The Blog of the Provost of St Mary's Cathedral, Glasgow
All is over for another year.
Last night’s synod dinner was very enjoyable. The Caledonian hotel does us proud.
This morning, the business ended unusually early, though not before an interesting debate from the Standing Committee on the organisation of the church.
All over for another year. Except for those of us on the Organizational Review Committee who meet in a month to go through it all again.
We have a debate about how to define the membership of the Scottish Episcopal Church.
Sally Gorton speaks against changing our current rules. She has done so before.
Alan Thornton speaks against giving anyone other than the Rector the role of keeping the role. I think.
John Armes speaks of the importance of keeping involvement of those who are not communicants. He wants a roll which allows people to say whether they want to be a member or not regardless of whether they are communicants or baptised. (I agree with this).
Robert Warren speaks – he wants something different too.
David Mumford speaks in favour – he wants a transparent list of those who are members and that this list could be shared with the vestry. However, he is concerned that people cannot be on 2 electoral rolls.
James Milne believes in Civil Liberties so speaks in favour of the motion. At the moment people can be put on a list of members against their will.
+Mark speaks – at 16 you can have sex and drink so why not be able to be a member of the church. He speaks in favour of 16 being the age of consent to church.
Darren McFarland speaks in favour of the motion. New legislation is important to stop people abusing church rolls by just turning up to become members by receiving communion to try to swing a vote.
Alison Peden supports the new canon – good for people to know when they actually belong.
Hugh Lee wants the Rector to remain in charge of the roll. Speaks of someone coming to church to receive communion once a year to remain on a roll. Wants to be able to challenge that and throw them off a roll.
Gregor Duncan speaks – he has to read rolls. He thinks that the present roll works well. He thinks it is bad to frame legislation to prevent people from being perverse as they will be perverse whatever legislation is passed.
John Whittall – Aberdeen and Orkney – has been in England and sees no problem with the idea of an electoral roll. Do we really need three rolls?
Patricia Pettie allows Sally Gorton to speak (again!) in the debate. She challenges James Milne to spell out the liabilities that beloging to a church has. He passes the buck to the lovely Jeremy Auld who will respond at the end of the debate.
John Lindsay endorses John Armes’s point. Wants an inclusive church and thinks the present system works.
David Brooke – asks who is responsible for the privacy of the church roll. It is a data prtection issue.
Iain Paton – used to think he was against this canon but now has changed his mind. Are we an unconditionally inclusive church? No the gospel is unconditionally inviting. We have an open invitation. Believes the new legislation will be a pastoral tool that will be helpful.
Jeremy Auld gets up to speak. Rolls should be held by vestry as they are the trustees. This is just the first reading – we can always amend this. There is a liability in law that could fall on every member of a church. Being a member has responsibily. It is right that people know whether or not they are on a roll and cannot be added against their will. It is possible to be the trustee of a charity at age 16 – so 16 it must be!
The motion is put.
It fails in the house of bishops. The motion falls.
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We have an excellent presentation on the Millenium Development Goals.
I missed who it was who did it. Can anyone help out?
More information available at the back of the synod hall and coming to congregations.
More here.
We hear from the Overseas Committee that the Scottish Episcopal Church is supporting training in West Africa, including paying University Fees and student bursaries.
So, we are paying for university education for African Dicoeses which are growing and apparently full of life. We are not paying for such training or university degrees for people from Scotland.
And then we wonder why there is decline in parts of the Scottish church and why it is hard to attract clergy for the future.
Donald Reid asks us to point people towards the Festival of Spirituality website.
Happy to do so: http://festivalofspirituality.org.uk/
We move on to discuss the report on the implementation of Journey of the Baptised and New Century New Directions.
Alison Peden begs us to stop sniping at TISEC telling us that it has received excellent reports from those who validate it for the Ministry Divison of the C of E.
[One wonders whether it is possible to drive from one's mind the recollection that even during the horrors of one's own TISEC training, it still in those days received excellent reports from its validators. Or, indeed, the recollection that some of us voted for New Century, New Directions specifically because it would stop TISEC teaching. Ex-students came from far afield (including Englandshire) for the celebration lunch after the report went through and we believed TISEC was no more.]
The Bishop of Brechin makes a plea for the church to provide university based training once again. He is also in favour of residential training. I support university paths but not residential trianing. However, I am pleased that his contribution is received well.
Gill Young speaks in favour of interim ministry. Or perhaps Interim Ministry, I’m not sure.
