Braemar, working with the local community to try and love St Margaret’s Braemar back into life. For those of you who don’t know it we have two churches in the village of Braemar. One is a little gem up the glen at Mar Lodge. The other an enormous gem but it’s derelict and is an eyesore right in the centre of the village. Engaging with the local community is at an early stage but is producing good small scale, but beneficial and positive outcomes. At a personal level it probably represents my most active involvement in a rural community in the Diocese to date.

So if you have a mission statement that needs revising, or if you’re working on a new one, make it active and achievable.

Working on a mission statement is of course only a part of what needs to be done. A number of you may well have notice boards that advertise particular local preferences such as ‘1970 liturgy’ or ‘said communion’ or ‘blue book’. I’m never sure what this sort of thing actually says to the person passing by. To quote the Book of Common Prayer, the ‘BCP’ to those of you who love acronyms, ‘It is not in a tongue understood of the people’. The messages we portray need to give people useful information, rather than words which mean something to us as insiders but not very much to the average passer-by. An interesting take on this are the services advertised at St Laurence’s Reading. They have two services each Sunday one is called the ‘First Service’ and the other the ‘Second Service’. Very simple. Very self-explanatory.

The risk for all of us is that when we begin to discuss what to put on our notice boards we can take up a whole evening of vestry meeting and in the process of doing so continue in a safe and secure comfort zone of church organisation. We must break out of this comfy place for there is an urgent imperative upon us to engage ever more seriously with our localities and for us to catch up with where we should be after decades of treading water in one spot.

There is I believe, and here I paraphrase words offered me by one of you in a recent letter, ‘… a swell of the Spirit that is impelling the church outwards in the renewal of buildings and in giving voice to God’s message’. I rejoice that at our forthcoming mission conference on 29 May John Drane will be providing this kind of ‘wake up’ call for us.

Planning realistic achievable ventures will bring people to Christ, or return them to Christ, more motivated and more aware of the call to service and to worship and to live God’s kingdom now. The scriptural narrative of this is the sending out and the return of the 70/the 72.

Moving out of the safety of ecclesiastical comfort zones can also help charges which have become bogged down in their internal stuff to become re-energised by faith and dependence on God and to find a heart for others who live or work nearby.

At risk, but without fear, of putting them on the spot St Drostan’s Insch is poised and must be ready to move in parallel tracks - on the one hand to develop correctly its pastoral governance but also to reach out in Christ’s mission to embrace now population growth in the village.

And likewise St Mary’s Auchindoir has a gifted chance to develop its parsonage into whatever vision God is revealing to that congregation - maybe a retreat centre, maybe a centre for renewal and quiet, maybe a base for mission.

The credit crunch has hit us hard. The diocese’s investments and those of individual charges have shrunk dramatically.

Moreover communities around us are going to be increasingly affected by the ripples of the Banking Crisis. One of the consequent outcomes is that some people will be re-examining the assumptions on which they have built their lives and therefore will be more open to a conversion of mind. On the Today programme on Radio 4 last month someone expressed this sense of unsettling change in the economy like this: we are experiencing a ‘once in a generation’ opportunity to ‘reboot our lives and ask the question, What is the good life?’ That’s a question that Christian Faith is well equipped to answer. It’s the question the writer of Ezekiel confronted when he offered his answer, ‘Choose life’.

Whilst on the one hand we want, and must, draw people into church our principal thought must be to draw people to Christ. This evangelisation will be most readily accomplished successfully if our churches are places where relationships are good and where difficulties are readily reconciled.

In his high priestly prayer in John 17 Jesus prayed that his disciples would be one just as he and the Father are one. ‘May they be one’ are words that resound from that passage of scripture. In any human community, not least the church, there are bound to be difficulties, misunderstandings and conflict. The key to being Christlike is the resolution of these and the reconciliation of people with one another and with the God in whose image and likeness we are made and whose life we must live.

In his interview in our Provincial Church magazine Inspires Sir Tom Farmer spoke of the importance of ‘relationships’ for any successful organisation. Good relationships are crucial in any church setting. We cannot expect people to move into a relationship with Christ if they see his followers forever arguing amongst themselves.

I have been deeply impressed by the work done by several of you in bringing difficulties in your congregations to a close. I do not share the view that tension and conflict are inevitable and good in that they keep people on their toes. Tension and conflict create disquiet and sap energies that should be deployed to better effect.

John Ruskin, that 19th Century social economist, offered some interesting thoughts on this. I concede I haven’t checked the original sources but I am attracted by what I recently heard in a talk about him. What he said in this context about economics can be applied to the church and to our part in Christ’s mission.

Ruskin challenged the ‘hard economics’ of a outcomes driven management approach to business. Setting targets, defining goals, making people accountable when they fail to achieve what is set for them is all very well if it is founded upon a framework of good relationships in the workplace, or wherever.

For Ruskin good relationships were achieved by setting in place three factors: affection, trust and loyalty. Affection, trust and loyalty. If the manager, to continue the business economics analogy displays and lives these three features towards her or his workforce then the workforce will soon mirror these in their relationships one with another. And in addition they will return them to the manager so that on the day when word goes out that 10,000 ball bearings are needed within 24 hours the workforce will not only produce the 10,000 but will do so ahead of deadline. Affection, trust and loyalty are thus reciprocated and reflected in everyone’s energy.

Likewise in church and in ministry. I know we all will say good relationships are important for clearly they are. But we can be more specific. Namely for clergy to embody affection, trust and loyalty. These are Christlike qualities which when lived out will spread through a congregation. They are also healthily infectious qualities which will soon be picked up by newcomers to the church as well as by those new to the message of Christ.

Affection, trust and loyalty are qualities that will not only broaden and deepen the discipleship of each congregation committed to Christ but will offer an insight into Our Lord’s relationship with them and of how this should mark each person’s relationship with their Saviour.

‘God so loved the world’. Affection.
‘That he gave his only Son’. Trust.
‘That all who believe in him should not perish but have life eternal.’ Loyalty.

Affection, trust and loyalty. Three qualities that are at the heart of all that our Lord has done for us. Qualities that he wants us to return to him in all that we are for one another, for to paraphrase scripture, ‘insofar as we have done it unto the least of these we have done it unto him’.

Bless you all. Amen.