Episcopal Visitation Address 2004
The Dorchester Area in 2009
One of the things I said in my address earlier in the year was that, as incumbents, we often overestimate what we can achieve in one year and underestimate what we can achieve in five. That was easy enough to say but it then set me thinking. Here we are churchwardens and clergy alike, committing ourselves to ‘Shaping the Future Together’. Here we are longing ‘to create caring, sustainable and growing Christian presence in every part of the Diocese of Oxford’. But what will that mean in practice beyond the words? What should we be working and praying for? What does ‘caring, sustainable and growing Christian presence’ look like? Can it be quantified in any way? Will we be able to see that it is happening if it is?
With those questions in mind I went back again to Acts 2 – to what was clearly a vibrant, growing church – warts and all. I asked myself what were the sources of that vitality and how can we foster them in our own generation? What I am going to do tonight is to talk more specifically about the sorts of things I long to see growing and developing over the next five years here in the Dorchester Area. Some of them will apply more than others to your own parishes, benefices, teams and deaneries and the last thing I would want you to do is to go way tonight burdened with what feels like another set of demands.
Rather these are things which I hope you will find the time to continue to discuss and to work at in your PCCs, Benefice and Team Councils as a way of making concrete the Diocesan Strategy - remembering that there is nothing more important in our institutional life than growing into the sort of Church God longs for us to be.
So what then are some of the identifiable marks of a growing Church both here in Acts and elsewhere in the New Testament?
1 An Expectant Church – I am not sure what the Apostles were expecting to happen as they met together between Easter and Pentecost. Certainly there is not all that much evidence of a sense of excitement or expectation but contrast that to the period after Pentecost where, with a few exceptions, they are looking to see God at work in new ways.
It was William Carey, that great missionary of the 19th Century, who said
“Expect great things from God
Attempt great things for God.”
It is no bad thing to seek in our own church’s life to foster that sense of expectation. If you want to know if it is there look at the balance of what happens in your Church Councils. Do an analysis of your agendas and the times spent on different issues. Where questions of maintenance dominate to the exclusion of questions of mission then expectation is probably at quite a low ebb. And if you want to know if it is growing then analyse them again in three years’ time. See what they tell you about what you are expecting God to be doing in your midst. And, if in doubt, always move the creative items up an agenda so that you look at them when your minds are at their freshest.
2 A Worshipping Church – One of the major changes in church-going over the past fifty years is that some of the core members rather than going twice a Sunday now go twice a month – or even less. Some of the reasons are obvious. The pressure on weekends is growing all the time. Sunday is no longer shaped in the way it used to be. But, sadly, it is also true that quite a lot of our worship is not very stimulating or satisfying. Much is, but, for a number, Sunday services are more about duty than joy.
All of which lays a tremendous responsibility on all of us to pray for our worship Sunday by Sunday. Clearly the clergy and other ministers have a particular role but all of us have a part to play. You do not need large congregations, fine choirs or great buildings to foster a sense of worship. You do need people who are wanting to meet with God whether in the familiar or the unfamiliar, the noisy or the quiet.
At that point may I do another plug for ‘Celebration Praise!’ on October 23 at the Marlborough School, Woodstock. It promises to be a wonderful day for experiencing and exploring a variety of styles and traditions of worship. There will be keynote addresses both by Jonathan Kerry, a leading Methodist, and Colin Bennetts, Bishop of Coventry and formerly Bishop of Buckingham together with over thirty workshops. But, like our day on prayer last year, it is not an end in itself. Its purpose is to encourage the growth of worship both in our own lives and in those of our parishes, and I suspect we will know if it has helped if people are talking with increasing enthusiasm about what their worship means to them Sunday by Sunday.
A third mark of a growing Church is that it is
3 A Praying Church – This, of course, is closely linked to worship as prayer springs from an encounter with God. In that context I am very encouraged by the way in which prayer is moving up the agenda in many places and in many people’s lives at present. The growth of Retreats and Quiet Days. The interest in developing churches as ‘Small Pilgrim Places’. The wide variety of courses on offer this Lent. The increase in the numbers of people getting involved in Spiritual Direction. All of these are very healthy signs indeed. How prayer will be expressed in different traditions will vary greatly. That it should be is central to the life of any church. Again as churchwardens and clergy it is well worth stopping every now and again to see what is happening. If by 2009 there was even greater depth to our prayer and worship and in our levels of expectancy then there is no doubt in my mind that we would be growing as a Church very significantly indeed.
But if those are some of the foundations of a growing church, what about some of its other aspects.
