A view from the edge

This is the 'headline report' which we are sharing at meetings in the parish and in the deanery for the exercise initial results from which were posted here and here.  It paints a picture consistent with what people having been observing more generally, but, of course, the value of the exercise is limited by my amateur socilogical research design and by the limited size of the sample; it is only a partial look through the door

 During February and March 2013 we asked 70 people to fill in a questionnaire.

 They were all people who have taken one step towards involvement with us – booking a Baptism or Wedding, coming to a Quiet Day, or sending a child to the Youth Group.

 They come mainly from the age group (under 40s) who we do not seem to be able to recruit into church attendance in the way we did a generation or more ago.

 Many are tentative in making a reply – where we asked for a tick or cross to answer a question, each time between one fifth and two fifths left the space blank.

 58% say they believe in God, and 21% say they do not.

 Almost three quarters agree ‘I think there is more to reality than the physical world around us', and 61% agree ‘I believe in something but I’m not sure what it is’.

 63% say they have had some Christian contact in the past year (over 30% each had spoken to a member of the clergy, said prayers at home, or attending at Christmas).

 A quarter of those who had had this Christian contact had also had contact with an alternative spirituality (e.g. 10% of the sample had visiting a clairvoyant and 16% had taking part in tai chi or yoga).

 29% are doing something on Sunday morning which they might not have a generation or more ago (at work, at a dance class, in a football team, or shopping).

 But more than twice as many (63%) are simply at home, where time with family (26%) and housework (19%) and are what is most likely to be occupying them.

 They don’t suggest the church operating at alternative times in the week would be better for them: 45% say our Saturday 4.30 p.m. slot is not good for them; 45% say Sunday at 5.00 p.m. would be good, but 31% say it wouldn’t be.

 They don’t think the church has relevant things to say to them about most moral issues (e.g. 16% do think the church has helpful things to say about gay marriage, but 43% explicitly do not).

 But they do think we may be onto something when we talk about forgiveness (two thirds said this, while 12% explicitly said they didn’t).

 For them, the word God is most likely simply to trigger the words Church, Prayer, Religion and Jesus, and the word Church is most likely simply to trigger the words God, Prayer, Religion, Wedding and Funeral.

 They always say ‘Christening’ not ‘Baptism’, and are much more likely to say ‘Wedding’ rather than ‘Marriage’.

The doorway is in the Casa de Pilatos in Seville.

Sundays with the family

The use of Sunday morning has changed. People are quite likely to be playing in a football team, shopping, or exercising their right of access to their estranged children, all in a way they wouldn’t have been doing a generation or more ago. So trying to do Sunday morning family worship ‘better’ (while not a bad thing in itself) may miss one of the significant reasons such services are less well attended than they were a generation ago.

That is a well trodden line of reasoning, although obviously not a systematic one since there has been quite a change in attitudes to faith and attitudes to church practice in the same period which will also be major factors.

It is something we wanted to test out locally with the questionnaire which we got people such as those bringing children for Baptism to fill in during February and March, about which I began to report at the time.

So, the first question we asked was ‘As far as you can remember, exactly where were you at 11.00 a.m. last Sunday and what were you doing?’. I’ve just got round to the detailed analysis.

Over a quarter (29% - 20 out of 69) did indeed say they were doing something which most of them might well not have been able to do on a Sunday morning a generation of more ago: working (10) or sleeping after a night-shift (2), playing organised football (4), shopping (3) and attending a dance class (1).

But almost two thirds (45 out of 69) were simply at home doing everything from lying in (three more were in bed, one with a hangover) to engaging in DIY (two people – nobody actually said he or she was washing a car). More were engaged in housework (13) than out at work elsewhere, and more were looking after children at home (8) than out at football or the shops. Six were spending time with family in other ways , five were watching television, two were skyping members of their family at a distance, another two were walking dogs, and one was in the shower.

So, yes, the changing use of Sunday is the dominant factor for a quarter - on this particular Sunday it was what kept them away from church. But housework, having time to relax, or being involved with family were the things two thirds were quietly doing rather than thinking of joining us. Two were on car journeys and two were in church.

I took the picture in Lincoln Cathedral after a study day there on Saturday.

Waiving fees

The legislation which came into effect at the beginning of the month says

the incumbent… may waive any fee payable to the Diocesan Board of Finance (DBF) in a particular case… [and] may, after consulting the churchwardens,… waive any fee payable to the Parochial Church Council (PCC).

The formal explanatory material which accompanied the legislation as it went through the General Synod says

[Fees] may only be waived ‘in a particular case’. That means the incumbent must be able to point to something about the particular case that would justify waiving the fee… DBFs may wish to offer advice to clergy about how and when they wish to exercise their right to waive fees. The [Archbishops’] Council’s advice is that this should only be in cases of clear financial hardship. It is understandable that some clergy have been known to waive fees for those who are long-standing members of the congregation. The [Archbishops’] Council believes, however, that this practice should not be encouraged, certainly as far as the DBF fee is concerned.

So the incumbent has an unfettered right to waive fees. He or she needs nobody’s permission to do so. The Archbishops’ Council offers advice and discouragement, the particular DBF may offer further advice, and the churchwardens must be consulted in relation to the PCC's fee, but none of these other parties may in fact direct the incumbent's decision.

However, the right relates to ‘particular cases’. The incumbent cannot say ‘I don’t believe in the fee system so I will decline to charge fees’. He or she cannot say, for example, ‘the fee for a funeral of someone under 16 is nil, but my general policy is not to charge a fee for a funeral of any teenager’ or ‘my general policy is not to charge those who over time have given substantial financial support to the church’.

What he or she can say is ‘this particular person is in real financial difficulties so I will not charge’, and also, I assume, he or she can say things like ‘I judge it would be a pastoral disaster to charge a fee in this particular case so I will not do so’.

The Lincoln DBF has issued its booklet of advice.  This says, under the heading ‘Key changes’,

Fees cannot be waived generally, only in particular cases and only be the incumbent who must be able to point to justifiable reasons, such as hardship, and should consult the Archdeacon.

