Category Archives: Growth Action Planning

WHAT’S GOOD NEWS?

Posted on by
2

I’M OFF TO A DAY CONFERENCE on “Catholic Evangelism” tomorrow. I’m not wholly sure whether it’s going to be about Catholic Evangelism (capital C, capital E) or catholic evangelism (small c, small e), and I’m rather hoping for the latter … hoping, that is to say, for a catholic evangelism that really is about good news (evangelism) universally applied (catholic), ie, for everybody – no matter their “faith tradition” or lack thereof – everywhere.

I’ve spent a very great deal of my life passionately pondering what exactly constitutes good news, and in particular why having some sort of acknowledged relationship to / with the Source of our lives might matter – to individuals, to communities, to nations, to our world, to the whole created order – some of these whole and healthy, some desperately broken, hurting, and in need of that Divine touch that brings healing. And I’m consistently finding that old definitions of what it means to be Catholic, or Protestant, or Christian, or shades in between all of these, don’t fit all sizes any more, if they ever did.

Christ everywhere …

What constitutes Good News in a ‘catholic’, pluralistic world? Where is an / our anointed Christ to be found? (as I’m sure such a Christ is indeed to be found, anywhere in the world, and across the world’s faith traditions). And the questions are so important to me because as a Christian priest, seeking always to live and learn – to be a disciple – after the pattern of Jesus of Nazareth, I have observed that some kinds of Catholic, some kinds of Protestant, and some kinds of “Christian” plainly do not represent very good news for many people at all. So catholic evangelism must be something quite different, something much more open, something prepared always to be held to account as to the reach of what it purports to be good news. Catholic evangelism will not, I think, be too prescriptive.

Feast of life for all

Catholic evangelism will offer the “feast of life” to people in the “highways and byways” won’t it? Catholic evangelists, personal and corporate, will have dismantled their drawbridges. Catholic evangelism will be less concerned (although not wholly unconcerned) with the Faith of our Fathers and hugely more concerned with Faith Being Received Today. When I’ve asked adults over the past thirty years whether they’d like to come to confirmation classes, so that they can be presented to the bishop, confirmed, and thereafter receive Holy Communion many have politely declined. When I’ve offered the Sacrament of Holy Communion “no questions asked” it has been the case, more frequently than I can count, that the recipient has ended up doing the asking, seeking to confirm a present and acknowledged reality – satisfied hunger – in their lives.

Let’s explore!

And I remember that Jesus was ever ready to go the extra mile for children, too. “Do not try to stop them for the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these”. Catholic evangelists will work hard at becoming more, well … catholic – so that they’re more plainly seen to be, well … “Christian” or “Anointed”. Catholic evangelists will be interested in marginalised multi-tasking-capable women, tax collectors, prodigal sons, unimaginative but very opinionated men, quieter and more imaginative men, too, and in lost sheep. Catholic evangelism won’t chastise the lost sheep for having left the fold in order to “explore”, still less tell the poor creature that God forbids it. Instead truly catholic evangelists (like Jesus of Nazareth) will make the fold larger so that there’s the space for MORE sheep to engage in the business of exploration, to engage, that is to say, in their God-given Life!

The Sound of Silence

One of the biggest growth areas in our parish (liberal Catholic with blurry edges – a bit like my paintings!) – has been a call to shared and silent meditation in the parish church – arriving and departing in companionable silence. No coffee or handing out electoral roll forms afterwards. And numbers in excess of many a church’s entire Sunday congregation have responded to a call – we believe a Divine call – to dwell for a space, together in the “house for the Church”, to wait upon the Word that touches life in silence. (The Word – not words. There’s not “even” a Bible reading). It’s life-changing, say many participants. It’s the only occasion in my month when I’m really and deeply aware of the heartbeat of God, the pulse of life, say others. This silence, this “that’s not very Catholic” but absolutely catholic encounter is breathing into our common life new elements of what it means to bear good news in our lives today, what it means, first and foremost to BE the Body of Christ now on earth, what it means to be religious in the original sense of the word (religare) – reconnected, re-membered. Restored to what we’ve forgotten.

