Tag Archives: ministry

RESTORATION, RENOVATION, RESURRECTION

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Report to the Annual Parochial Church Meeting of Bramhall Parish Church

RESTORATION, renovation and resurrection works have continued in and around our Church buildings in the past year and the works for repointing the Lantern Tower are beginning at the time of our APCM 2012. I am enormously grateful to churchwardens of the recent past, and to those of the present who, together with the PCC and its finance and buildings committee, continue to facilitate works that both maintain and enhance our “house for the Church”. We’ve been very fortunate to have been served by Architects John Prichard,  Chloe Maher and Rebecca Gilbert-Rule.

Ministries generally 

I am also grateful for the ministries of my priest colleagues, Fr David Stoter and the Reverend Ann Hyde. We wish Ann Godspeed as she embarks upon new work at St Martin Low Marple from next month. Sterling service has been given and great works accomplished by Churchwardens Ralph Luxon and Sue Taylor, Ann Walker as PCC Secretary & Graham Knight as Treasurer, our Parochial Church Council, Readers, pastoral team, sidespersons, administrator, sexton, musicians, vergers, florists, gardeners – and by the faithful lives and deeds, in so many areas of church life, of very many members of the church family.

New ministries particularly

Once again I warmly thank and pray God’s continued blessing upon each and all who have responded to Christ’s call to love and service in this place in the past year. (Electoral Roll Officer Frank Bennett reports 470 committed Christians on our Roll at this 2012 Annual Meeting – and 450 persons not on the Roll were present at a St George’s Day service this afternoon, following in the footsteps of 200+ worshippers present this morning. Around 200 names appear on the various lists and rotas for our various ministries of service).

It has been an especial joy to encourage the seeking and discernment processes in the lives of ordinands Paul Deakin (Mirfield College of The Resurrection), Tracy Ward (Diocesan Foundations for Ministry Course and newly appointed Chair of our Pastoral Committee) and Rachael Elizabeth Hunt (hoping to read Theology from September 2012). Their early preaching has been widely appreciated and acclaimed. We’re also delighted to be sponsoring the priestly formation of Franco Asili in the Diocese of Newala, Tanzania.

Newala, Children, Youth & the Arts

Our parish’s link with the Diocese of Newala continues to develop. Part of the development and ministry of our children and youth work, guided and encouraged by leaders Jill Elston, Yvonne Hope and their team, has involved real engagement with the issues facing life in Tanzania, alongside the development of a very popular and delightful puppet ministry.  Association with the Chester Diocesan Arts and Faith network and most recently with artists Wendy Rudd and Stephen Raw have brought blessing, benefit and enormously important vision.

Deeper nearness to God

I continue to thank God for the Resurrection faith, hope and love that are source and sign of warm welcome to those newly born amongst us, whilst also bringing comfort to us all in times of personal illness or other need, and when we have  commended the loved ones who have entered into the deeper fullness of Divine presence. May each of us in this world aspire to a deeper nearness to God – our hope and our inspiration, our joy and our crown.

The wind of God’s Spirit

So: works of restoration, renovation and resurrection have also continued in and around our personal and corporate spiritual lives. The wind of God’s Spirit blows amongst and between us and so we grow and change and live to say: “To God be the glory.”

Eastertide 2012

UP, UP & AWAY!

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Tracy – photo/emmaward

REALLY GREAT first sermon from Tracy Ward here today. We’ve had some inspirational first sermons here in the last year or two and I’m thrilled to bits that we’ve currently 3 aspiring priests at Bramhall Parish Church, and we’re also sponsoring the theological training of an ordinand for the Diocese of Newala, Tanzania.

God’s Spirit calls hearts and souls and minds and bodies today, as ever. Tracy voiced the Word of God’s Spirit with an encouragement to Live Your Life – being exemplars of the kind of in-love-with-life-and-Love-service that can truly be described as a more excellent way. Great sermon. Great eucharistic worship. Great Spirit of God right here in the midst of us. We hear the commission. We’ll act upon the call: the uniting, embracing Body of Christ.

THE CHAORDIC AGE

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VICAR & WARDENS meeting this afternoon, reviewing last year and looking ahead to this year’s Growth Action Planning exercises. I’m blessed with marvellous (ordained and lay) colleagues here. We’re working together on what twenty-first century leadership in the Church is about, acknowledging a need for leadership whilst taking collaborative ministry seriously. There couldn’t be any other kind of ministry in this parish of ever-widening circles. Vicar-on-his-tod would have to be Vicar-with-no-time-for-God. So I’m not juggling precarious finances on my own (though they are precarious, even in this “larger” parish), and mine are not the only pair of ears trying to get attuned to the Divine word for our times.

My friend David Herbert shares my enthusiasm for a similar collaboration between mission minded people on the web, too. I check out his blog, and a dozen or so more, most days to see what friends and colleagues are up to. And I was rewarded over at David’s today by his Blackbirds and Hock from which I’ve nicked the following Dee Hock snippet. I’ll be taking this along to our next Growth Action Planning meeting. Cracking New Year questions as we begin to map out our aspirations for the next year or two. Thanks David. I’ve ordered the book … and we’ll doubtless swap notes …

What is this chasm between how institutions profess to function and how they actually do; between what they claim to do for people and what they actually do to them? What makes people behave in the name of institutions in ways they would never behave in their own name? Church, school, government, business – all the same…. Nothing in nature feels like church or school. There’s no ‘principal’ blackbird pecking away at the rest of the flock. There’s no Super frog telling the others how to croak. There’s no teacher tree lining up the saplings and telling them how to grow….

