Bishop's Visitation Charge 2007
Ministry & Mission
Our challenge is one of ministry and mission and it is to these two areas that I want to address the rest of this Charge, and I am going to begin with mission because only when we can identify our task of mission in the twenty-first century can we discover what ministry we need to carry it out.
When I was ordained a priest at the age of 24, the preacher began his sermon by saying, ‘I am told that Adam said to Eve, ‘My dear, we live in a time of change’. The world of course is ever changing, and in many ways the changes in society are often reflected in the life of the church although we tend to be a conservative institution (with a small c) and take our time to embrace such changes. [I am thinking of such issues as the re-marriage of divorced people and the role of women in ministry]. I think it is right that on some issues, the church should take its time to reflect, to listen, and to do its theology. There is a valid warning, that those who, too quickly, embrace the spirit of this age, will be widows in the next!
Nevertheless, there are I believe, some changes in which the church should be in the forefront, such as Fairtrade and tackling climate change because these are issues of justice and stewardship which lie at the very heart of what we are about – and sometimes it is those who would not claim to be Christians who shame us into action. I want to ask those churches that have not become Fairtrade parishes what on earth they think they are about. Jesus said, ‘Set your mind on God’s kingdom and his justice before everything else, and all the rest will come to you as well’. (NEB Mt 6:33). Justice for the poor should be a priority for Christians.
The Church today is vastly different from the Church into which I was ordained 35 years ago. In those days we were told that if you prayed, visited and cared for your people, and if you offered well-prepared liturgy and sermons, you would have them queuing in the aisles. Today, we can no longer sit back and wait for people to come to us; we have to take the church to them. We have tended to have an attitude that said, ‘we do what we do in this particular way, so take it or leave it’ – and they have decided to leave it. Unless what we do in church is for a missionary congregation we shall have the same fate as those others churches in Wales that failed to adapt and change although I doubt that we need any more carpet warehouses!
The other day, I was at a meeting of the University governors and an academic sitting next to me asked, ‘How is spirituality doing?’ I was able to say, ‘Great, there is a huge thirst for spirituality and people searching for that other dimension that gives meaning to life’. I was grateful that she had not asked me how organised religion was doing.
The truth is that people have not stopped being spiritual, but that they no longer look to the church to satisfy their spiritual hunger, and New Age practices and home-spun philosophies have taken over. If you want to know what people believe about the meaning and purpose of life, see what they put on grave stones today. There are messages about ‘going home,’ being ‘re-united’ or being ‘at peace’. The One who has made it possible for them to go home, or He who is our peace is rarely mentioned because they are so far removed from the core message of the gospel, that God in Christ has done for us what we could not do for ourselves.
How then can we meet the challenge of change with all the resources that are available to us? The answer of course is that we can’t unless we are prepared to be disturbed. The Church is renewed by disturbance. Church history bears this out. Just look at the Desert Father or St Francis or Luther or Desmond Tutu. The Holy Spirit comes to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable, so we have to be prepared to leave our comfort zones and to explore new ways of ministry and mission.