Old assumptions yield

So whether tomorrow proves to be slanted more to Catholic Evangelism, or to catholic evangelism, I hope we’ll be asking the same question – What is Good News? – at least sometimes. Because, remembering Louis MacNeice’s Mutations again:

… old assumptions yield to new sensations.
The Stranger in the Wings is waiting for his cue.
The fuse is always laid to some annunciation …

LIGHT AND SPACE

Posted on by
1

please click this photo for slideshow in separate window

ONE OF THE PARTICULAR JOYS here in St Michael & All Angels Bramhall has been the willingness of the leadership teams to work with me, over the past five years, to create together a gently evolving best use of our beautiful building. Light and space have been keywords in hearts and minds. And the removal of as many “fences” (as Dean Richard Giles famously calls them) as possible. We’ve worked with Chloe Granger and John Prichard, a couple of the best architects in the business. We’ve prayed and experimented. We’ve decluttered and then decluttered some more. We’ve welcomed Cheshire Sinfonia to a new home, and (gloriously noisy and creative) Messy Church is comfortable here too. A new puppet ministry is on the horizon … reaching young and not so young alike – going out into schools, elderly persons residences, hospitals, bereavement ministries and so on. We look to prayerful liturgy – with plenty of silence, together with a warm welcome for every child, woman and man who could ever imagine wanting to come – as probably the most important thing we do.

We keep the church open long enough and often enough to be able to delight in daily “passing prayer”. Restoration works in the Tower space in time for last year’s Centenary celebration have given us an acoustically gorgeous home for one of our choirs, and space for suspended art installations, currently Angels (for said Centenary celebration) but shortly to house, all being well, Wendy Rudd’s stunning wind sails. Christmas here is a joy to behold. Light and space. Light and space. “Wow! Isn’t it fabulous?” is the response of most newcomers. “And gorgeously quiet”. 32 people gathered in a circle around the altar for (monthly) silent Meditation together on Monday evening last. Light and space. Light and space. Our “House for the Church” is teaching us, again and again, to make room for Light and space. Not to fill every blessed corner of our lives with clutter. And in the Light and space we’re finding God, or as a visitor said today, “truly finding Sanctuary”. Thank God for visionary shared leadership. Thank God for Light and space!

please click this photo for slideshow in separate window

GAP COORDINATION

Posted on by
Reply

one of our Growth Action Mind Maps - click to enlarge (pdf)

GOOD MEETING WITH OUR GAP coordinator (Tricia Munn) this morning after an equally good (enthralling, actually) Café Church earlier.

GAP? – well you wouldn’t be the first to wonder: GAP’s for Growth Action Planning - one of many processes at work within the parishes of our Diocese of Chester. And all the jokes about “mind the gap” and “where’s the gap” (and who, and what, and when, and why, and how!) are somehow miraculously absorbed into that process. For mind we must. And sometimes about gaps.

sculpted stillness

LE MODELE Bronze à cire perdue | Françoise Naudet (1928-2008)

Who, what, where, when, why and how? These are important elements in the growth of any work one can think of. And they’re elements that have to be communicated in ways that can be as widely received as possible in order that the requisite resources, materials, personnel and tools might be brought together into the right place at the right time. (I’m thinking, for example, about what might be needed by a portrait painter, or a sculptor, or a teacher, and where the necessary resources come from, and how, and by whom, they’re all made and marshalled in the first place). Growth Action Planning is, for us, a good mind mapping exercise because our business engages with “the mind of God”, and with “the mind of the Church”, and with “the mind of God’s people – humanity” and each and all of these need somehow to be carefully and faith-fully synthesised.

Virtually all the negative news going into or out of church life can and should be turned into something positive. That’s what we mean by redemption and – I dare to imagine – what God might mean by regeneration (baptism) or re-creation (potter, clay …)

I love the clock face above the entrance door of Christ Church Claughton-cum-Grange which is decorated with the words “Redeeming the Time”. That’s what Jesus’ whole life was / is – a bridge between an “old order having passed away” and a “new kingdom already upon us” – a world order that seeks to promote whatever it takes, whatever the context, for God’s entire Creation to live in, to experience, “the peace of God that passeth all understanding”.

Seeking clarity in our planning and in our communications is a wholly good idea. And it’s often in the pursuit of the detail that we discover that there’s a whole lot going on, much of it that we hadn’t taken account of before, and almost all of it having had its roots nurtured long (really long!) years before our arrival. And therein lies encouragement, and a sense of being caught up in a vision bigger than ourselves.

Let the mind of Christ dwell in your richly. Colossians 3.16

The GAP programme seeks to enunciate those elements of the mind (or the Word) of Christ that are separately and corporately to be discovered in the hearts, souls, minds and bodies of humanity in its entirety. These elements incorporate questions as well as answers, discipling (learning) as well as teaching, discovering as well as celebrating what is, or has been. For there’s neither teacher nor church upon the face of the earth that has nothing yet to learn. And the feast is free: alimentos gratis!

