Diocesan Conference October 2006 - Bishop's address
Brothers and sisters,
Personal
I want to begin and end on a personal note and in between to say something of the life of the diocese and what are my – and I pray – your hopes for Monmouth.
This time last year, the day after our Diocesan Conference I went into hospital for heart surgery – a quadruple bypass operation. I was quite overwhelmed by the prayers and acts of love that I received from individuals, parishes and schools and I want to say how much I appreciated your support and concern. As you can see, I have now made a full recovery and I have been back in action since the beginning of the year.
Stewardship
Canon Barrie Gauge is our main speaker this afternoon and he will address the subject of stewardship and I know for many this conjures up memories of campaigns with ‘time and talents’ lists, supper invitations and pledge forms. They were important and successful in their day but times have moved on.
Today, stewardship is seen as part of Christian discipleship even though I think it was Charles Wesley who said that the last part of a man to be converted is his pocket! Today the Church in Wales can no longer rely on past endowments to pay our clergy and although parishes will continue to be subsidised with the costly provision of clergy pensions and housing, the burden of paying clergy stipends and costs will more and more become the responsibility of the parishes. This is nothing new for most other churches but for us it presents a challenge to take seriously how we allocate our personal money in a sacrificial way to the ministry and mission of the church. It also means that we must recognise that we are a family where the strong should support the weak and the richer should support the poorer (and I said poorer not meaner). There will be some parishes that will never be able to pay the costs of their clergy and will need help from the wealthier parishes. How we do that through the parish share is the subject of a review group. The parish share is essentially a family purse that is used for the ministry and mission of our parishes which cover the range from inner city, suburban and market town to valley and country villages, and I am confident that with generosity of spirit we shall continue to maintain this breadth of ministry.
As the old campaigns used to remind us, stewardship is not just about money, it is about an attitude towards life. We are stewards of God’s creation and there are huge global questions about how we share the world’s resources, how we conserve energy, how we exploit poor people and animals and how we are changing the climate of our planet. These ‘green’ issues are issues of stewardship and I encourage parishes to look at new initiatives to save energy in the heating and lighting of their churches, to re-cycle waste and to support Fair Trade products.
Stewardship is a communal – a church activity – and it is also about the use of our personal gifts and our time. God has provided a great deal of personal talent and much of that is being offered and used in our parishes, but I know that there are those who are hiding their lights under bushels. Today, we recognise that the church is not just the vicar, but the clergy enabling the laity to be the people of God - and the survival of our church communities will depend upon the laity offering themselves – their time, their gifts and their financial support for the work of the kingdom.
Ministry of Welcome
One ministry in which nearly all the laity can be involved is the ministry of welcome, that is, welcoming people into your churches. The problem is that everyone thinks they belong to a welcoming church or they wouldn’t be there, but I can tell you stories from this diocese of people who have gone to a new church and been ignored, or found the ‘regulars’ gathered in ‘not-so-holy’ huddles and cold shouldering the visitors. I know of one couple who attended a church in this diocese every week for three months and nobody spoke to them, let alone visited them. Some Baptist neighbours invited them to attend their church and during the week members of the church called on them and even brought them flowers. They have not been inside their parish church since.
Welcoming people without being intrusive or over-powering is an art. Having a church that is ‘visitor friendly’ is important but you have to work at it. The church can easily become a club for the regulars, whereas we need to develop a culture of welcome. I want to help churches to do that – to be places of welcome where no visitor or stranger will leave without a smile and a kind word – or having been put off by boredom or frostbite. If we kept just a quarter of those who give ‘church a try’ we would be growing at a very steady rate. There are some excellent booklets about creating a culture of welcome and Judi Hattaway, our Lay Training Adviser will be putting on days to help people discover and learn the art of welcome. Please support these days because a welcoming church will be a growing church.
MAPing
This year is of course, the year when parishes are expected to begin the MAPing – Mission Action Planning - process and I am very grateful to the Revd John Leach, our Parish Development Adviser who has worked so hard to produce material to help parishes engage with this process. The first Maps should be ready for the Diocesan Conference next year and much of what we shall be doing in the next few years will be to help parishes to put their plans into action.
Our youth and children’s advisers will be producing ideas and material for parishes to engage with young people and to bring them into Christian discipleship and we hope to have this available by the Diocesan Conference next year. I have appointed the Revd Dr Will Ingle-Gillis as our Church & Society officer – Will is replacing the Revd Mark Lawson-Jones who has recently moved to lead the Magor Rectorial Benefice - and we shall be looking at how we can assist parishes that have identified projects to serve the local community, to put their ideas into action.
Vocations
Another new appointment is that of Canon Ambrose Mason, the Rector of Grosmont, who also takes on the role of Diocesan Director of Ordinands and Continuing Ministerial Education officer with the title of Director of Ministry. Ambrose takes over the ordinands’ role from Canon Richard Pain and the CME role from Father Patrick Coleman following his move to Abergavenny.
