Caritas 2008

As part of our preparation for Caritas we have been asked to prepare a twenty word aspiration, as well as pictures of our church building, church family, and our parish. 

Our aspiration, agreed by the PCC, is that we become more deeply a church where: “All are made welcome, the gospel is proclaimed, and we are drawn ever more deeply into the life of Christ.”

I hope that most of you will have picked up one of the leaflets about the Caritas celebration and though about whether you can come. It should be a good and fun day of encouragement, gathering together with other Christians from across the Diocese. If you haven't already, please do think about whether you can come.

APCM Sermon 2008

I know that many people were not able to attend the APCM because of childcare commitments, or got caught out because of the holidays!

So I'm posting my sermon for the meeting, and hope that members of the congregation will take the time to both read it and take up its challenge for the coming year.

Always be ready to make your defence to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you.

At the PCC recently we have been discussing our mission priorities. It is only 3 years since our Growing a Healthy Church exercise, and we are still being guided by our conclusions on that day that we need to be working to develop our spirituality and be a Church which clearly puts God at the heart of everything we do.

But that is a general aspiration, and this discussion was about trying to focus our energies over the coming year in response to a suggestion from the Diocese. This suggested three aspects to mission – Attending to God, Building Community, Commending God’s love for the world. We looked at what we were already planning practically and how they might fit into these categories. It’s an ongoing discussion and the new PCC will have to take on the task of thinking this through further with me.

What was clear from our discussion is that as with all these schemes it is a useful exercise to concentrate on improving one thing at a time. You may remember from Growing a Healthy Church the advice to concentrate on doing a few things well. Yet at the same these priorities are part of the same thing.

As individual Christians and as a church family we have three interwoven parts of our Christian lives; knowing, living, and proclaiming.

Knowing the faith is both about our personal relationship with God, and knowing the content of our faith.

Living the faith is living out in our own lives and as a community the implications of that faith. 

Proclaiming the faith is about sharing our Christian lives with others, both in the specifics of encouraging others to know the Lord Jesus, and in the love and care for our neighbour which he demands from us.

You can see at once how these three are related. Clearly one of our priorities at St Peter’s is to share our faith with others, to encourage others to join our church family and to grow our church.

As you know we are using the Credo course again as a way of giving us something to invite others to. We were one of the parishes in the Diocese who experimented with Back to Church Sunday last year and are looking forward to using it again this year supported by some Diocese wide advertising. These are some of the structured practical things that we can do as a church to help encourage others to come and join us, or to become more involved.

Yet clearly we cannot effectively proclaim, share our Christian faith with others if we are not committed to living it clearly ourselves. The most effective way to evangelise is to live such a distinctive and clearly committed Christian life that other people are interested and encouraged by your witness to find out what makes this so important to you. This is true whether you are sharing your faith with a work colleague or your children.

One of the many encouraging things that has happened this year is the effort in the Children’s Liturgy to make provision for our children over the school holiday periods, this is a very important and symbolic move. I quite understand that our children’s liturgy leaders, who do a sterling job, are often on holiday and need time in church themselves. Yet if we have no provision for our children at these times, what are we saying? Are we not encouraging a view of church that it is indeed like school, something that is only a part time commitment, and one you grow out of. It was precisely for that reason that we began to stop talking about Sunday School and talk instead about the Children’s liturgy. If we want others to respond to our invitation to join us as Christians we have to show them that we are serious about what we are inviting them to. That it matters to us.

I am very interested in some of the research that shows that how committed we are to our celebration of the Eucharist plays a big part in whether we provide a community in which others find this service a good place to meet God, as it should be.

And how can we live our faith effectively if we do not know what the faith is ourselves. How can we share our faith if we do not know what we are sharing.

As many of you will know my girlfriend is a Roman Catholic, and with her little girl we regularly attend a Saturday evening mass so that she can fulfil her obligations as a catholic and still attend St Peter’s as well. It has given me a new level of respect for all of those of you struggling to help your children through the service, as there is usually no children’s provision on a Saturday evening. At the same time it also makes it very clear how much you need to be connected yourself to what is going on in order to communicate it to others.