This is almost fine so far, although perhaps ‘should consult the Archdeacon’ is already a bit of a stretch from the DBF advising or requesting that the Archdeacon be consulted; since the legislation names consultation which must take place (with churchwardens in relation to the PCC fee) it follows that nobody can actually require additional consultation.

But three pages later the Lincoln DBF advice has a substantive paragraph under the heading ‘Waivers’ which reads in full:

PCCs cannot waive any portion of the DBF fee without permission from the relevant Archdeacon. The PCC fee or any other local fees may be waived by the PCC or incumbent, as agreed between the PCC and incumbent.

It is difficult to believe that either of these sentences has been written or approved for publication by anyone who has engaged properly with the legislation, let alone by anyone who wishes to be taken seriously exercising a formal right to offer advice in relation to it.

The first sentence names the PCC and Archdeacon as the two parties involved in a decision about waiving the DBF fee. But we have seen that neither of them is actually a party to that decision (other perhaps than being parties which the DBF might or might not advise the incumbent to consult).

The second sentence names the PCC and incumbent as the two parties who must agree any decision about waiving the PCC fee. But we have seen that it is the incumbent who decides, after consulting the churchwardens, and the PCC isn’t involved (still less a party which needs to agree).

There are also further obvious problems with naming the PCC as a party to any of this. We have seen that the waiving of fees can only be considered in particular cases not as matters of general policy, so it is very difficult to see what role a PCC might actually play. A PCC will only meet a few times in a year and so simply wouldn’t be in a position to advise let alone agree about a particular case (especially where a quick decision about a funeral fee needs to be made). And anyway it would be totally inappropriate to share any information about the financial situation of individual parishioners with such a body.

It may seem perverse, but I’m actually a little relieved to find this level of incompetence demonstrated so clearly in the booklet. It shows just how far the Working Party who dealt with this matter on behalf of the DBF has gone off piste. The serious but in most cases futile objections I have raised about the rest of what the DBF is imposing on us suddenly looks less like the rantings of one of the diocese’s difficult clergymen.

As I look at other diocesan websites, I see that most (but sadly not all) advice about waiving fees is accurate and reasonable, and no other one makes things up about a PCC role. I also see that the universal new practice elsewhere in the Church of England is that parishes continue to collect all fees and then disburse them as necessary – payments of the DBF’s fee to the DBF being monthly (in some cases quarterly) and accompanied by a single page form listing the relevant services and fees.  I hate to think how much paid time is to be spent in our Diocesan Office administering every individual funeral payment across the whole of old Lincolnshire, or how much extra clergy and volunteer time is to be spent completing a separate form relating to every separate individual fee generating activity.

The photographs were taken after Matins at St Nicolas’ this morning.

Proportionality

“It is your busy time of year.” Yes, but that has nothing to do with Christmas being so near. I have been called three times in the last six weeks to diocesan briefing events at the Lincolnshire Showground, in Scunthorpe and in Lincoln. I find I have notes from all three still on my desk awaiting action or at least cascading the sometimes quite disproportionate information to others.

The Bishop wrote to say attendance at the renewal training about safeguarding (child and vulnerable adult protection) was mandatory, and we do indeed need to maintain the highest levels of good practice here. The Church of England’s general rigour has meant that the systematically predatory no longer look on involvement in the church as an easy route by which to access the vulnerable. It was also clear this year that one diocese’s lack of rigour has been the cause of real harm to some vulnerable individuals, which may be in part what spooked the diocese into providing renewal training now.

What this means in practice for this parish, apart from an annual review that everything from Childline posters to awareness of proper reporting systems remain in place, is that we have Criminal Record Bureau (CRB), now Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS), checks in place and renewed every five years for about a third of the one hundred or so regular church attenders in the parish. This applies even to the ones for whom a CRB clearance is already in place for another area of their lives – I’m still separately checked by the church, hospital and FE college, although there is a chance that DBS checks may become more proportionate by becoming ‘portable’.

At the moment I’m also just setting up the next safeguarding awareness training evening for two new people who will be joining the teams taking Communion to homes. The briefing reminded us that we should really have two references and a job description sheet on file for each of them as well.

The second briefing was about how we handle fees - the diocese said it hoped all parishes would be represented at this, so I could actually have asked someone else to go and report back. It was here that the word ‘proportionality’ sprang most forcibly from my lips.

At present the three church Treasurers collect fees which are technically part of my stipend and I send their cheques to the Diocesan Board of Finance (DBF) at the end of each quarter. Should our auditors or the diocese want a break down then it would take the Treasurers a little extra paperwork but it could easily be provided.

From 1st January the legal status of this money changes. It becomes the property of the DBF, which has decided how it wishes us to account for it and how it wishes to police both our handling of it and our good practice in the way we charge ‘extras’.

So the DBF will now require that we generate a separate form relating to each and every individual fee generating activity – and we return over £10 000 of fees from this parish each year. For some fees, it wants this form e-mailed straight away so it can collect the payment direct and then send the parish’s portion and extras to us. For other fees, it wants us to collect the payment and then send the DBF the form and its fee, and to do this monthly not quarterly.

For every wedding, the DBF now requires us to tell it what extras were charged, although this has nothing directly to do with accounting for the fee money which belongs to it. For every funeral, the form requires us to state not only which Funeral Director’s firm is involved but the name of the member of staff dealing with the particular funeral. For every churchyard memorial the form requires us to state not only the grave to which it relates but also to provide contact details for the next-of-kin of the person buried there.

I was in a tiny minority raising questions about this, but I actually wonder whether some of it is even in breach of the Data Protection Act - I can understand a requirement that we have accounts which show clearly how all payments to us have been handled, but I seriously doubt whether it is legal for the diocese to build up a computer database of next-of-kin on the back of this process.

A Churchwarden from a tiny parish said she was grateful to have a system set out on a form she could follow through step by step when she had the odd wedding or funeral to deal with in a year. An incumbent of a major parish said it would be simple for her administrator to change all the parish’s systems and use the diocesan forms as the basis for the parish’s own record keeping. So what had I to worry about?

