multi congregation ministry

Seeing necessity as opportunity is in many ways a virtue.

In the recent edition of the Retired Clergy Association Newsletter there is an article about Multi Congregation Ministry.

It makes interesting reading for a church which is plunging ever deeper, much like the Labour Party,  into an existential crisis.

Like most crises it is both a crisis of the Churches own making and not.

I have to accept my portion of responsibility, after all I was ordained in 1969 I have served as a curate, a vicar, a canon, a diocesan officer, the parishes where I served as priest are all still in existence, but all reflect contemporary reality, with ageing congregations, little or no evident renewal and in the most part linked with other parishes in groups or teams as part of multi congregation ministries.

What I did, I did conscientiously and as far as I was able, sensitively.

I broke bread and word, I visited those who were sick, I ran youth clubs and elder groups, organised bible studies, took school assemblies, ran community initiatives and with my family tried to do justice and serve the Lord.

But all through I had a sense of swimming against the tide.

As with Matthew Arnold and Dover Beach the tide was constantly ebbing.

Numbers of communicants fell steadily.

Confirmations, the great passing out parade of the Church, continued to attract members both junior and adult, but once confirmed they were rarely seen again.

Baptisms continued, as did marriages and funerals, but the sense that alternative rituals were being demanded began to grow until now, as I understand it, marriages are 'civil' hopefully both when they are celebrated and as they are inhabited, funerals are now more commonly conducted by secular ministers, two of my neighbour's died last year and the funerals were conducted by secular ministers.

But the essence of ministry over 45+ Years was steady decline as families abandoned worship for shopping or social or recreational activity on Sunday.

In retirement I find that when I am asked to preside at a Eucharist in local churches in our part of North Cumbria numbers are small and congregations are elderly.

So the question arises what can be done?

Should we follow the advice offered by a character in Ron Ferguson's tale of a Glasgow Church trying to light the Easter Candle outside on a wet and windy morning when a local character came by from a long night out to observe 'Ye'd be better off in yer f***ing beds!"

Or do we try to restart mission in our urban and rural communities or do we start imagining failure as opportunity?

Writing in the RCA Newsletter Malcom Grundy chooses the latter option.

I have been ordained longer than Malcom, by about two minutes, as we knelt next to each other at the ordinations in Sheffield Cathedral in 1969 and we were contemporaries in the Diocese for two years or so.

In his article Malcolm summarises from his book on multi congregation ministry to describe seven ways that such congregations can celebrate as Faith hubs,  Community support networks, A barometer for local opinion, Workshops for liturgy, Shapers of community identity, Springboards for development, Landscapes of transcendence.

Reading the article I was reminded of the most recent service at which I presided.

The high flowing rhetoric of Landscapes of transcendence eluded me I have to say.

This was the base metal of a failed alchemical experiment I tried, lord knows I tried, but for the life of me I could not lift the liturgy or the congregation either with word broken, I watched the words of my sermon on the beheading of John Baptist and Jesus message to John's disciples, linked with the tragedy unfolding in Syria and God's purposes for our lives, float over the heads of the two or three gathered that morning in that place; the sacrament equally failed to captivate as people duly came forward to receive I wondered that Jesus who promised to be in the midst of us seemed so signally to fail to make his presence known amongst us.

My own experience of multi congregations is that they meet when they meet in the place they call their own and rarely meet when the meeting is called for another location or setting, the ubiquitous fifth Sunday when there is a 'parish' gathering rarely gathers more than those who still see the local church as theirs.

Over time there have been many initiatives decades of renewal, evangelism, and outreach now there is to be school of leadership, the leadership of the church will be enriched as women Bishops are ordained and prelatic pomposity is retired but I somehow sense that it is going to far more than the alpha course mindset of the present Archbishop to address the existential crisis facing the church.

Malcom Grundy's seven reasons to be cheerful sound OK in principle, maybe Malcolm wants to be seen as the Ian Dury of the Church?

To paraphrase Ian Dury's great anthem to cheerfulness:

Yes, yes, yes dear

perhaps next year

the pews will fill

and just in case

William Temple, Right Reverend Shirley

Amen, Amen, Amen and Praise

Let's have a bible study, why not bring a buddy

Baptisms in the nuddy

Let's do the Hokey Cokey, fire up the incense smokie

Let's play croquet

The new vicar's a soprano, swap the organ for piano

Drum machino

Reasons to be cheerful, part un

Reasons to be cheerful, part deux

Reasons to be cheerful, part trois

Reasons to be cheerful, Trinity