In recent work looking at why people join churches of all denominations a number of factors emerged. Some were fairly predictable – the youth and children’s work, the personality of the minister, the relevance of its teaching and the style of its worship. Less predictable, perhaps, were the two that appeared at the top of the list. Again both are marks of a growing church. For a growing church is
4 A Serving and Caring Church – Serving and Caring for the communities of which we are a part is something central to the Church of England and indeed to Christianity itself. I am well aware that in some parishes, particularly in our villages, that care is exercised in such a way that people see it as good-neighbourliness rather than the church’s work and maybe that is no bad thing. But one result of that and, even more of our tendency to make our faith and even our church-going a rather private affair is to become invisible in our communities. It can, of course, be argued that that is how it should be - the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing -but there is a knock-on effect. The invisible is deemed to be the irrelevant. Now I am not arguing for a large-scale publicity campaign but I do think we can make ourselves better known for what we are already doing and also keep up our wonderful tradition of seeking to find new ways of serving our communities. Certainly this generation responds warmly to that.
In that context a number of people said that it would help to know what others are doing and to help with this we shall be developing better systems of email communication in the autumn. My hope is that this will foster much more strongly a spirit of cooperation and collaboration in the Area. All too often we can spend too much time reinventing the wheel rather than learning from one and another in a spirit of mutual respect for the benefit of all.
Again the particulars of what we are doing are less important than the fact that we are making them a priority and, by 2009, I would long that through all that we do that the Church is recognised far more widely as the power for good that it is within the Community.
But there was something else that came out still higher in that survey. It was the significance of being
5 A Welcoming Church – This is something all of us can work at and the good news is that, in financial terms, it costs little or nothing. As many of us will know from visiting other churches the initial welcome we receive is of enormous importance as is all that happens beyond that. If friendships form then people stay in churches – but, if they don’t, they won’t. In this context it is vital to get the opinions of newcomers – better still to vote some of them on to your PCCs so that you begin to see your church through their eyes. How good it would be if every DCC and PCC had people serving on it who had been coming to that Church for less than five years. And if that PCC regularly reviewed its plans for welcoming the newcomer.
But undergirding all of this what matters is the quality of the leadership of a Church and its sense of purpose and vision. Even if there is plenty of fuzziness round the edges a sense of direction and purpose is crucial. For a growing church will be
6 A learning and purposeful Church – One where people together, not just the Vicar, have caught a vision and are wanting to pursue it. Within that ministry teams have a vital part to play and I am convinced that we need many more licensed and authorised, lay and ordained, ministers for the future. To achieve this we need, I think, at least 150 more men and women licensed, authorised or in training by 2009, not just to keep the show on the road as the number of stipendiaries drifts downwards but, more more importantly, to provide the opportunity for the development of real collaborative ministry in every place. Already we are seeing some encouraging signs but there are still too many parishes where the development of leadership and vision is being squeezed out by the need to do too many things.
Well, you may have noticed that I have not talked about the two things people tend to think of in connection with a ‘growing’ church – numbers and finance. Both I believe are important but both need to be set in this wider context because they are not ends in themselves.
Looking around the Area there are plenty of churches that are growing numerically at present from all shapes of churchmanship, social backgrounds, age groups and traditions. I long that we should see our Electoral Rolls and the figures for Usual Sunday Attendance, weekday services and baptisms and confirmations all rising. But chasing numbers for their own sake is a fool’s errand. How much more important it is to seek to be a Church that is shaped in such a way as to provide a good soil for all the kinds of the growth I have outlined above.
And the same goes for money. Viewing the share as a tax or even as a sum to pay for what we receive, if that there is all there is to it, is a dead end. God loves a cheerful giver. Someone who has learnt to reflect his extravagant generosity. And when we begin to reflect that in our own lives we discover that, far from losing out, we are the winners. And yes, it would be wonderful if we took our giving more seriously. If we gave, as General Synod recommended, 5% of our income to the Church and a further 5% elsewhere as well. And yes, it would transform our lives as churches in the Dorchester Area as we would cease to have financial problems. But all that would be as nothing compared to the spiritual benefits that would flow to congregations and individuals alike. That is why a spirit of generosity is so important.
As I say you have heard much of this before but I cannot over-stress the importance of your role as churchwardens and clergy within it. In a few moments’ time many of you here will take on responsibility as churchwardens for the coming year. May I say at this point how grateful I am for your willingness to do so. Yours is often the job of unsung heroines and heroes. It is a calling which is, quite properly, associated with the care of buildings, finances and the ordering of the churches’ life. Many of you, I know, are already playing a vital role in your ministry teams whether at parish or benefice level. Taking forward this Strategy is part of that whole, for this is a task we are engaged in together. Use the marks of a growing church I have just outlined to reflect further on the life of your own parish or benefice. In our thinking and praying as we look ahead to the next five years, seeking to create caring, sustainable and growing Christian presence in every part of the Diocese of Oxford let us seek to be even more the Church God longs for us to be – expectant, worshipping, prayerful, caring, serving, welcoming, learning, purposeful and generous – and may God bless you in all you seek to do for Him.
The Rt Revd Colin Fletcher OBE
Bishop of Dorchester
May, 2004