The final briefing was about marriage preliminaries and registration. The Bishop wrote that he expected incumbents and priests-in-charge to give attendance the highest priority. It was in part prompted by concerns about ‘sham marriages’ about which the Diocesan Registrar confessed we have been naïve (as I did in a post here in April 2011). But this post is already too long, and the briefing was really to promulgate the disproportionate approach about which I already posted then.

Meanwhile, the picture shows our effort this year to make links between Christingle and the outside giving of our three churches. The orange / world has our link parish in Zimbabwe marked. The ribbon / blood is made up of Christmas cards being sent in response to information from Action of Christians Against Torture. The cocktail sticks / fruit carry the sorts of tins which members of the congregation contribute to a local food bank. The candle / light of the world is marked for the Children’s Society for whom each year Christingle is a major source of education, prayers and funding.

Believing in Common Tenure

Eighty-five per cent of the serving Bishops in the Church of England don’t want to share the new terms and conditions of their clergy.

Nearly two years ago (at the end of January 2011) all serving clergy without long term security of tenure (such as Priests-in-Charge, Team Vicars and Curates) were automatically moved onto new terms and conditions called Common Tenure. Since then all new clergy appointments have been on this basis. It was also open to those who did have long term security of tenure (such as Archdeacons, Rectors and Vicars) to opt in as well. Both Archbishops opted in to begin the cascade, and I see that my own formal Common Tenure paperwork is dated from 1st March 2011.

There have been something like twenty new Bishops appointed since then, and these all now serve under Common Tenure. What about the other ninety or so of our present serving Bishops who were already in post by January 2011? A question was asked at the recent General Synod about how many of them have opted in. The answer was eleven.

Although there is absolutely no obligation on them to do so, I had a quite disproportionately depressed reaction when I read this last week. I suppose it is the dull sense that if they really believed it was the best for us they would have grabbed the opportunity to be part of it themselves. I suppose it is the even duller sense that such a high proportion of Bishops are overseeing terms and conditions for us to which they chose not to be subject themselves.

Anyway, part of the new terms and conditions is a mutual obligation between Bishop and clergyperson to provide and to participate in appropriate schemes of ministerial development review (at least once every two years) and continued ministerial education. Of course these things are not new - indeed fifteen years ago I was working full-time for the diocese trying to operate the good practice recommended at that time in these areas.

I’ve written before about such things, especially when I was engaged in a ministerial development review experiment in the summer of 2010 which was part of the diocese's preparation for the introduction of Common Tenure. The process was not completed then (my Archdeacon never responded to the draft Role Description I was obliged to send her, and no offers of relevant continued ministerial education came my way), but it was only a trial run.

The keen eyed will spot the fact that this was more than two years ago, but I know the other Archdeacon’s Secretary has now been given extra hours to get the diocesan scheme moving (she included me in an e-mail a little while ago when she was trying to find out who had been trained as reviewers for it), and I suppose I will not be ‘overdue’ for such a review until March, so I simply have to trust that those who will supervise my terms and conditions hereafter  really do believe in them.

Unrepresentative Synod

I’d much prefer to be typing about our annual visit to the seal breeding colony on the Lincolnshire coast on Friday , but there it is. The bottom picture is a turnstone feeding on seal placenta.

The General Synod vote was a train crash waiting to happen, and it doesn’t give me any pleasure to say this was set out in my post of 14th July 2008.

Among the informed lay people who have been involved in discussing this issue there are some who take the position that the Church of England is not in a position to develop its tradition in this way at least without the consensus of the major Catholic and Orthodox churches; our continuity with the pre-Reformation church has never been fundamentally fractured. But they are in a small minority; the rest see careful weighing of our own place in a developing tradition as what happened at the Reformation and what continues to happen today.

Among them there are some who take the position that the Church of England is not in a position to diverge from a biblical interpretation which forbids women from taking leadership authority in the church; we are not free to make moves which a literal interpretation of any New Testament text would forbid. But they are also a small minority; the rest see careful weighing of the bible in our present context as what has happened at every stage of Christian history.

We know the size of these minority positions for two reasons. One is that only 7% of the parishes in the Church of England have taken advantage of the provision made at the time of the first ordinations of women as priests to ring fence themselves against their ministry. The other is that over the last year between them over three quarters of the members of the Houses of Laity in each Diocesan Synod have voted in favour of legislation to allow the consecration of women as Bishops.

So for 36% of the House of Laity of the General Synod to vote against this legislation was both entirely predictable and fundamentally misrepresentative of the mind of the church.

A hundred years ago England still refused women the vote and resisted their place in professions such as medicine. For the hundred years since, in the same way that those who found the Holy Spirit given to Gentiles as much as to Jews and brought their recommendation that such people could not be excluded from the church to the central authorities of the early church in Jerusalem, people have been bringing again and again to state and church irrefutable testimony that women’s voting, working, ministering and leading are as grace-filled as those of men. We can be respectful of those who take specific minority views on how we handle tradition and scripture, but there is no way of avoiding this truth self evident both to society and to the growing consensus in our church.

There are two ways forward from here. One is that, after behind the scenes negotiations, the six senior members of the General Synod will exercise their right to have the legislation re-presented, with safeguards for conscientious objectors more explicit, and passed next year. The other more tortuous and tedious path is that the next round of elections to the General Synod will be conducted with a sharp awareness that the militant tendencies of the church should never be over represented again.

This parish has produced as ordinands or has had serve in it as licensed clergy twelve priests who are women (Anne now Chaplain of our local Hospital, the late Bridget, the late Christine, George still working with us, Jan, Jenny, Judy still living in the parish and now a Canon of our Cathedral, Julie, Linda, Pauline, Sue and Terrie) and any implication that they are not real priests or that their fellow women priests are somehow incapable of being bishops would be laughable if it were not so sad.

Where we are

The church doesn’t really know how to operate in a post-Christian society. It isn’t our fault. It is simply that we have no experience of doing it on which to build. This isn’t an original thought, but it is brought back to mind by my recent post about our mission situation and by a recent shift in the Baptism policy of the Cleethorpes parishes.

