Presidential Address to Diocesan Synod by the Bishop of Ely
19th March 2011
In the name of the Living God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
I am so grateful to all of you for praying me through the Installation on 5th March, whether you could be physically present or not. I have been in Ely now for nearly two months; but it is a source of deep joy to have been fully launched. Some say never work with children or animals. In defiance of this, I was prepared for my installation by children of the Diocese who delivered me right to the door. The doves were rather reluctant to be released, perhaps because they sensed the presence of a hawk and large seagulls. Those of you in the Cathedral I hope could see clearly from my face that there is no reluctance on my part to be released among you. Indeed, someone said in a rather puzzled tone that I appeared to be enjoying myself. I assumed that was what I was supposed to be doing,
A sign of my being fully-fledged is that I am allowed to preside over this my first meeting of the Ely Diocesan Synod. I have had time to begin to get to know people and communities within the Diocese. As I have begun to pick up the stories of our common life, a theme from the vacancy is thanksgiving for the leadership of the Senior Staff Team. I want to take the opportunity this morning to add my heartfelt thanks to yours. Most particularly, I should like us together to take a moment to thank God for having given us Bishop David. David, please come and join me here. I should like to express my own profound thanks and appreciation of your leadership during the episcopal vacancy and my enthusiasm about continuing to work with you and Jean in the years ahead. As a small mark of recognition, I ask you to receive this gift for both of you. I am sure that everyone here joins their thanks with mine.
It feels like we are living in a period of great upheaval and threat. Unemployment in this country is at its highest for seventeen years and the cuts have not really begun to bite yet. We are witnesses to a great break-out of courageous hope for democratic change in parts of the Arab world; and we are seeing both the backlash of tyranny and the toxic confrontation of Sunni and Shi’a. Prince William has been representing the Queen and all of us in showing solidarity with the people of Christchurch, New Zealand after their earthquake. None of us could fail to be awed by the violence of nature seen in the earthquake and tsunami which have devastated the lives of millions of people in Japan. TV pictures and reports bring close to us the mixture of public and deeply intimate suffering.
Similar evidence of catastrophe and tyranny provided the backdrop against which the ministry of Jesus and his disciples was defined. In the late prophetic literature like Daniel and threaded through the New Testament itself, we see the mixture of the prophetic call to repentance and new life and the apocalyptic expectation of fulfilment in the end of things. The recovery of Scripture in the Reformation provided the driving motive of the reformers as they saw God moving and shaping the future, even in the midst of the violence of the Wars of Religion. The end could not be far off. Building the kingdom of the saints would not wait. During the Second Civil War, soldiers from Cromwell’s New Model Army came across a simple shepherd. He asked them, if they were soldiers, which captain they followed. They told him, Jesus Christ. He is alleged to have said that he did not know that Christ had come down from his throne just for them. That is exactly the point, though. In the midst of so much tragedy and the mystery of suffering, we do not peddle easy answers. What we offer is the answer which means everything to us which is the redemptive suffering of Christ on the cross. The whole of creation is groaning for fulfilment, for the coming freedom of the children of God. We should never invite suffering upon ourselves or others; but we know that for so many of us an experience of suffering can strip away our pretences and self-reliance and discover a new readiness to trust God. We were thrust to our knees but find that we are raised up by Christ. I was hearing about a woman this week who knew what it was to get to rock bottom; but she also found that the rock at the bottom was God.
This does not let us off the hook in relation to the world’s need. The circle around St John the Evangelist was very caught up in the crisis of the times and captivated by visions of the completion of all things. But they were also very alert to what was actually going on in real communities, even down to the furring up of the springs at Laodicea. Most of all, their watchword was love. There has been much discussion about the nature of Japanese society in the light of the current crisis. We have traditionally thought of Japan as a close-knit society where nearly all the world’s really old people lived because they were at the heart of close families and communities. Many Japanese people feel that they have been complacent about this and that it might no longer actually be true. The real challenge for them is how they re-imagine civil society for the future. I have found it shocking to read and hear financial commentators say that the first priority is to get the economy kick-started and not add to debt. Surely, the priority is to help people whose lives have been devastated literally to rebuild their lives as communities and families. This is what real investment is for. The root of our word ‘economy’ is the Greek word for managing a household. It is about the ordered and wise management of resources on behalf of a nation or any group. We may use disembodied concepts like ‘free trade’ or ‘global markets’; but it all has to be traced back to the scale of embodied human beings who use the resources which God’s abundance provides.
