Diocese of Worcester “Open Conversations” about the future

Published in the Bridge Magazine, 1 Feb 2020

In January, the Diocese of Worcester began a series of “open conversations” about the future of our church. So far, they’ve been both uncomfortable and yet encouraging.

Uncomfortable, because they set out the financial challenges the Diocese of Worcester (and therefore its churches) face, but encouraging because there’s a growing recognition among diocesan staff, clergy and congregations, that carrying on as we have been doing for the last fifty years is a recipe for closure.

The detailed plan for the future is still to be revealed, but it’s driven by four hard facts: that with certain exceptions, attendance at our churches is declining; we’re all getting older (46% of church members are over the age of 70); the Diocese needs to cut its annual expenditure by £1.67 million by 2024, and 60% of our church buildings are now classified as “difficult to sustain.”

And if that’s all there was to it, we’re probably better off giving the whole thing up as a bad job. But the truth is, church was never about buildings and money, it’s about our loving God and his people. Or as my wife likes to put it,

Church is what’s left after the building burns down.”

Though please don’t take this as an encouragement to arson.

So what’s going to need to change if the Church of England is to have a future in Worcestershire? For starters, the old model of one priest, one parish, one church, is gone. I’m already responsible for eight church buildings, and five parishes, and it’s entirely possible I’ll get more before the changes are complete.

But it’s also possible I’ll have fewer of each, because some of our church buildings may need to close, and some of our parishes will merge. There’s no “hit list”, but it’s very hard to justify sustaining buildings or parishes where the congregations won’t take legal responsibility for the administration of the parish and the building and don’t contribute sufficiently towards the cost of the clergy. Clearly, heritage buildings cannot be demolished, but some could close, or be sold, or more likely given over to charitable, or community trusts. Whilst others may remain open, but with significantly fewer services.

The face of the person leading the service will change too. The diocesan vision is to ensure that every church that does not have a vicar of its own will have a “focal minister” – a volunteer who leads mission and ministry locally. They’ll be overseen by clergy, and supported by a new training scheme.

There’s also a growing recognition that much church administration and bureaucracy is needlessly complex. UK Charity Law is partly to blame for this, and I doubt there’s much that can be done to change that. But our structures and governance can be simplified, and the number of parochial church councils (PCCs) reduced, so that we all spend less time in meetings, and more time helping people.

As well as trying to fix some of the brokenness of the parish system, the Diocese is keen to do some new things. You deal with the problem of an ageing, declining congregation, by reaching out to younger people and families. And to help with this there’s a vision to create two brand new churches by 2025 in areas where population changes merit it. The Diocese will also continue to invest in two larger “Resourcing Churches” (in Worcester and Dudley) to be centres of excellence, resourcing and enabling their surrounding parishes.

As more details of the plans for the future become available, I’ll keep you informed. But if you’d like to join the conversation now, it’s not too late to read about the plans online and offer feedback electronically through the diocesan website here..

Losing Jesus.

First published in the Bridge Magazine, February 2019

 

What have I got in common with David Cameron and Jesus’ mother Mary? Answer: we’ve all suffered the embarrassment of losing a child in a public place.

Back in 2012, the Camerons and their three children stopped off at a country pub. After a swift pint, the Prime Minister jumped into a car with his security team, and his wife Samantha followed with two of their children. Each assumed the other had eight-year-old Nancy, who was actually in the pub toilet. A panicked telephone call confirmed Nancy was okay, and her embarrassed Mum returned fifteen minutes later to collect her.

They have my sympathy because I did something similar in an Edinburgh pub back in 2009. A game of hide and seek, combined with a failure to do our normal headcount when it was time to leave, meant that it was only as I reversed out of the car park that my wife noticed the lost child’s bemused face staring at us through the pub door.

But when it comes to losing a child, Mary takes the biscuit. She lost the 12-year old Jesus for three whole days in Jerusalem. It was only at the end of the first day of the long journey back to Nazareth that she realised Jesus wasn’t off playing with the other children.  Three frantic days of searching later, mother and son were reunited. Perhaps predictably Jesus was debating the scholars in the temple courts,

Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?

He says to his Mum, before she presumably grounded him for a month.

I wonder if you have ever lost Jesus? Not physically like Mary did, of course, but spiritually. Christmas was a great time to reconnect with him. It’s relatively easy to find Jesus in a carol service or other special Christmas events. But then the hustle and bustle of January means we get distracted and take our eyes off him. Rather than depend on the one who is in charge, we get busy trying to organise and plan every detail of our lives. And ever so slowly, the truly important business of enjoying the presence of God in our lives as we read the scriptures and pray gets squeezed out. That’s what I mean by losing Jesus.

It’s a bit late for New Year’s Resolutions, but it’s never too late to find Jesus again. So why not set aside five minutes of every day, to meet with God in prayer? Talk to him about your worries, your hopes and dreams. A lot of people find a verse from the Bible can help with this: a website called verseoftheday.com will even email you a daily Bible meditation to help you focus your thoughts on Jesus. And as you do that, something remarkable will happen: God will come and meets with you, as what was lost, becomes found.

If it bleeds it leads

First published in the Bridge Magazine, October 2018

I was chatting with someone recently and we got onto politics and elections, and his real fear that if an election came suddenly, he wouldn’t know who to vote for.

Conservative? But the Prime Minister is incompetent – just look at the mess with Brexit. Labour – Corbyn just wants to take the country back to the 1970s. And the other parties are no better.”

Then we switched to the broader political scene – and

that idiot Trump, and Putin – he’s a monster.”

We live in a frightening world. Or do we? Is it really as bad as it seems in the newspapers? When the Queen had her 90th birthday back in 2016, Guardian Columnist Simon Jenkins reflected on why a good news story was getting so much coverage when newspapers generally only give us bad news. And the simple answer is that bad news sells: or in newspaper speak:

If it bleeds, it leads.”

He recalled how an edict once came down from a newspaper owner saying he was fed up with so much bad news, so his staff prepared a spoof front page. ‘It reported:

No crashes at Heathrow”; “Government doing well”;

and in gossip column,

All celebrities slept in their own beds last night”.

Would you buy a newspaper that read like that?

And that’s part of the problem. We live in a frightening world because most of our information about our frightening world comes from newspapers who know that we won’t buy them if they don’t give us a reason to! The Pew Research Centre in the USA studied people’s news preferences over a 20-year period, starting in the late 1980s. What they found is that

people’s interest in the news is much more intense when there’s a perceived treat to their way of life.”

Fear sells! There’s money in crisis. Click here to find all about something horrible and how to avoid it.

The psychologists have probed the consequences of all this. Apparently, the more we’re exposed to news media, the more likely we are to feel our communities are unsafe; that the crime rate is rising (it isn’t!); and that the world is a dangerous place. Most strikingly of all, it makes us completely overestimate the odds of becoming a victim.

So how do we handle fear? Well we could read less news, but that too has its dangers. But what if we could find a place to read from that offers absolute security? Psalm 46 is an ancient prayer written by an unknown Bible author to teach his people how to pray in response to fear:

God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way
and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam
and the mountains quake with their surging…

…The Lord Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress….

…He says, ‘Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46: 1-3, 7, 10)

We love good news, and it’s a helpful buffer to fear. But what we really need in this life is the safety the Lord provides. When we place ourselves in his fortress we can choose not to fear, because we’ll know the absolute security offered by the one who, one day, will call all the nations to be still, and to give an account of their actions before him.

So next time you find yourself afraid because of a news story, why not turn to Psalm 46 and read it through and use it to pray away the fear?

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