As Director of Ministry, Ambrose will work with Canon Andrew Willie as Warden of Readers, the Revd John Leach as Warden of Evangelists and the Revd Dr Jason Bray as ICME officer responsible, (with their incumbents) for the training of curates in their first three years of ministry.
It is now clear from statistics and projections that the Church in Wales will, through moves and retirements, hit its target of reducing to 450 stipendiary clergy by the year 2013. The problem is that by 2020 there will only be 350 clergy to fill those 450 posts unless we can encourage more people – and especially young people – to consider ordained ministry. There will be new initiatives to foster vocations and each one of us needs to try and identify possible candidates and help to sow the seeds of vocation. [On your seat you should find details of a Vocations Day being held at St Michael’s College].
Vocation – the calling of God – is something that is living and dynamic. Vocation needs to be fed or it will die and there is nothing so sad as a priest whose vocation has died and who is trapped in a ministry that brings no joy. CME is one way – although not the only way - of trying to keep the spark of vocation alive and I know that Ambrose will be consulting with the clergy and facilitating training to equip clergy for ministry today and to feed their own spiritual lives.
Fair Trade
Last year, we agreed to become a Fair Trade diocese and set the target of 60% of our churches becoming Fair Trade parishes and serving only Fair Trade coffee, tea and other products at parish events and to encourage Christians to buy Fair Trade products when they go shopping. It may be that some parishes have made this decision but have not informed Fr Mark Lawson-Jones and therefore do not have their Fair Trade certificate to hang in their church hall and do not have the name of their parish on the list of the righteous. There are something like 1,500 Fair Trade products. Well known high street coffee houses serve only Fair Trade coffee and if you remember the early days of undrinkable Fair Trade coffee – forget it – they now produce excellent quality products.
We are lagging behind the other dioceses in Wales – and they are waiting for us to declare ourselves a Fair Trade diocese – so that we can become a Fair Trade Province. There are enormous benefits to communities that are paid fair wages for their tea, coffee, bananas, rice, sugar and other products. They have money to dig wells and produce clean water for their children. They have money to send their children to school and money to provide basic health care – and the more Fair Trade products we buy the more retailers will stock it. So please, please consider becoming a Fair Trade parish if you are not one already and next year I hope we shall have an accurate display of the Fair Trade parishes in the diocese.
Cathedral Appeal
Readers of the Argus cannot have escaped reading of the Appeal to raise something like £2 ½ million for restoration work on our Cathedral Church. Whilst we hope that much of that money will come from heritage grants, there is also a need to raise large sums ourselves. We are pleased to have an architect, HRH Prince Richard of Gloucester as the royal patron. I would ask you to try and support fund raising activities at the Cathedral and if you can assist in any other way, please speak with the Dean.
Pilgrimage
In May this year, I was pleased to co-lead a joint diocesan pilgrimage with the Bishop of Bristol. It was good for our two dioceses to join together and we visited Jordan and Sinai. The pilgrimage took us to the desert and to Mt Sinai where Moses received the Ten Commandments and where at the foot of the mountain there is the oldest Christian monastery in the world. We crossed the Red Sea – not on foot but by boat – and visited Bethany-beyond-Jordan where Jesus was baptised and where we celebrated the Eucharist and renewed our own baptism promises. From Mt Nebo we viewed the Promised Land and by camel, horse and on foot visited the city of Petra.
The purpose of a pilgrimage is to remind ourselves that we are a pilgrim people. Life itself is a pilgrimage as God leads us through its good times and its bad times. The new Eucharist 2004 has an emphasis on the idea of journey as God’s people have desert times and mountain experiences. We walk with Jesus and we invite others to join us in this walk – this journey of discovery and mystery. As a diocese we move ahead putting Hope for Monmouth into action and knowing that we are led by the Holy Spirit to be God’s pilgrim people, a people who live in Wales but whose true home is with God in heaven. As a diocese, we seek to provide food for the journey through training, encouraging retreats and pilgrimages and though equipping parishes to plan for growth.
Those who came on the pilgrimage in May and the clergy who came to the Sacred Synod in July and met Bishop Mike Hill will be sorry to learn that he and his wife were in a serious car accident and although Bishop Mike escaped with minor injuries, his wife Anthea suffered serious injuries and is in hospital with a broken neck and head and hand injuries. She is recovering slowly but I know that both Mike and Anthea will value your prayers.
Renewal
The renewal and growth of our diocese will depend largely on the relationship that each one of us has with the Lord. I remember a priest once saying to me, ‘It is very hard to turn church-goers into Christians’. That was perhaps an overstatement but churches that grow are churches that are spiritually alive, and churches that are spiritually alive are churches where people are praying, engaging with the scriptures, learning more about their faith and open to the Holy Spirit. Some Christians do too much – they are Martha’s when they need to be Mary’s.