What I really want each of us to do this year is to reflect upon what we as individuals are doing to grow in our Christian faith. It is perfectly possible to come to church faithfully every Sunday, listen attentively to the readings and the sermon, reflect upon them and grow in our life with God. However many of us aren’t able to do that. If you are helping with the Children’s Liturgy or looking after children you won’t have the luxury of even being able to listen easily to the readings and sermon. So I want each of us to reflect on what we are doing to grow closer to God.

Maybe you are the sort of person who gets on best beavering away on your own. Check out the resources as we slowly add them to the parish library, or come and ask me for suggestions.

I suspect that most of us however are not cut out for self study. I really want to encourage you to think about joining in some of the groups we organise. There are the Credo courses, Bible study groups, especially at Advent and Lent, and many other opportunities. I have been leading the Following Jesus course at Church house this year and it has been very helpful. It is not demanding, other than a commitment of an evening a week during term time. It involves getting to know the Bible better and seeing how it connects with what the rest of our Christian and Church life. I really can’t recommend it highly enough to anyone who has been confirmed. This is a very good course, and there will be another one beginning in September.

As always, within the constraints of time I am always happy to take suggestions as to what we could be doing better or differently in the provision of groups and other support to help us grow in our faith.

By doing these things we will, both as individuals and as a church, be able to respond better to the challenge that we heard in the first letter of Peter.

Always be ready to make your defence to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you.

Because it is together that we make up the church – and our lives are shaped in this way then when we invite or welcome new members to our family they will see a church in which God is known and our faith lived out and proclaimed.

As always be assured that you are all daily in my prayers – and I ask you to remember me in yours.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Easter in the snow

Caister Retreat

The poor blog has been a bit neglected in April! Here are some pictures from the Caister Retreat/Conference I went to a couple of weeks ago. Included are pictures of my training incumbent Fr Roger, Canon Martin Warner who welcomed us at St Paul's, and two showing you how to create a lovely chapel out of a holiday camp dance hall! 

The retreat/conference is an interesting mix. It is organized by Bishop Lindsay who is the area Bishop of Horsham in our Diocese, and incidentally the Bishop who ordained me to the priesthood. There is a regular pattern of worship, bible studies, seminars, keynote addresses, and special themed acts of evening worship - and that's before you get on to the chance to socialize in the Bar of an evening. At first sight it seems a somewhat riotous mix - how do you marry a retreat and a conference? The idea that most of us probably have of a retreat is of a silent one in a monastery, coming together only to pray, eat, and hear some addresses. A conference is a more active affair. Yet if the conference is a spiritual one then the retreat and the conference have the same goal - to encourage and feed us in our spiritual lives.

I have come back armed with CDs of talks - all of which can be borrowed  - and some of which will be passed around the PCC. There was for instance a talk about how to make the most of the  Back to Church Sunday initiative. Fr Martin also gave a really excellent talk on the resurrection  and Mary. I also made a new friend - another priest from the Diocese who likes to talk theology!

But for me the heart of the retreat - and what in the end made it for me more of a retreat than a conference - was the hour of meditation in front of the Blessed Sacrament which lay at the heart of each day. It was great to be able to attend worship which I wasn't having to lead, and to hear somebody else's sermon. But that encouragement to simply be with God was most rewarding. But, an hour! What do you do for an hour? I find that for me the thing to do is to break it down.

First I said midday prayer. Then I prayed silently, prostrating myself on the ground before the presence of God with us in the sacrament. Then I did some spiritual reading, a few pages at a time of Pope Benedict's letter God is Love, which is a lovely meditation on this theme. (It's available free on the internet here.) Then I prayed the rosary. This is when I found that just as I was beginning to think of the people I wanted to pray for at this point the hour had proved to be too short, as there were the hymns and blessing that make the final act of adoration. For that encouragement to prayer alone the retreat was worthwhile. Why not come along on the next retreat or pilgrimage we organize as a parish?

Holy Week Pictures

There haven't been any posts recently as I've been away quite a bit, but I've now uploaded pictures for most of the Holy Week entries - so its worth going back and looking at the technicolour version of the blog.

Holiday Mass

This is a picture of St Carons, the church my parents attend in
Tregaron. I always try and attend mass there when I'm on my Easter
break. My mother has travelled a long way since her days as a
Congregationalist, but one of the vestiges is a lack of enthusiasm for
services without hymns. So it's just my Father and me.

