Winter's Tale: the 'best years' of my life

David Winter gave up his careeer as head of religious broadcasting for the BBC and moved to the Oxford Diocese to spend five years as Director of Evangelism and Priest in charge of Ducklington. These edited extracts from Winter’s Tale covers the period which David describes as ‘by some distance the best of my working life’.

I have had broadly three careers: a short one in teaching, in my twenties; a slightly longer one in print journalism, in my thirties, and a third one in broadcasting, starting in the year when I became 40. Now in the year that I reached 60, I was gong to embark on a fourth ‘career’, if one can call it that, as a parish priest.

To be frank, I knew very little about parochial ministry outside the metropolitan setting when I arrived in Oxfordshire and the learning curve needed to be steep.

In London, it was perfectly reasonable to ask someone ‘Do you belong to a church?’, and they would understand what you meant. I think that simple question would have bewildered many a village resident. ‘That’s our church,’ they would say, not meaning they went to it, or particularly shared its beliefs, but that it was theirs. Mission was more a matter, in a phrase of Cardinal Hume’s, of ‘evangelizing the baptized.’

Part of that work was fulfilled in Ducklington by the ‘Tiny Tots’ service, which we had inherited as a thriving weekly event. It happened on Friday afternoons at 2pm, was led by an enthusiastic group of Christian women, and aimed very clearly at the pre-school age group. It lasted no more than 20 minutes and was followed by ‘drinks and biscuits’ for the children and the adults who had brought them. It was our staple follow-up to baptism and a wonderful way of introducing the mothers to the life and worship of the church.

The Mothers Union was almost entirely Christine’s idea, as was the even more strategic one of a ‘pastoral team’. As the congregation grew, there were more and more calls on our time. People asked us to visit them, there were church members or other parishioners in hospital, there were elderly people who couldn’t get out, and dozens of other opportunities for friendly caring contacts – but never enough time.

Ducklington church was, in fact, a joy. I often said to people that these years were by some distance the best of my working life. At 60, I had started a new life and I suppose something of the freshness and thrill of that communicated to the congregation. For a year or two Christine and I ran the services more or less on our own, but slowly a ministry team came into being, and by the time we left that team was strong enough to carry the church through what might otherwise have been a difficult interregnum. By then we had three readers - Christine, Judith and Dave - and an NSM curate, Bob, who had been ordained the previous year, having started his training soon after we arrived.

Coping with two jobs

The one real drawback in Ducklington was the dual ministry in which I was involved, though both the parochial and the Diocesan tasks could be mutually nourishing. I certainly felt that my experience as a rural incumbent gave me some degree of credibility in the country chapters and synods.

The Oxford Diocese is vast, both in terms of its geography - Ducklington was over 60 miles from Slough on the map and about a million miles apart culturally - but also in numbers of clergy and parishes. In the course of five years I visited over 200 churches, but that left 400 or so unvisited.

The Diocese was - and still is - blessed with a splendid and varied team of area bishops, acting as regional deputies for the scholarly and poetic Diocesan Bishop. In that sense, it is a well-managed Diocese with clear spiritual priorities. But in the sense of a location of church life, ‘Oxford’ is an awkward historical misfit, too big to feel one thing, too varied to feel a common pulse, too diffuse to have a sense of Christian community.

My arrival in the Diocese coincided with the start of the Decade of Evangelism, an ecumenical initiative to encourage the churches to share the Christian message with as many people as possible in the last ten years of the millennium.

The whole idea was ridiculed in some circles from the very start - ‘doomed to failure’ was the verdict of Clifford Longley in The Times - but there are worse initiatives than to tell Christians to do precisely what Jesus had told them to do: ‘make disciples’, ‘be my witnesses’, ‘preach the gospel to the whole creation.’

It was frequently alleged that the churches couldn’t even agree about their basic message, but in my experience that simply wasn’t true. I conducted an experiment with nearly 2000 church people in those 200 churches, but also including several groups of clergy and one of bishops, inviting them to summarise in not more than 26 words what they felt was the core of the Christian message. Put together and analysed, they did not vary greatly, mostly emerging somewhere along these lines: ‘In his love for the world, God sent his Son Jesus to forgive sins, offer a new life and bring us into the kingdom of heaven.’

Little islands of contact

What seems to ‘work’, in terms of growing churches, is the day-by-day shared involvement of the congregation in the life of the community, backed up by effective and well-run little ‘islands’ of contact - toddlers’ activities, lunch clubs, men’s discussion groups, healing services, bereavement support. Then, of course, the worship offered on Sundays must be such that people who venture to turn up feel welcome and involved, rather than odd and isolated. It also helps, needless to say, if that worship has a genuine air of the divine about it: not simply well-presented entertainment or polished liturgy, but a genuine touch of God.

Three times, in my short parochial experience, people have simply ‘turned up’ in church and sat through what must have been a totally unfamiliar service, yet felt the reality of the presence of God in such a way that they embarked on a life-changing journey of faith. We can work towards that, but only the Spirit of God, I believe, can actually bring it about.

A survey run on the back of some BBC research in 1981 showed that 60% of non-churchgoers had attended church at some time in the past, and that 70 per cent of ‘occasional churchgoers’ were more regular attenders in the past.

Losing the church habit

The reason people gave for this lapse in church attendance were fascinating. Less than ten per cent stopped attending ‘because they did not believe in Christianity any more’. In contrast, three times as many stopped attending ‘because they had too much to do’ and 28% because they had ‘lost the habit’.

Simply in terms of church growth (and I accept that that is not the same as evangelization), if the churches could somehow stem this haemorrhage of members, reversing habits, altering people’s priorities of time, church attendance would be transformed.

It seemed that the key to it all was to make church worship and fellowship a relevant, live and important part of people’s lives. That is the ‘change of habit’ which is really a conversion of life, and nothing less will produce lasting change in our churches.

There will be times when people ‘crowd into the kingdom’, and times when the way seems narrow with few travelling companions. It is wonderful when we can see people responding to God’s god news, but the good news remains true valid and unalterable whether or not they do.

However, in my experience it is that very ‘totality’ of faith that tends to frighten off the casual, agnostic, would-be believer. Consequently they come just so far – to the family service, to harvest festival, to the midnight eucharist at Christmas, perhaps – but hold back at the point of real commitment.

Good ministry cherishes the grain of faith ‘like a mustard seed’ and the ‘smoking flax’ of a spiritual longing. But always with the intention that the former will spring into growth and the latter will burst into flame.

But that ministry has to be carried out sensitively, and is completely invalidated if words such as ‘parasites’ or ‘hangers-on’ are employed. We are not calling people to become religious fanatics, to abandon their friends, hobbies or pastimes, provided they are, by the grace of God, prepared to turn from their sins, whether ‘little or large’. We are inviting them to believe in a Saviour who can transform, not demolish, the ordinary bits and pieces of everyday life. The Church of Jesus Christ does not exist to limit life, but to offer it ‘in all its fullness.’ That, in summary, was the position I took in my work in the Diocese, and to a great extent it was the approach I employed during my five and a half years in Ducklington.