Serving those God is calling

I’m just selecting the most useful bits of a recent Leading Your Church Into Growth conference to feed back to our two Parochial Church Councils over the next couple of weeks. 

Having spent my initial time here holding back on initiating too premature a ‘mission action planning’ process - I wanted to wait to get a real feel for what might be going on here and I also knew this particular bit of training (which the diocese of Leeds requires of those coming newly to work in it) would be coming up - I find that I’ve been here for sixteen months and I have now been to the residential event at Swanwick so I need to change gear in feeding back, consulting and planning.

At the same time, I’ve intrigued myself by trying to ‘translate’ the slogan leading your church into growth into Mullins.

Leading sits slightly uncomfortably with me as the headline definition of an incumbent’s role, although Hebrews does reference it.  I knew the conference leaders were keen on model of a strong leader in schools and in sports, but I suspected that to be uncritical.  The Sunday Gospel readings we’ve been exploring over the last few weeks do suggest that a more dominate biblical theme is serving.

Your is a particular problem, although I’m as prone as many to talking about ‘my parish’.  I’d certainly want to remind myself that this is not mine but God’s.

Church is a less obviously discomforting or problematic, although I serve three churches and fundamentally think of myself as Rector of two parishes rather than of three institutions.  The root biblical word (ek-klesia) offers me a sense of those assembled but more fundamentally a sense of those called out.

Into is probably unobjectionably neutral, although my attention was again caught at our recent Harvest Festivals by the set Gospel for this year which uses the active word seeking.

Growth is striking (we were again told ‘if you are not leading your church into growth, where are you leading it?') but Paul teaches that God gives the growth, most of Jesus teaching about what grows is about the Kingdom of God, and the text about ‘seeking' is definitely about seeking the Kingdom.

So, serving – God’s – called out – seeking – Kingdom take me to something like

'serving those God is calling in seeking God’s Kingdom together'

as at least one possible take on what leading your church into growth might be intended to mean for me.

Meanwhile, two peacocks feeding at a chalice is a ubiquitous Christian symbol in Venice representing the glorious new life fed by the Eucharist.