In our Christian tradition, one person who embodies the humble and skilled use of this abundance, the one who, with Mary, provided the household in which Jesus thrived, is St Joseph – often remembered today as St Joseph the Worker. Here is a model of a person whose settled hopes are turned upside down by God and who obeys the will of God and accepts charge of the Saviour against his own interest. We see the settled character who goes on the run with his family; and the puzzled and proud artisan who watches his son take on the scribes at the Temple. Most of all, we wonder at the secret life of the Holy Family in all those years in Nazareth. The Son of God learns a trade from his earthly father. Manual work and manufacturing are honoured completely in the daily discipline of the Word made flesh. Work can be oppressive, poorly paid and boring; but it is a good in itself, blessed by God. It produces the resources that we expect to be wisely managed in the economy.
Many of you will be familiar with the Posada, a custom promoted by the Church Army for the Church of England by which home-made images of Mary and Joseph move from house to house each day in Advent as a focus for family prayer in anticipation of the coming of the Saviour. I assisted in a very tough parish in Hartlepool many years ago where they started to do this at my suggestion. One very holy old lady got the wrong end of the stick and thought that she and I were playing the characters and moving around the parish for four weeks. With much hesitation, she pointed out that most houses would not have enough bedrooms to accommodate us both. As we celebrate the Incarnation of the Word, we must think through how our lives reveal in the present the traces of the hidden years in Nazareth where Philippians 2 is lived out. The attractive accessible Jesus who invited all to him learned about unconditional human love and the noble value of work at the knee of Mary and in the workshop of Joseph. We need to be those who really celebrate work and the creation of the sustainable wealth which creates jobs. People do find value and purpose in having worthwhile things to do and a proper contribution to the common good. At the same time, we need urgently to consider a proportionate approach to the value placed on particular contributions. It is entirely appropriate – certainly in the public sector – that there should be only so many multiples of difference between the lowest and highest paid. Like the Governor of the Bank of England, I remain amazed at the effrontery of some bankers in setting the level of their own rewards so out of kilter with society’s general assessment of what they have done for us and for lasting wealth-creation.
I am thrilled that scientific innovation and inward investment are still bringing new jobs into South Cambridgeshire and around Peterborough. However, we must not lose sight of the needs of the easily-forgotten rural poor in West Norfolk and fenland areas, or people in the poorest wards of Cambridge, Huntingdon or Wisbech whose deprivation scores are easily swamped by neighbouring affluence.
Joseph looked on while the boy Jesus spoke with authority with the leading teachers of Israel. One of the most wonderful achievements of our education system since I was a child is the way in which children and young people are much more active participants in their own learning, no longer just recipients of cannonades of facts as the headmaster, Mr Gradgrind expected in Dickens’ Hard Times. Yesterday we celebrated with the leaders of our church schools the achievements of education provided by the Church of England in the two hundred years since the foundation of the National Society. As we engage in discussion about what the Big Society might mean in practice, our work with schools demonstrates in the most profound and positive way that the Church has been seeking to serve and build a generous society all along.
The humanist assault on church schools always fails to take account of the fact that Church of England schools are always at the heart of communities with an open roll. We are not there to indoctrinate children. If we were, our parish churches would be fuller than they are. On the other hand, we are completely open about the Christian faith being at the heart of what we offer and that this underpins the ethos we seek to create which parents of all faiths and none want their children to be formed in. Our only desire is to demonstrate that every child matters to God. We are going to be hearing later about how we support the vocational formation of potential candidates for the ordained ministry. In old-fashioned language this is about enabling people to respond to the call to become parsons. A parson is, of course, a person, someone called to be a walking talking sacrament of what it is to live the character of Christ. As God’s priestly people, we are all called into this fullness of humanity and that is no more or less than we want for the children in our care. We want to give them every opportunity to flourish, so that every school is its own Nazareth in which wondrous things happen quietly. Meeting these head teachers yesterday reinforced for me how vital it is that any drive for vocations among young people must include the vocation to be a Christian teacher. We must also always see our schools and parish churches as one extended mission unit in the communities in which they are set together. We need to be ambitious about enabling an even closer synergy which creates opportunities to inhabit awe and wonder together at every age.
Not being interested in indoctrination does not mean, however, that we lie back and accept the creep of secularist assumptions about the place of religious education within the curriculum. It is wonderful that so many young people choose to study religion and ethics at ‘A’ Level. It is a terrible oversight that RE has been left out of the proposed core curriculum at secondary level. The National Society is engaged with the government over this, along with our faith partners. It is bad enough that we appear to be losing much of a sense of our own history, let alone not providing people with the tools to understand how faith develops and the power that faith has in people’s lives. In school we are very conscious of developing emotional as well as cognitive intelligence within young people. We also need urgently to address the matter of helping them develop their spiritual intelligence over the whole of their lives and equip them with the language to express their own longings through encounter and study.
Some of this encounter is happening right here. Bishop David will leave us for a time later in the morning to spend time with the Diocesan Youth Council which is meeting alongside us. Two members of the Council prayed for me in the service at St Mary’s, Ely ahead of my installation. As I said at the conference yesterday, part of the dynamic of the relationship between our schools and our churches and diocesan structures is how we learn better to ensure that children and young people are full participants in every part of our life. They are not the Church of the future but the Church of today. If we honour and include them better they are among the strategic leaders of tomorrow.