The church knows how to operate in a pagan society. It has a lot of experience of this - this is where it begun and where it is in many parts of the world today. In these circumstances Baptism is a carefully guarded gateway (albeit most Biblical examples in fact evidence very little preparation).

It knows how to operate in a Christian society. It has a lot of experience about this - this is where we have been in our European culture for many centuries. In these circumstances Baptism is an open way (albeit followed up by sometimes quite substantial later formation).

Some of us persist in seeing a Christian society around us (with some justification when we are welcomed in schools, and when we are asked to pray by strangers) so we continue to use the open approach. Because there are substantial Christian elements in a post-Christian society, this sometimes works well. When it does, the process of human ‘confirmation bias’ means we take this to be strong evidence that we are doing the right thing (and ignore the way we can be seen to peddle ‘cheap grace’).

Some see a pagan society around us (with equal justification when large Baptism congregations are uninterested and unresponsive, and when secular values dominate) and so revert to a more fenced approach. Because there are substantial pagan elements in a post-Christian society, this also sometimes works well. When it does the same human tendency to self justification means we also take it to be strong evidence that we are doing the right thing (and ignore the way we can be seen to provoke long term hostility).

But my instinct is that we have simply not yet found out how to operate in the complex and changing post-1960s society. An often liberal instinct towards inclusiveness and an often evangelical instinct towards rigourous commitment both arise from Gospel values and both feel consistent, justified and neat. But until we are better nuanced in our understanding of the complex situation in which the church now exists any subtlety about policies of engagement (let alone Baptism) doesn’t seem very likely.

The picture is another of Kirmington church, this time taken next to the lights ahead of the runway at Humberside Airport.

Not just an extra Archdeacon

Things are changing very rapidly in the diocese. There were a range of real and imagined worries when a new Bishop of Lincoln arrived a year ago, and he quickly commissioned an external group to do a review. The reviewers spoke to a large number of those on Bishop’s Staff, at the Cathedral and at the Diocesan Offices. They also spoke to eighteen other people across the diocese, of which I was one.

The Chief Executive resigned soon after the first draft was circulated internally and the Area Bishop of Grimsby announced his early retirement shortly before the contents of the final report were made public a couple of weeks ago, so the ground was beginning to move before we even saw it. Further changes in our strategies and our financial arrangements will follow.

Alongside the Bishop of Lincoln, we have been operating with an Area Bishop of Grantham and an Archdeacon together serving the southern half of the diocese (the Archdeaconry of Lincoln) and an Area Bishop of Grimsby and an Archdeacon together serving the northern half (the two separate Archdeaconries of Stow and of Lindsey - in reality a bit more than half the diocese).

The review recommends the Area Bishop system be discontinued partly in response to apparent fears that two quite different dioceses were developing, and the Bishop has simply got on and done that. It seems quite possible that consultation will result in the one remaining Area Bishop continuing as the only Suffragan Bishop in the diocese; a large amount of the ministry strategy work and the routine appointment process work will then need to be done elsewhere.

The review recommended a new senior-status Director of Ministry post to hold the whole recruitment, review and support of the clergy processes, which is where it envisaged the ministry strategy work being implemented. It also noted that the two Archdeacons were seriously over stretched.

What the Bishop and Diocesan Council have in fact recommended, and what the Diocesan Synod agreed last week, is the immediate recruitment of a third Archdeacon. The idea is that the sizes of the three Archdeaconries are adjusted so that each covers about a third of the diocese, and each Archdeacon gives perhaps a third of his or her time to strategic work across the whole diocese in the areas of use of buildings, nurturing of lay discipleship and deployment of ministry.

Contributions to the Synod meeting were limited to two minutes each. All l was able to do was ask for clarification about this. Two Archdeacons giving six days a week each to their Archdeaconries doesn’t appear to be any different to three Archdeacons giving four days each and so doesn’t appear to be a response to the review finding them over stretched. One Archdeacon giving two days a week to ministry issues is also much less than a full-time Director of Ministry appointment if that is what the report recommendation meant and the loss of Area Bishops requires.

The diocesan Press Release after the Synod persists in saying that the changes are in part ‘to reduce the significant administrative burden currently placed on the two Archdeacons’ - something which I understand may in fact be achieved in part through a different plan for a ‘triage’ system by which the overwhelming flow of requests for things like permission to undertake minor work on churches will go to the diocesan office and only those which would then benefit from Archidiaconal ‘treatment’ would reach them.

It is over ten years since I last went to a Diocesan Synod. It seemed to me then that it had been so managed that it had no realistic chance of being a real player in policy development, so I stopped going. This time the Synod gave a fair wind to the rest of the report, noting it and authorising the setting up of nine panels which should indeed make a difference as they to work at the whole range of other recommendations within it.

What I have spent the last twelve years doing is serving as a Governor of a large College of Further and Higher Education where I’ve got very used to an extreme level of scrutiny of our standards and rigour of governance. With examining how we measure ourselves against the new Common Inspection Framework and with the on-going process of assessing whether a recommendation can be made to the Privy Council finding us worthy of having Foundation Degree Awarding Powers (FDAP), this process feels almost continual.

So it was slightly surreal being back at Diocesan Synod simply being informed of the Area Bishop changes and voting through the new Archdeacon arrangements. I realise that a large Synod cannot really operate as a tight governing body and has a different role, but I know what Ofsted and the FDAP assessors would say if the College Governors had agreed radical adjustments to the provision of Deputy and Assistant Principal posts on the basis of a couple of paragraph in an external review and a one paragraph proposal from the Principal which didn’t appear quite to match it, with a single two minute window to raise questions, and without things like detailed Job Descriptions, impact assessments and organisation charts. Which doesn’t, of course, mean that it isn’t an appropriate and potentially creative way forward. We shall see.

Meanwhile, I sometimes encourage people who come across local ironstone church walls to look for shell fossils, and found this example myself at the weekend on the tower wall of St Helen's, Kirmington.

Polishing leaves

Our Area Bishop has announced his retirement at the age of 59. Although we might well have expected him to carry on for another five to ten years, one can understand why a Bishop, after twelve years in post, wants to take what he calls the ‘risky step’ of exploring whether the years before final retirement could be used doing new things.