We all need time to pray and time to be with God. Jesus invites us to be his friends and friendship requires time and care. We are fortunate to have our contemplative nuns at Tymawr and now the Sisters of the Good Shepherd at Llanfrechfa. I am grateful to the Revd Jim Florance and Sister Anita Woodwell for the time they give to the spiritual direction network and to all who are involved in guiding people in prayer and teaching the faith.
I was disappointed to discover that we had a congregational decline of over 2% last year after two years of slight growth. I am aware that 4% of our congregations die each year, so to have a decrease of less than that shows that we also have some growth. You will know the age profile of your own congregations and do not need me to tell you, that unless we find new mission opportunities and provide an experience of worship that give people an experience of God presence, we will not achieve the turn around for which we pray and long.
Our Link Diocese
Our links with the Diocese of the Highveld continue and I know there have been visitors both ways in the course of the year. We shall look forward to a visit from Bishop David Beetge (who unfortunately had to postpone a planned visit) and he has invited me to lead his diocesan clergy retreat next year.
Looking to next year
Visitation
It has been the custom in the diocese for the Bishop to carry out a formal Visitation every five years. I shall therefore carry out an Episcopal Visitation in 2007 and I shall commission the Archdeacons and Area Deans to assist me with it. During the first six months of next year, the Area Deans and Archdeacons will visit every church in the diocese and inspect the Inventories and meet with the incumbent or priest-in-charge and with the churchwardens. I have simplified some of the customs associated with the Visitation evenings, but have tightened up on inspecting the fabric, the registers and property of the churches.
The purpose of the Visitation is for me to have an over-view of the diocese and to identify issues that need addressing, and to ensure that there is good practice particularly in those areas where there could be litigation. A Visitation tends to look at the material aspects of church life, but our incarnational theology teaches us that buildings are there to provide places of worship for those who are themselves ‘the living stones’. Buildings are sacramental in that they are outwards signs of God’s presence but our church buildings must serve the people and not inhibit our ministry or mission.
Ordination of Women as Priests
Next year will mark the tenth anniversary of the ordination of women to the priesthood in the Church in Wales and it seems appropriate to mark this occasion in the diocese. There will be a day of reflection and prayer for our women priests and there will also be a celebration Eucharist at which I shall preside and at which Sister Una Kroll will preach in the Priory Church of St Mary in Monmouth on Saturday, 6th January at 2.00 p.m. and of course, everyone will be welcome.
Thanks
I want to conclude my address with my thanks to those who have relinquished various posts in the last year or so – to Canon Richard Pain, Fr Patrick Colemen, Fr Mark Lawson-Jones, Mr Malcolm Phillips, Mr Mike Jacob, the Revd Joy Wilkins and Canon Phil Rees, and also the late Canon Michael Beesley. I am most grateful to all of them for all that they have given to the life of the diocese and the work of the church.
I also want to thank Mrs Jean Hackett who stands down at the end of the year as Diocesan President of the Mothers Union. I know that she has done much over the past six years to make known the wide ranging work of the MU in various parts of the world and in the UK and to serve the branches and individual members in this diocese. We owe her a real debt of gratitude.
I am also grateful to those who have taken on new roles – those whom I have already mentioned and also Fr Edward Matthias-Jones who is now our Inter-Faith adviser and who has recently been involved in the multi-ethnic celebrations of the centenary of the Newport Transporter Bridge which is in his parish. I welcome Terry Smith who is our new diocesan representative on CHASE (Church in Wales Action on Sustainability and the Environment) and Kathy Palmer who will take over as Diocesan President of the MU next year.
To my Senior Staff Team, the Chancellor and Registrar, Diocesan Officers and Area Deans I extend my personal thanks for the way in which we have been able to work together and for the way in which we are developing a shared vision for the future of the diocese – and a huge word of thanks to the clergy and lay people in the parishes who I know are facing a challenging time such as the church has not experienced in this country for many years. I can only remind you that we are here to serve you and to do our best to provide the resources that you will need, but in the end we depend on you to be on the front line, and a diocese is only as strong as its parish clergy and people. I greatly value all that you do to serve God’s people and to build the kingdom. I pray for every priest and every parish every day – and I value your prayers as together we take the diocese into the twenty-first century.
And finally, on a personal note you may know that Hazel my secretary has been in hospital following an accident and is likely to be off work for some weeks. She is now at home and needs time and peace to recover. Also Richard Tarran, our Diocesan Secretary is to undergo hip replacement surgery in the not too distant future and will also be out of action for a while and I am sure you will join with me in wishing them well.
My thanks also to those who have arranged our Diocesan Conference today and for those who have brought displays and stalls which I hope you will visit during the lunch break.
And so to him who is able to do immeasurably more all than we can ask or conceive, by the power which is at work among us, to him be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus, throughout all ages. Amen.