And as Cardinal Czerny put it to me on my recent visit to Rome
that the big theme of Pope Francis' ministry is the defeat of
abstraction, or as the Pope puts it in his encyclical on fraternity,
Fratelli Tutti, “Goodness, together with love, justice and solidarity,
are not achieved once and for all; they are to be realised each day.”
It is what we do, not what we talk about. And we don’t stop doing it
because we think our small offerings are insufficient. We are indeed a
church of mustard seeds and widow’s mites. But also, a church of yeast,
where small things can have a huge impact.
Therefore, for us in
the Church of England and in this Synod, we fulfil our vocation to be
the church for everyone everywhere by clearly affirming the centrality
of the local, meaning that bunch of women and men, etc. etc. who are
focused on actualising and making real and available the fruits of the
gospel, a Jesus shaped life. And we trust that God, the Lord of the
harvest, will take what we offer and use it and multiply it.
Moreover,
we celebrate and marvel at the presence of the church in every village,
every town, every city, and commit ourselves to revitalise every parish
so that there can be a viable flourishing presence into the future.
We
call this growing healthy churches. It is something we all need to be
committed to. We want every church to flourish. That’s what healthy
things do. But it will flow, primarily, from the renewal of our own
lives in Christ and from a recognition of the need that is before us and
our receiving the vocation to serve our communities and share the
gospel. I will say more about this in a minute, for a new missionary
situation requires a new missionary mindset. But first of all, back to
this key word ‘revitalise’, which is referenced in the Church of
England’s bold outcomes for the 2020s and also in the work we are
developing in this diocese as part of Living Christ’s Story.
Under
the Growing Healthy Churches heading, Revitalise as a project will be
working with small cohorts of parishes and benefices, looking first to
those places where there is potential to move into viability and greater
flourishing quickly, since this will be not only good for the
individual parish, but for the deanery as a whole. And in making choices
about which parishes we invest in first, we are, of course working with
area and lay deans, and your own carefully formulated deanery plans.
This
is a really exciting development. It is only just beginning. And of
course we have much to learn. But the parishes working together on this
will themselves form small learning communities. And in due course, this
learning will be shared across the diocese, and new cohorts of parishes
will be included in the project.
Let’s be clear; there will not
be ‘one size fits all’. We are a very diverse diocese, and different
approaches will suit different contexts. But in all of this, the core
principles of Living Christ’s Story: Becoming more like Christ; Reaching
people we currently don't reach; and Growing churches of missionary
disciples that are younger and more diverse will be central.
This
will mean change. But it will be change that is continuous with our
core vocation and purpose. We dare to hope that we will see the diocese
move into growth and to do this we will dare to try new things, learning
from the experiences of other dioceses, and using the resources of some
of our stronger churches to help those who are struggling, particularly
through church planting where that is appropriate. But also focusing on
ministry with children, young people, families and schools as a way of
revitalising the whole parish. There are inspiring examples of this
happening in other parts of the country. We need to learn from this.
We
need a new missionary mindset. We need to be mindful that the parish
system we have inherited and that we cherish, was the fruit of focused
missionary endeavour, where the church understood itself to be the ‘sent
out’ people of God, nurturing strong centres of prayer and resourcing,
but giving this away for the greater glory of God and in order to share
the gospel with everyone. As Bishop John helpfully pointed out to me,
when I shared a draft of this address with him, “Parish is a mission
word since it speaks about those around the house as the focus of those
in the house, literally ‘para oikos’”. This upends the view of parish as
an internally focused word, especially when expressed as parochialism.
It is the opposite. It is about our concern for our neighbour and for
the whole community.
What then developed was the system we have
inherited, a parish system to serve a whole a nation. When you ask an
Anglican minister how many people they serve, they won't tell you the
number of the Sunday congregation, but the population of the parish. We
set the bar of our expectations high.
We live in a new missionary
situation, where most people grow up knowing very little about the
Christian faith and having virtually no experience of the church. There
is much we can learn from the first evangelisation of England, and
particularly from the Anglo-Saxon Saints of the North, and the movements
of mission that shaped our land and gave birth to the church that we’ve
ingerited. Their flexibility and sacrificial approach to mission; the
way they established intentional communities of prayer; and their
willingness to be vulnerable and to go to people where they were
inspires us today.
In this way, we will renew our parishes and
therefore renew our diocese. But there will be a focused attention on
the local; on service to the local community; and on evangelism, sharing
with others the good news we have received and therefore paying
attention to our own receiving. Hence the really important work on
Rhythm of Life that we have introduced this year. We then learn to share
the story of Christ that we have been called to live.
I believe
this can lead to growth. More churches in the York diocese, not less.
But it will be a mixed ecology of Church, where, within our ministry
units, we will find ways of revitalising our parishes, but often we will
find the best way of doing this is by also focusing on new initiatives,
and new communities of faith that reach out to new groups of people.
We
will pay attention to the whole ecosystem of the Church. This will
include chaplaincies as well, a vital part of how we reach into and
serve networks as well as neighbourhoods. But we will do all this so
that the local can thrive. And the local means that bunch of women and
men who have been so impacted by the life, death and resurrection of
Jesus, that in the transforming and refining power of his Spirit, they
have formed a community centred on him and are trying to change the
world. This church in which we are a part is the hope of the world. It
is not an abstract proposition or a set of ideas. It is real women and
men in real places serving real needs. It is what we are called to and
it is actually what every single item on our Synod agenda is working
towards.