We shall be poorer for the absence of his strengths - everything from his personal way of conducted Confirmation services to his clear sighted view of the changing landscape within which the church operates.

It is a challenging image from a Sabbatical he undertook a while ago which I may remember best - set out here from the beginning of an article in his own old Blog:

The most valuable aid to my thinking came from a fig tree... When I arrived, the tree looked magnificent, with leaves of a dimension that could cope with any Adam. The fruit was forming, although still bright green and firm.

What I had not realised was how sterile a fig tree could be in terms of other life... [until], as the summer moved on and the fruit ripened, the tree developed a community of its own - a community drawn to the fruit. There were insects and birds eating the fruit, birds eating the insects, and birds eating other birds.

Inevitably, my mind was drawn to the passages in Mark and Matthew where Jesus goes to a fig tree looking for fruit, finds none, and curses the tree so that it withers and dies… Israel, with so much potential for responding to God’s desire to engage with his creation, had let God down.

The cursing of the fig tree and other episodes such as the clearing of the temple and Jesus’ turning water into wine, speak of God moving on in the person of Jesus – the new wine of God’s relationship with the created. God’s agenda was not to be held back by the Jewish religiosity of the time which produced vast amount of religious leaves – but when those hungry for God reached into those leaves, there was nothing there. It was all leaf.

Observing the fig tree, I realised that as the fruit was eaten or fell to the ground, the vibrant community which had gathered and established itself, disappeared with the fruit. The tree became very dull – still plenty of leaves but very dull…

The danger for a Church is that it can be all leaf. It may ‘look the part’ on the human landscape but it may in fact be fruitless – and God moves on. It is fruit that reveals God’s relationship with his creation, and the religiosity, the system and structure of Judaism, had let God down – and Jesus cursed that tree…

I could not help but see the danger for the Church in our age. It can be good at producing leaves of religiosity – reports from Synod; new liturgy; umpteen commissions and renewal schemes – but where is the fruit?

With this in mind, as I studied church growth, I found I was frequently reading about institutional survival. This was true even of material from the evangelically minded independent churches. When we talk about growth, we’re usually talking about more members for the institution, and fruitfulness comes a long way down the list of what the Church might offer the world.

In a tree there is an essential balance between leaves and fruit. Leaves are essential for the producing of fruit. They are essential for the health of the whole tree, but they are not the purpose of the tree. There is a delicate balance between the need for a tree to have the structure and mechanisms needed to give it life, and the fruit, which is the purpose and future of the tree.

We talk about how to ‘grow’ the church but we are caught up with conversations about institutions and ‘leaves’. Yet without fruit how dull the tree is – no community, no vibrancy of life, nothing for those who hunger. The question hangs there: ‘what is the purpose?’

When I recognised the dullness of the fruitless tree, I recalled the rubber plants and cheese plants of the 1960s and 1970s. In truth, they were very dull plants, but we tenderly cared for these monsters growing in our living rooms. We bought bottles of leaf shine, so that with leaves carefully polished they looked splendid, but actually they continued to be very dull plants. For me, it sometimes feels that much of what we do in the Church is actually polishing leaves!

The picture is of the Deserted Mediaeval Village site at Brackenborough Hall.

Conducting ministry

The Bishop of Lincoln’s Charge last week (at the end of the four-yearly residential conference for the clergy of the diocese) included the story of a group of musicians naturally taking its lead from the professional player who happened to be at the harpsichord rather than from the amateur Director of Music waving his arms about ineffectually in front of them.

His story embodied the difference between an imposed style for the leadership of a diverse community and leadership which is natural and recognised, between attempted dominance and the provision of a secure framework within which others can perform.

He was returning us to creative models for ministry in which a soloist’s gift is brought out by interaction with an audience and then a conductor’s gift is to bring and hold together the gifts of all - far cries from the caricature celebrity soloist in isolated glory or the maestro forcing his brilliance and personality on other performers.

I’ll wait to receive the two quotations he used and then post them here as well, because they are much more subtle than the pedestrian interpretations in the two paragraphs above.

While waiting to do that, I was prompted to look back four years to see how close his image is to ones which have been used in the diocese over the years and about which I blogged then at http://petermullins.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/models-of-ministry.html.

The model of the conductor is actually only one variation on a theme which included the image of the producer of a pantomime which I used often when responsible for clergy in-service training and

was hawking round for fellow clergy an article from the journal Theology which used this image - each new pantomime grows out of a specific shared tradition which is made new that once - the director has a role equal to the actors in enabling both the rootedness in the tradition and the creativity needed for them to pull this off

and the image of the impresario which the Bishop of Grimsby was including in a range of images he was offering clergy

we can’t go on running the show, but we can take every opportunity to make sure an attractive variety of shows go on.

Meanwhile, we had just had distant relatives from Australia to stay and took them at sunset to the point on the edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds from which it is possible to see both the Humber Bridge and Lincoln Cathedral; they could see neither because of the haze but they have put this picture of the sunset up on their Facebook page.

A new MAP

A new Mission Area Plan (MAP) for the deanery dropped through my letter box on Wednesday. That was a bit of a surprise, although we were asked to provide some basic material about this parish a while ago to contribute to some reflection on the existing MAP. It appears the Deanery Synod’s Standing Committee has taken to itself the role of the MAP Group (which hasn’t met for nearly a year now, but which did use to have representatives from each parish). The covering letter anticipates discussion and approval at clergy Chapter and then Deanery Synod next week.

The surprises don’t stop there. The only new element of the MAP is a half-time Parish Development Adviser post - which, it says, has already been filled (albeit only for an short initial period). The Standing Committee actually has skills in this area I did not have; when I was Rural Dean it proved a protracted and obstacle strewn process to get the diocese to authorise the appointment and payment processes for posts even when they had been through the then required layers of consultation and Pastoral Committee approval.