Growth Action Planning can leave us all a bit out of breath sometimes, but that’s how it should be. We’re reminded by it that adamah, the dust from which we are formed, is entirely reliant upon God for the ruach, the breath of life itself. And we can lean on that fact. For just as it is with my Dad, so it is with God: both remind me “I’ve been here before you”.

My friend Fr Roger Clarke will smile if he reads my umpteenth quotation of one of his favourite poets, and mine; (which, incidentally and to our delight, Bishop Robert Atwell quoted at Roger’s Induction at Ringway!) from R S Thomas’ Pilgrimages 

He is such a fast God, always before us and leaving as we arrive.

GAP has to be about energising the pursuit, then – and some mind-mapping!

ARK BUILDING

Posted on by
Reply

Once in a thousand year floods in Cumbria: November 2009

BLOGGING JUST FLOWS SOMETIMES. At other times it’s floods of words that overwhelm. It’s as well that God, the Word we know in Jesus, is content to keep silence alongside us.  It’s the silence, sometimes, that assures us of the presence of a saviour. It’s in the silent spaces in our worship here that I most fully sense a redeemer.

And – God help us – we need a saviour. We need redeeming. So much of the Church’s conversation in recent months has embarrassed me. Who’s in and who’s out? Who’ll “stay” and who’ll “go”? “Who is on the Lord’s side?” – and who’s not. When may we turn a blind eye to persecution and when not.

I know I’m not alone in having wondered whether anyone in the Church reckons to take gospel – good news – seriously anymore? In the contemporary Church it’s all too easy to find oneself marooned on an island in the midst of an ocean of cruel words. Where’s the gospel to be seen and heard? Where’s the good news for all humankind?

Jesus spoke and still speaks of good news for everyone: whatever the colour of their skin, or the name of their place of birth. Male, female, straight or gay. From East and West, from North and South, people matter before all else to Jesus. His religious certainties were bound up, every one of them, in the confident proclamation that God’s love must prevail.

What will help to grow God’s kingdom of peace? Running dangerously close to adopting mere modern management language our parish and diocese are currently engaged in a process called Growth Action Planning - or GAP for short. Other parishes and other dioceses are engaged in similar exercises that they’re calling Mission Action Planning – or MAP.

GAP or MAP amount to the same thing. Where’s the gap between what we are and what we’re called to be,  and is there a map that’ll show us the way out of the ecclesiastical impasse the Church at home and abroad seems currently to be embedded in. God lives in his people, in the whole of Creation.

How might we clear the way in order that we may the more readily recognise divine presence in one another? How may we engage in the kind of Growth Action Planning that Jesus led the way in amongst his contemporaries on earth 2000 years ago? How may we “give God worth” (worship) in one another instead of being an embarrassment – perpetually washing dirty linen before a by now largely uninterested public?

Oddly, and not for the first time, the gap is seen to be closing in parts of Cumbria this week. There’s not much talk in Workington or in Cockermouth today about “the gay debate” or women’s ordination. Not much talk about getting “bums on pews” or the rights and wrongs of a million religious views. But there is something of a Communion to be celebrated. Food and drink – “bread and wine” are being shared by and amongst a people whose priorities have been changed.

Christmas shopping has given way to clean-up operations. Who’s in and who’s out are non-issues. Flooded by words as well as by water there’s a sense of the fragility of human life. The Christmas Tree stands battered and without lights. Modern day Noah stands battered but illuminated from within. In a police officer’s life given up for the lives of others, in the fearful bravery and selflessness of dozens and dozens of “ordinary” human redeemers, olive branches are brought home to the ark builders.

Ways will be found to rebuild bridges … and in more ways and in more times and places than just one. Here is Love. Here is gospel. Here are redeemers. Here are people BEING what Jesus Christ inspired his disciples to be. Mind the GAP. Dangerous gaps are to be found wherever we question “who’s in and who’s out”, wherever we’re too quick to denounce the lives of others as “the work of Satan”.

If there’s not room in the loving embrace of God for all of us there’s no room in the divine embrace for any of us. As it is, by divine providence, any who need to eat of bread or to drink from a cup, any, that is to say who are alive and human in this world, have access to Communion. That’s God’s answer. That’s God’s Growth Action Planning … something plainly recognisable in many faith traditions. Something plainly recognisable in the marvellous and extraordinary gift of human life generally. And it closes the gap.

THE GAP

Posted on by
Reply

P1000451

I’m just back from one of our diocesan GAP (Growth Action Planning) Roadshows. Stifling heat left me day dreaming of the splash pool in Bishop Alan Wilson’s garden.

Lo and behold, the bishop’s posting today was the splash pool I needed. Perhaps those who were with me tonight may like to read: Why ordination? Why today? Thanks Bishop Alan …