Closing the ecumenical circle

This is one of the wonderful paintings with which S. George's is
blessed. The artist is local and a practicing catholic and the
paintings are almost icon like in their theological symbolism.
Caroline of course had attended the vigil in the morning and had to
fulfill her Sunday Mass obligation so I ended Holy Week at S. George's
where we had began it with the Procession of Palms.

Renewal of Baptism Vows

We had a good congregation for the 10.00 Easter Family Eucharist - by
which of course I mean the attendance, passing no judgement on the
state of our souls! Last year at the vigil we had the joy to baptise
Eleanor Hayes. Since not all the family were able to make it to the
Vigil we took the opportunity of renewing our baptism vows to make a
special renewal of her patents and godparents vows. I wasn't quite
sure how thus would work, given that it required a bit of creative
liturgy, but in fact it worked very well.

Easter Vigil

Like so much of the Holy Week ceremonies the Vigil is something that
has to be experienced rather than simply described.

I know that most of you who haven't yet made the effort to get up for
the dawn service are a little non plussed by the whole thing. If
anything should encourage you to go it should be the fact that I, who
find mornings so difficult, am enthusiastic about it, there must be
something to it......

To simply describe the vigil fails to capture the experience. You get
up early (or stay up late if ypu have a Holy Saturday evening
celebration) light a fire, sing to a candle, have a long series of
Bible readings and have a Eucharist including the renewal of Baptismal
vows. That prosaic description somehow fails to bring out the way in
which the vigil can have a power to really draw us into the mystery of
the resurrection.

Like the women coming to annoint the body of Jesus we gather before
dawn, only to find that the Lord has risen. The kindling of the new
fire a simple sign of the glory of Christ's victory if death which
takes place in the night and which yet destroys the power of death and
sin and fear (all of which we tend to associate with darkness). The
darkness of the tomb is transformed into the brightness of the
resurrection day. The sun has not yet risen, but the Son has.

From the fire we light the great Easter Candle and are reminded that
this great event of 2,000 years ago is not past, Christ is alive at
the right hand of the Father, and he is with us now as we carry this
candle which, as candles always do for us in Church, is a sign of his
presence to us. And so I sing the great song of Easter Praise, (the
Exultet) not to the Candle, but in praise to Christ, celebrating his
saving work, enabled to proclaim it literally by the light of Christ,
the light from the Easter Candle illuminating the pages of the Exultet.

I always imagine the vigil readings, which help us through a selection
of passages to see the whole of salvation history as leading to the
death and resurrection of Christ, as rather like being able to listen
in on the conversation Jesus had with disciples on the Emmaus road,
when he opened the scriptures for them, helping them to understand the
Passion.

All of this transforms the celebration of the first Eucharist of
Easter, helping us to see more clearly the risen Lord meeting us as he
akways does. As the sun rises we are also reminded of the first
Christians who would gather like this Sunday by Sunday before going
off to work. A reminder to us that they could always find time for
Christ.

If you were able to come I hope you enjoyed it, and if not perhaps
next year you'll be encouraged to try it out.

Special thanks are of course due to everyone who works so hard to
prepare for these celebrations, among them the flower ladies and
sacristans, but especial thanks to Maggie and her team for preparing a
wonderful Easter Breakfast afterwards.

Holy Saturday

It is difficult to communicate a theology or spirituality of Holy
Saturday in the parish. I prayed the office of readings and morning
prayer as the bustle of the day began, a succesion of flower ladies
coming to beautify the church, and I soon join them with the
preparations for the Vigil which take up a good part of the day. The
irony of our busyness does not elude me. Jesus' body is in the tomb,
and his soul has descended to the dead. In an ideal world today would
be a day of quiet meditation and prayer for the departed. However it
is possible to connect the activity of the day with the tradition of
Christ as on some sense preaching to the departed who in this life had
not had a chance to hear the gospel. In this way of looking at Holy
Saturday it begins to anticipate Easter. Von Balthasar's vision of
Christ as being in some sense passively active, not preaching so much
as experiencing the uttermost separation sees the day more as a
continuation of Good Friday and is one he presents in my opinion a
strong argument for. However one meditates on this day it is a shame
for it to be simply lost.