Other than this new half-post, the new MAP simply sets out the present pattern of clergy deployment - which is the existing MAP developed by incremental changes over several years. This is a further surprise because this is the one thing the Bishop of Grimsby challenged us not to do. We had a surreal experience last November when all the local clergy were called to his house to ‘share ideas for the future mission and ministry of the church across the [two North East Lincolnshire] deaneries’; the Bishop spoke for five minutes as we stood round a crowded room, funnelled us through for a buffet lunch and then sent us home. The one thing he did say then was the approach of making cuts by incremental steps within present groupings of parishes has gone as far as it can and we needed to move on to a more radical approach.

The new MAP also floats the idea that an increase in parish giving could be considered to fund a further half-post promoting Fresh Expressions in the more socially vulnerable areas of the deanery. I suspect some special expertise in this area would be appreciated in all parishes. The money may in fact already be there. The new MAP capitulates to the diocesan policy of budgeting for all planned posts rather than all filled posts which has and will mean that on average each year we return at least the cost of half a post to diocesan reserves; I think there would be more of a revolt if I had not failed so badly as Rural Dean in conveying the fact that this is equivalent to about £1 in every £7 paid by each parish as Parish Share going unused.

My guess and hope is that this is all a bit less strange than it appears to be at first sight. Most parishes probably have a member of the Deanery Synod Standing Committee, or have been consulted by someone who is, so knew how far a process had got and may even had the opportunity to contribute ideas to it. Most Deanery Synod members next week will probably simply welcome the support the new post holder can give without thinking a great deal more about it. Her quality and work might well be exactly the thing which prompt us towards developing the sort of more radical MAP the Bishop requested. Most parishes will simply continue unaware of the damage diocesan policy about budgeting for all planned posts does to our mission potential. Nevertheless, I’m sorry to have just briefed two of our District Church Councils in detail about where we’d need to be developing and thinking next unaware that a new MAP was going to drop through the door a few days later and not to have been able to tell them that a new deanery developmental colleague was already in post.

Oh, and the new MAP also thinks that lay ministry should ‘compliment’ ordained ministry, so this spelling may now be becoming normative among those who take leadership in providing and implementing fully worked out plans on our behalf.

Meanwhile, we heard Prof Warwick Rodwell lecture at Barton last week, and he pointed out that the two largest stones at eye level here at St Peter’s, Barton are actually hollow - portions of mediaeval stone coffins cut up and reused.

Fresh eyes

We announced yesterday that the Revd David McCormick is coming in May to work with us as Team Vicar and with St Andrew’s Hospice as Chaplain. David was brought up in Grimsby and returned to be Team Vicar of St Hugh’s in our neighbouring Great Grimsby Team Ministry before moving ten years ago to work full-time in the diocese’s training team, so we are looking forward to welcoming him back.

In my twelve years or so here we haven’t worked with an external work consultant in this Team Ministry (at one point the Bishop offered to try to identify one for me, but nothing came of that, and it is a serious fault of mine that I haven’t ever pursued this), so it will be particularly interesting and valuable for me and us this summer and autumn to engage with what he will be observing about and reacting to my and our established approaches.

Meanwhile, last week the newish Priest-in-Charge of the Great Grimsby Team has very kindly sent his neighbours the terms of reference for the review of that Team parish, including a quite thorough assessment of the role of the Minster there and of his role as Area Dean both serving the whole of North East Lincolnshire including this Team parish. He won’t know that nine months earlier the Deputy Chief Executive of the diocese wrote to me on behalf of himself and the Archdeacon to say there would be consultation with the Deanery Pastoral Committee about these terms of reference, but even at the time we didn’t imagine that was actually going to happen.

So there will be fresh eyes in both neighbouring Team Ministries, and much opportunity to engage constructively rather than defensively with what they see.

The other over view of at least part of this parish at the weekend was provided by going up the towers of St Michael’s (which I do quite often) and of St Nicolas’ (which I have only done once before). There is a report and ten much better pictures at http://www.rodcollins.com/wordpress/inside-a-church-tower-and-the-view-from-the-top. The top picture here picks out a spiral of flowers on the north side of St Michael’s which wasn’t there last year. The bottom picture of two ships passing on the Humber hints at how unexpectedly close Yorkshire is to St Nicolas’.

Renew

The new Bishop of Lincoln is taking two initiatives. One is to review the central services and costs of the diocese; I’d first heard about this from a couple of people on the diocesan staff concerned about their jobs, and it has now been formally announced in the most recent mailing to clergy. The other is to have a programme to deepen discipleship, for which there will be major ‘opening’ and ‘closing’ events in the Cathedral; I’d first heard this referred to by a couple of people active at deanery level, and I’m sure an announcement and programme will be coming to us in due course.

The Bishop spoke about these two things at the Cathedral Council last week. He is aware of good heart and faithfulness in the diocese, but also of a rate of decline in attendance and a rate of financial giving which do not compare well with other dioceses. Part of the result of his review may be to liberate some money to be spent in parishes rather than at the centre. Part of the result of the discipleship initiative may be things ranging from increased giving to more vocation.

This all seems very worthwhile, although I wonder whether these things take sufficient notice of what I think of as the demographic unravelling of our present patterns of operation; the decline which is becoming increasingly visible is not so much people ceasing to attend and give as the coming home to roost of the sharply different rates of recruitment and Christian formation of the people born in the 1920s-50s compared with those born in the 1960s-90s, something about which I have posted before.

On the surface a review of central services and costs makes a lot of sense. The 2012 diocesan budget indicates that just short of 40% of expenditure (£3.8 million) is in these areas while just over 60% (£5.9 million) is in the local deployment of parish priests. But it is not quite as simple as that. Over a third of central expenditure (£1.4 million) is on deploying Curates in training posts in parishes and in deploying ‘sector ministers’ such as Industrial Chaplains in local areas. And a further £0.8 million is our payments to meet fixed national costs, over half of which is for training clergy. If the review was to result in a cut of one third in the remaining £1.6 million of central expenditure that would only free up enough money to deploy 0.75 of an extra clergy post in this deanery (whose budget meets 6% of central costs), which would be welcome but actually quite marginal in a process which has halved the number of filled posts within ten years from about 16 to 8.