Nothing in the early years prepared me for the shock of institutions. With school and church came crushing confinement and unrelenting boredom … It was as though everyone began to shed wholeness and humanity at the door, along with coats and overshoes, and, one by one, to cut the threads of connection to the inner spirit, the world of nature and the humanity of others.

Dee Hock – Birth of the Chaordic Age via The Jog.

THE ONLY THING I DON’T RUN

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JUSTIN LEWIS-ANTHONY’S “If you see George Herbert …” has been a great read. A breath of fresh air. A challenge to rethink the living out of priestly ministry: everyone’s priestly ministry. The book tackles some of the dangers inherent in “mythos” – the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves – head on. A parish priest goes every evening to watch the passing-by of a regular train just for the joy of it – “because it’s the only thing I don’t run” … (now, if it’s true, whose fault is that!). This is a challenge to the notion of salvation by incessant striving and I’m recommending it to any and all, clergy and laity alike. 3 Minute Theologian contributes a great deal to clarity of thought and purpose. What’s salvation about, for anyone, anyway?

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts-Schori hit the news headlines at this year’s General Convention as it was understood that she denounced the idea of personal salvation as heresy. “Apparently I wasn’t clear”, writes the bishop in an OPINION column yesterday, the last three paragraphs of which are in my view most helpfully clear … and written at the end of August after several week’s further pondering. Neither knee-jerk reaction nor “incessant striving.”

Salvation depends on love of God and our relationship with Jesus, and we give evidence of our relationship with God in how we treat our neighbors, nearby and far away. Salvation is a gift from God, not something we can earn by our works, but neither is salvation assured by words alone.

Salvation cannot be complete, in an eternal and eschatological sense, until the whole of creation is restored to right relationship. That is what we mean when we proclaim in the catechism that “the mission of the church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ” and that Christian hope is to “live with confidence in newness and fullness of life and to await the coming of Christ in glory and the completion of God’s purpose for the world.” We anticipate the restoration of all creation to right relationship, and we proclaim that Jesus’ life, death and resurrection made that possible in a new way.

At the same time, salvation in the sense of cosmic reconciliation is a mystery. It’s hard to pin down or talk about. It is ultimately the gift of a good and gracious God, not the product of our incessant striving. It is about healing and wholeness and holiness, the fruit of being more than doing. Just like another image we use to speak about restored relationship, the reign of God, salvation is happening all the time, all around us. Where do you see evidence?

via Episcopal Life Online – OPINION.

The train spotting priest is uncomfortable with the notion that he runs everything. Others are uncomfortable because they feel they don’t run enough. This morning I thank God that there’s one thing I know that we humans absolutely DON’T run. And that’s salvation. Thanks for the reminder Bishop Katharine.

SAINTS AND FATHEADS

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Ann Hyde prepares to be ordained Deacon

I DROVE MY NEW COLLEAGUE over to Bishop’s House this morning, and drove home with a full heart, praying a bit, and hoping a lot, for Ann and for all who are preparing to be ordained this weekend. I pray they’ll have a good retreat, one and all. Whatever they hear there will live on in their hearts for the rest of their lives; along with Sunday’s episcopal bidding, already well rehearsed:

In the name of our Lord, we bid you remember the greatness of the trust in which you are now to share: the ministry of Christ himself, who for our sake took the form of a servant. Remember always with thanksgiving that the people among whom you will minister are made in God’s image and likeness. In serving them you are serving Christ himself, before whom you will be called to account. You cannot bear the weight of this calling in your own strength, but only by the grace and power of God. Pray therefore that your heart may daily be enlarged and your understanding of the Scriptures enlightened. Pray earnestly for the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Elation, I remember,  at my Deacon’s Retreat in 1982, alongside a gnawing terror that came upon me suddenly. Neither the years of training, nor the cathedral rehearsal, prepare you for the day: “we bid you remember the greatness of the trust”. Glory be! This is serious, serious stuff. About as serious as serious gets. And seriousness has remained. But so too elation.

Amongst the joys and the sorrows, trials and tribulations, great faith and lost faith, hectic round and R S Thomas’ absence of clamour, a theological twinkle has remained a constant companion:  Geoffrey Paul, on the occasion of his Enthronement as  sixth Bishop of Bradford, in 1981, said

I don’t find faith any easier than any of you, and must echo the words of the epileptic boy’s father in a modern translation: ‘Lord, I believe but not enough.’ I shall want to do everything I can to help you to believe in practice what you say you believe, and I shall rely greatly on your faith and love and prayers to help me in my unbelief, so that by enlarging the area of believing, we may give God room to demonstrate his strange Christalmightiness in our midst.

And then, being a Christian is a matter of belonging to Christ with those who are his, and of course there is no way of belonging to Christ except by belonging, gladly and irrevocably, to all that marvellous and extraordinary ragbag of saints and fatheads who make up the One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.

The Enthronement Sermon, in The Pattern of Faith, an exposition of Christian doctrine by Geoffrey Paul, Churchman Publishing, 1986, page 135

And all who heard him knew that he was a holy bishop, and serious, and humane, and Christ-like and absolutely-hit-the-nail-on-the-head-dead-right. Encouragement there for retreatants tonight. Elated and serious, “remember the greatness” … gladly and irrevocably you’re to be marvellous and extraordinary, in company with all God’s people, both a saint and a fathead. Thank God,  and sing alleluia!