In my inaugural sermon on 5th March, I spoke about building a generous society and a generous church. Within this next twelve months we shall be voting on serious issues, most particularly the consecration of women as bishops and the Anglican Covenant. The matter of women bishops is on the agenda today as a preliminary to a very full presentation at the next Synod. The Church of England has already determined that women can and should be bishops. The matter for continuing debate and decision is whether the draft legislation is appropriate and whether the yet-to-be crafted code of practice will genuinely enable those opposed to this development to stay with us. It is well known that I am a keen supporter of the ordination of women as priests and as bishops. I shall be voting in favour of this move at every stage. At the same time, I shall be supporting a generous and enforceable code of practice. We all wait to see what that might look like. This issue which concerns all of us raises passions and hurts, joy and pain and honestly–held competing convictions.
Some of our sisters and brothers are already pursuing their vocation in the Ordinariate and are worshipping alongside Roman Catholic congregations during Lent as they prepare to be received at Easter. We pray for them and wish them well. A priest from another diocese who has made this move has spoken about a parting with genuine and lasting love on both sides. I pray that we may live the truth of that as others may feel conscience-bound to leave at a later date. The reality which I envisage, however, is that most traditional Anglicans, both Catholic and Evangelical, will most probably stay. This will be a test of our comprehensiveness and of our continuing generosity towards one another. How we talk to one another and on what terms is going to be even more critical. If ever anyone begins a letter or conversation with ‘My Lord’, I can usually rely on being told off. When a Christian wants to tell me the truth in love it can be the preamble to acid rudeness without fear of retort. Travelling with the truth as we see it are courtesy and kindness and the readiness to see ourselves in the shoes of those who disagree with us. Most of all, we should expect and hope still to see Jesus in them. I am going to road-test a background toolkit for discussion with the Bishop’s Council and Rural Deans before making a version available ahead of the next Synod.
I know that the issues which we face leave many feeling impatient and frustrated because they appear to distract us from our number one priority which is mission. My own view is that drawing women into the fullness of ordained ministry is a key plank of that mission in the future. The Diocese needs to continue to build momentum around a bold vision for mission which embraces all of us as disciples and which does not shy away from evangelism and the desire for numerical growth in our churches. Some years ago, I was preaching in Colorado in The United States. I was presented with a book of Western Theology. This was not a summary of Augustine and Aquinas; but a tongue-in-cheek study of a theology of the Wild West. It was a thin read. Nonetheless, it made me reflect on the relationship between settlers and pioneers. In western myth, settlers are the unromantic bad boys who want law and order and fences and schools and railroads. The focus of adventure and romance is the pioneer who wanders off into the wilderness and communes with God and nature.
We can so easily set up similar caricatures of settled parishes over against church plants and fresh expressions. Fresh expressions get dismissed as theology-lite and parish life is threatened with imminent extinction. Well, some fresh expressions need to be more counter-cultural than they are and raise the invitation to baptism and the sacramental life of the Church; and some parishes may have become tired. But the truth is that the pioneers get prayed for and paid for by the settlers. Settlers need to be adventurous, while pioneers still need a home to return to. Within the Cambridge Federation we already have a Centre for Pioneering. I applaud both the initiative and the wording. I want us to raise up and use pioneer ministers, lay and ordained. Even more, I want us all to be infected by the passion to be pioneering even within the regular rhythms of parish life in town and country. St Joseph’s feast today is book-ended by St Patrick on Thursday and St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne tomorrow. They were both missionary bishops who took with them the fullness of the Bible and the Tradition of the Church to people who had never heard the good news of the gospel. Cuthbert most conspicuously combined this missionary endeavour – as Jesus did – with regular withdrawal to pray and worship so that the next journey would always be in step with the Lord. In the most settled places of the Diocese I want us still to have restless hearts which will only find their rest in Him. I pray that we shall be able to kindle the generosity which will match the vision for growth with the resources we need. Whatever initiatives we employ, I trust that God will lead us to the wells of salvation. In Australia I understand that large sheep stations try not to fence in the animals but sink the wells which will draw them to living waters. In much of this Diocese, we are not short of water. I am confident that in the years ahead we shall identify fresh wells all over the place, both in existing communities and in new ones, and in networks which are still only a gleam in a young person’s eye.
The other prelude to St Joseph’s Day was Red Nose Day yesterday. Some pupils of the Vine Church of England Primary School in Cambourne led the worship at our Schools Conference and were wearing their jumpers back to front and walking backwards for Comic Relief. They raised well over £300 from participants. They also reminded us from John 15 that we are called to abide together in Christ’s love and to bear much fruit. Let us get on with it together. Amen.
Bishop Stephen Conway, Bishop of Ely.