And on the surface a systematic readdressing of our discipleship would also be very fruitful; a Catholic member of the Cathedral Council spoke about the impact of the Renew programme when she lived in the diocese of Arundel and Brighton a number of years ago. I am reminded of the Recovering Confidence and Missionary Congregation ideas which were fresh when I was on the diocesan staff fifteen years ago and about which I’ve posted from time to time: taking one’s eyes off the immediate planning and retrenchment to focus on deepening our Christian distinctiveness and engagement. This level of faithfulness and renewal of dependance on God is probably the only way to open up new confidence, mission and possibilities, but perhaps not if in our heart of hearts we go into it simply hoping it will be a magic wand to preserve our present failing structures.

The pile of shopping at the back of St Michael’s yesterday was an impressive response by people in our churches to an appeal the previous Sunday to help restock the North East Lincolnshire churches' Community Larder which had been emptied by the distribution of 79 different gifts to those in emergency need during January and February.

Advert appears

The absurdity of many adverts for clergy posts was pointed out to me a long while ago by someone who suggested the simple stratagem of mentally reversing the redundant phrases to reveal things like lazy priest, with a poor track record, a tentative hold on faith, and an marked indifference to both young and old, sought for a contracting and unsupportive parish in an unattractive part of the country.

We had hoped that our own suggestion of The parish is waiting to explore with appropriate applicants the gifts and vocation they can bring that will complement and surprise its well established ‘Shared Ministry Team’ would strike a different note, not rule out a good candidate who didn’t happen to fit a detailed person spec we'd prepared, and place us and any candidate in a genuinely vocational discernment process.

But necessary and important consultative processes meant that, somewhere between the Bishop’s desk, the diocesan communication department and the Hospice’s HR department, this got turned into The well established Shared Ministry Team in West Grimsby collaboratively serves a number of diverse communities... a Team Ministry open to compliment and be surprised by the gifts and vocation which the person appointed will bring which, among other things, manages to edit out the discernment idea.

We were offered this on a ‘take it or leave it’ basis (‘the advert is about to appear but we could pull it altogether if you don’t like it’) and the only response a Churchwarden was able to slip in included pointing out the spelling mistake. Meanwhile, the diocesan communication department (which, it turned out, hadn’t seen the advert earlier either) did suggest the advert be pulled, and offered a rewrite (rightly retaining the Hospice’s preferred style) for consultation.

This appeared to give us an opportunity to respond, which included me pointing out again the spelling mistake and championing our own choice of words about what we would like to explore with candidates. The re-drafted advert then appeared on Friday exactly in the form in which it had been sent out for consultation without a single amendment. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.

My wife encouraged me to do the first but conjuring up a picture of affirmation-starved candidates coming forward on the basis that we had promised to compliment them on their gifts. But I’m afraid I did the second faced with the truth that things have moved in the diocese to the point where a Team Rector can have no influence over the accuracy of, or wording about the parish in, an advert for a colleague. I am only grateful that I stood back from being Rural Dean eighteen months ago so only now having to encounter this sort of truth on a more occasional basis.

Anyway, the advert is out there, and, as the Bishop pointed out to one of our Churchwardens, those attracted by the Hospice half of the post will learn where the parish is coming from in relation to the other half when they receive the background papers about the job.  No potential applicant worth his or her salt (to return to my opening paragraph) should take the exact wording of any advert too seriously - and so perhaps I should be more relaxed about it as well.

Meanwhile, I took the picture last week in the open porch at the front of the empty Vicarage concerned.

The undeserving poor

Clergy have strikingly more liberal views about the causes of poverty than members of their congregations. And the views of churchgoers don’t differ markedly from those of non-churchgoers.

The national British Social Attitudes Survey gathered information from 3500 people, 500 of whom identified themselves as at least monthly churchgoers. The Church Urban Fund and Church Action on Poverty then asked identical questions of 209 clergy at their periodic deanery ‘chapter’ meetings - and last week they sent out spam to our e-mail addresses to tell us about this.

Three quarters of the clergy (74%) thought poverty was attributable to injustice in society, but only a fifth of churchgoers (22%) did so, not that much different from non-churchgoers (20%). 1% of clergy (that would be two of those at the meetings) agreed that laziness or lack of willpower was a cause, something a quarter of churchgoers (23%) and non-churchgoers (27%) thought it was.

Clergy were half as likely (16%) as either churchgoers or non-churchgoers (both 38%) to say poverty was an inevitable part of modern life. Clergy were twice as likely (78%) to think there was ‘quite a lot of child poverty’ (the Government's own figures suggest four million children) than churchgoers (37%), whose perception is very similar to non-churchgoers (38%).

So what should I type?

This vindicates the policy of having parish priests living in each community and having their antennae out among the most vulnerable around them. But it is pretty damning about the ways in which we share insights with and help the Gospel form the consciences of those in our congregations.

Or
 
This challenges the policy of having stipendiary clergy who don’t have to earn a living and become detached from the objective realities which are self evident to their congregations and parishioners doing business in the real world. And it is good that our naivety washes over most of those to whom we preach.
 
Or
 
I’d better not let me kid myself into being self congratulatory: far from my beliefs, values and behaviour about most things being so much more Gospel-sourced than even those in our congregations, most of what I think and do is almost indistinguishable from the norms in the community around me.
 
Or
 
A sample of 209, especially collected in a context in which peers were present, is a very poor base from which to draw any conclusions.
 
Meanwhile, North East Lincolnshire Council is working along local roads pruning back the trees, as these two pictures at the gateway to St Michael’s (taken two days apart last week) show.

A new Team Vicar?

We don’t know what we are looking for in a new colleague. This is a deliberate step. Being too sure of what we want may limit who will apply. Apart from anything else, this is likely to be dangerous as there are not usually many applicants for jobs in this area. We’d quite like a surprise, and pray that it will be a God-given one.

So the Bishop may be about to advertise the post (half Chaplain at the local Hospice and half Vicar in this Team Ministry) left vacant when the Revd Terrie Stott left last year.

The draft text of an advert which may appear soon says:

The parish is waiting to explore with appropriate applicants the gifts and vocation they can bring that will complement and surprise its well established ‘Shared Ministry Team’.

