Presidential Address, Ely Diocesan Synod
Bishop Stephen Conway
The Bishop of Ely, 11th June 2011
We have officially been designated as an area suffering drought. I think that we already knew this! The soil is drier in some places than it has been for fifty years and certainly this is the driest time we have experienced since 1990. Yesterday, the Secretary of State, Caroline Spelman, held a drought summit involving representatives of all the stakeholders. The Environment Agency has committed itself to working closely with farmers and water companies not only to monitor the situation but to seek to ensure the best environmental as well as economic outcome from a very difficult situation. The Fens are particularly affected, worse effected, indeed, than other parts of the region.
We need to pray for and support our farmers through a situation which for some is likely to get worse before it gets better. Farmers who have irrigation technology are not affected at the moment; but farmers who do not are in a bad way and need our particular prayers and concern. Donations to farmers' charities will help a lot in the coming months.
The situation highlights the fact that our human flourishing is more fragile than our human and western arrogance tells us. Many of us may have met visitors to these shores from some parts of California who have usually seen no rain at all for four years at a stretch. They marvel at how green our country is - or has been. They are now facing the politics of competition over water with various states claiming the water of the Colorado River. Similar disputes erupt over the tributaries of the Nile and over river systems around the world. We generally take water for granted in our green and pleasant land. Clean, fresh water is perhaps the most precious natural resource which is available to us. We must start regarding it as a gift from God and not as a commodity.
Access to clean water is denied to 1.1 billion poor people across the world. We need to be more grateful for what we receive and to be much more conscious of the need to collect rainwater when it comes. This is our small way of celebrating our being a responsible and sustainable community in a region committed to cherishing our fertile land to grow food not just for ourselves but for the wider world. The Fenland, recovered from the sea, is a wonderful sign of God's gift and of human ingenuity. We must celebrate both and share the gift.
When I visited a diocese in South Sudan, the local Christian revival initiative had a factory making simple domestic water filtration units out of wood and various kinds of sand to give away to families as a gift from Jesus. Every deep bore hole drilled in an African village dramatically improves everyone's health, but especially that of women and children AND also radically improves the access of children to education because they can attend school rather than walk up to twenty miles for water.
We are in human solidarity with all the poor because we, too, know what it is to be thirsty. The difference between us is not only that they are more thirsty just for water but that our brothers and sisters in Africa are more thirsty than we often are to drink at the well that springs up to eternal life.
On Thursday evening I baptized two adults among a crowd of people to be confirmed. There was a wonderful sense of anticipation on the part of the candidates that they were caught up in a great transformation and re-orientation of self. As the Psalmist writes in Psalm 63, "O God, you are my God; eagerly I seek you; my soul is athirst for you. My flesh also faints for you, as in a dry and thirsty land where there is no water." Although General Synod wants the Liturgical Commission to rework the Common Worship Initiation Rites, the scriptural language within the various alternative prayers is very rich. One of the shorter texts for Trinity prays thus over the water,
"May your holy and life-giving Spirit
move upon these waters.
Restore through them the beauty of your creation,
and bring those who are baptized
to new birth in the family of your Church.
Drown sin in the waters of judgement,
anoint your children with power from on high,
and make them one with Christ
in the freedom of your kingdom.
For all might, majesty dominion and power are yours,
now and forever.
Alleluia. Amen.
The Samaritan Woman discovered that there was a lot more to her relationship with Jesus than sharing a water bucket at the well. Her life was fully exposed for what it was - which was precisely the reason why she was drawing water in the middle of the day repudiated by the other women. Jesus breaks through all the barriers of caste and tradition in his claims as the Saviour and sends the woman out forgiven to be his witness. These are the consequences of drinking at the well of salvation.
You cannot live the freedom of the kingdom and not speak out. As a communicant Anglican himself, the Prime Minister was the first to assert the right of the Archbishop of Canterbury to articulate the fear which many people have about the future of our public services. We are properly concerned about how poor people living in our market towns, let alone in the deep countryside, will be able to access jobs via public transport. I know that the senior officers and political leaders of our local authorities are working very hard to ensure that services are sustained for those in real need. We need to be vigilant as well as cooperative citizens.
I am firmly of the view that our energetic and confident commitment to evangelism must be yoked with our passion for mercy and sacrificial service: building the kingdom is all about proclaiming Christ from our knees, washing the feet of people whom we do not distinguish as either deserving or undeserving. Demonising the poor to save money is a cynical abuse of power.
Mr Cameron was also right that we need to take up the opportunities both to identify the importance of social capital in our economic future and to throw ourselves into the running of a generous society. Bishop David is leading an initiative to bring together leaders from every sector of society in our region to discover how we change our culture away from 'me, me' to 'we and us'. We need a persuasive case to be made for compassionate capitalism which we can all understand. As the Archbishop said to the New Statesman readership, it would help if the Left gave us a viable alternative to the Coalition's case to weigh in the balance. We also clearly need not to be taking on great swathes of services in order to flounder like a Southern Cross but we do need to galvanise that altruistic service in the community which the Chief Rabbi rightly identified as the gift of faith communities to the wider society. We need to be thinking all the time about how we offer our time to support activities like street pastors and very local neighbourliness when we witness the miraculous quality in many forms of ordinary human kindness.
All of this arises from our conviction that dying and rising with Christ through the deep waters of death in baptism draws us deeply into his life as his priestly people. I often meet congregations which reveal themselves as Anglicans by filling up churches from the back, leaving space between what appears to be the centre of holy activity and themselves. We are also very accomplished at creating wide spaces between ourselves to ensure some internally coherent purity which is felt as exclusion by others. In all this we just create spaces which Christ then occupies and through which he always moves towards us as Saviour and as merciful Judge. The baseline for our conversation today about the efficacy of the current draft legislation to enable the ordination of women as bishops is that we are all saved sinners, women and men equally together in God's presence and in his service. We are all in our different ecclesial languages united in one voice as the Holy Spirit comes upon us afresh at Pentecost. We are all drawn into something much deeper than community because the Holy Trinity draws us into the communion of perfect love which is not going to let us down whatever we decide in the next year or so. We need to hold one another to account in living that communion to the highest degree possible even when we disagree acutely.
It looks like the majority of the Church of England would support women bishops as a natural development in the ordering of the Church. You know that I take this view robustly myself. That does not mean that this particular legislation will pass. It is really hard that the legislation precedes a statutory code of practice but that is how the law works. My prayer is that we shall find a way to stay together which honours everyone acting with integrity. In all of this, we need to be alert to what we present to the world, not worried that we should be like the world but always focused on what witness to the world we seek to give. Whatever we proclaim in word and deed is the shape and character of human flourishing in Christ, not looking to my entitlements and rights but to the gentle but vivid aliveness of the whole world in Christ. We pray for the restoration of the beauty of creation when righteousness and peace have kissed each other and our current groaning is transformed as we hope to enter the glorious liberty of the children of God. Of course, we are torn and do not always know how to pray or what outcome to pray for but our confidence rests in the Holy Spirit who helps us in our weakness and, in sighs too deep for words, intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. Let us put ourselves and all of our listening and discussion today into His hands.