The draft text of the background papers for applicants says:

We’ve carefully decided to take the risk of not to over define what we are looking for but wait to see where God may be moving. We’d like to find out what potential applicants for the half-time Hospice post have to offer, and how these might add to or complement what we already have. The gifts and vocation of the person appointed will determine the post.

Meanwhile, the accidentally artistic photo was really an attempt to capture something of the red sun falling through a plain window in St Nicolas’ last week.

A Very Heavy Christmas

She isn’t actually biting Rudolph’s head off. This is the answer I had already prepared should this publicity shot have fallen into the hands of the less sympathetic parts of the media.

The picture is of our Curate. She is possibly the first one the parish has had who is a Heavy Metal fan. She also did some writing while training for ordination about the unexpectedly large number of similarities between Christian community and Heavy Metal festival communities. This means she was in her element when a different sort of Carol Service was suggested for Grimsby.

A new active leader of the local YMCA has been gathering an ecumenical group to plan engagement activities with young people in the town for a little while. It was from a member of this group that the suggestion of the Carol service emerged. Something like three hundred people were in the Minster at the weekend for A Very Heavy Christmas, with traditional carols rendered loudly by a live band, along with video clips, and George’s sermon, so they are clearly onto something.  There should be some of it up on You Tube soon.

We are seconding George one day a week to provide some chaplaincy at the local College of FE and HE, so I’d hoped the service and the chaplaincy would be to able to feed off each other fruitfully. I’ve also been encouraging her to take time out of the parish to work alongside those further away who are pioneering Heavy Metal ‘alternative worship’ and those who have been providing chaplaincy at some festivals.

Catching up

I’ve been taking a bit of a rest from the internet; a productive fast which, among other things, has left more space to spend time with the poems in the Orkneyinga Saga. I don’t expect to be blogging again this month.

Among things I haven’t blogged about is having a Vicarage number listed in the phone book against not only the name of the Vicar and also the name of each of our three churches. Previously this has been provided for free. Now BT has written to say it will charge £167 a year if we want to continue - a little over £1 a week for each church name. I don’t think we’ll be doing that.

Then there is engagement with the local Hospice, providing some cover during the vacancy in the Chaplain’s post there. I was with a day group this week and was invited to stay for their relaxation exercise. We were taken through what was (of course) an entirely secular meditation a substantial part of which was attention to our breathing, and it was interesting to chat afterwards to the Complementary Therapist about what this appeared to have in common with some of the mediation and prayer technique of Buddhists and Christians.

And a trip to Lincoln for a Theological Society lecture on the Historical Jesus by Fr Joseph O’Hanlon. He made the point early that it is often observed that individuals’ reconstructions of the historical Jesus usually end up looking quite like themselves. He went on to dispute at length the pictures painted by a couple of other scholars, especially the Pope. He finished (answering the final question) by suggesting that we put aside the Gospels’ trial narratives as implausible and think instead that Jesus’ death was primarily the result of his disputes with other scholars and religious leaders.

The picture is another left over from Orkney in the summer.

Scattering rose petals

The Church Times is less acerbic than I am.

A questioner recently wrote:

Why are brides suddenly demanding that the bridesmaids precede rather than follow then down the aisle? Should it be allowed? Should the priest lead the bridesmaids, or follow the bridesmaids and lead the bride? I think the latter, but brides have (crossly) told me to go in front of the bridesmaids so as not to impede the congregation’s view of the dress!

Among the replies printed this week was mine:

If the questioner made so much of a fuss about his own status and place, no wonder the bride was cross. Why do we get requests for bridesmaids go first? For the same reason school balls are now called ‘proms’: this is how the Americans do it. Where should the priest be? What about waiting at the chancel step smiling and ready to tell the bride how wonderful that dress looks (even if it doesn't)?

But this is an edited version of what I actually wrote:

If the questioner made so much of a fuss about his own status and place, no wonder the bride was cross. Why do we get requests for bridesmaids go first? For the same reason school balls are now called ‘proms’ and schedule is often pronounced 'skedule': this is how the Americans do it. Where should the priest be? What about waiting at the chancel step smiling, and ready to tell the bride how wonderful that dress looks (even if it doesn't)? What about (just this once, as a penance for putting an exclamation mark after 'so as not to impede the congregation's view of the dress') walking backwards before her scattering rose petals at her feet?

The picture was taken as the Bishop and clergy emerged from Grimsby Minister after the licensing of the new Priest-in-Charge and Area Dean yesterday.

Stuck back in

The first get together of local clergy of the new term was more reflective and mutually supportive than these ‘Chapter’ gatherings sometimes are.

A well known alcoholic man has been imprisoned for breaking the terms of an ASBO which excluded him from the town centre. He was going to the Minster which knows how to deal with him without fuss and where he has traditionally found support. I presume the trouble he has caused for town centre businesses and visitors must have been substantial enough for people to have bothered putting an ASBO in place to begin with, but nevertheless it seems strange that nobody outside the church says publically that there is something wrong with this result.

It has been St Aidan’s turn to have a shock from the five-yearly architect’s inspection we are each required to have: half of the quarter of a million expenditure recommended is regarded as urgent. I’ve highlighted the parish here before: huge century-old building opposite the football ground two thirds of which was substantially developed across several new floors for community use in the 1970s or 80s at the centre of the often neglected but needy Sidney Sussex Ward. We kicked around the contacts, community funding and lottery possibilities which might exist even today for what is the only real facility in an area which has not had as much investment of this sort as others.

St John & Stephen’s, whose substantial youth work in the most deprived East Marsh Ward I’ve also highlighted here before, gained a diary item mention in the Guardian (which I haven’t been able to trace) about whether or not it is surprising that a place which does this work like none other should attract the level of police monitoring which it appears to do. We chatted about the way there had not been local looting; the church trusts that early attention to disaffected young people is an element in the non-development of gangs, and is not surprised that those arrested elsewhere usually have prior police records given how many of the responsible older young people who help here have something like this too.

The inscription is above a door in Stromness, and we enjoyed the confidence with which the carving began and the success in finally fitting it in.