+Aberdeen then gets up to say that he is greatly concerned at the proposal to incorporate the move towards more collaborative ministry in congregational development rather than have an officer dedicated to LCM (with capital letters).
+Edinburgh then has a go as he is concerned that we have exceptional tallent in clergy and laity but wonders whether the talent mutually enriches us. We often get people from outside the province to help us. Should we do something structural. Do we need a “professional body” like the Royal College of Physicians who will act as experts to enable us to become a mutually enabling church.
Dean Fostekew speaks in favour of the report. It is good to be asked questions. We need to continue to have reviews.
The synod agrees to receive the report and overwhelmingly agrees to appoint a task force set up by the Mission and Ministry Board to consider “appropriate” ways forward.
I vote in favour of receiving the report but abstain on the second motion. These matters are so important. Their appropriateness should be decided by Synod not by the Board. We should be giving direction to the Board not giving it free reign.
Just to report the success of yesterday’s great innovation - we had the main Synod Eucharist in the place where we meet rather than in the Cathedral Church of St Mary (Edinburgh) just down the road.
Yesterday’s service was splendid. James Macmillan’s lovely mass setting rang around the synod hall. The bishops huddled in splendour around the altar.
Fr Primus’s charge to the synod is online elsewhere. Some of it seemed to be a plea for the bishops to be given greater leaway to exercise their authority in the church. Odd then that they did not wear mitres.
One distraction from true worship at this year’s general synod is the floral display which bedecks the platform. The red and pink clash with Episcopal shirts.
And they are not real.
(The flowers, not the bishops).
Having made rather a fuss about the lack of internet access in the General Synod Hall (aka Palmerston Place Chuch), I was delighted to find that wifi access had been enabled this year. However, it soon transpired that my own computer was the only one in the room which refused to connect to the wifi system. Thus, this post comes courtesy of the computer of Fr Kirsten of East Kilbride.
From my point of view, the most interesting thing in yesterday’s synod was the way we dealt with Motion 3 – that is the one which asked us to affirm that it agreed in principle with the idea of a Covenant in the Anglican Communion. It was a close run thing, but synod chose not to affirm this, but rather, amended the motion to affirm that we wanted to remain a part of the discussions instead. Having been asked to affirm the Covenant, synod chose to do something else.
It was exactly the kind of compromise I was hoping for and which I referred to in an earlier post.
The Rule 10 Motion. This section is about preliminary report in response the a Rule 10 ie a member’s motion which was pursed last year. This encouraged a renew of the financial & administration models of the church. Very complicated, but also very important.
Should the province pay for Episcopal ministries? Should investment income be weighted differently for quota to “giving in the plate?” Should the cost of employing curates be diocesan, provincial or a mixture of the two?
Consultation is still going on in the dioceses to some of the questions that this review has bought about. The motion to the synod merely asks us to give a mandate to the Standing Committee & the College of Bishops to bring firm proposals next year. It is a soft motion that is a bit silly. The Standing Committee and the College could bring proposals whether they have a mandate from us or not.
There is something missing from much of this debate. At one time there was a mantra, which came from Mission 21, which suggested that Mission should become a part of all our structures. Nancy Adams does try to get some of that into the debate. She speeds about Scotland’s challenges rather them just the church.
Fay Lamont joins in. She makes a plea for a shorter lead time for grant applications.
Bishop David says that this is more about grants than quota. He has been thinking in the shower.There must be some redistributive element in the grants system.
I find myself wondering whether it is merely coincidence that those bishops who want to work in a more diocesan way rather than a provincial way have the shortest experience of Provincial life.
John Whittall asks whether Grants for Ministry will be needs based. Will the formula allow for change?
John Riches asks whether we can afford 8 administrative centres. The world is changing. New regulation may mean that we need fewer diocesan centres . Mistakes made on employment policy can be very expensive.
David Bayne – so much of the debate is not about reality but about people’s perceptions of what goes on. Finance Committee is spending a lot of time on the system for allocating grants. It allocates about half a million. The changes proposed won’t make any difference. 0ur problems we over a failure in mission thinking not a failure of administration.
Colin Sibley: there is a lack of trust over grants.
Martin Shaw speaks. the has an “addiction” to spirituality. Argyll has a new mission statement. He speaks of his blog and asks us to tell him what we about it.
[We don't understand it, Martin. Not at all.].
He would be happy to be seen as a Mission bishop who becomes a part of another diocese.
Motion 28 is moved by Patricia Peetie. My character recognition system reads her name as Portia. She would make an excellent Portia. The quality of mercy is not strained. The motion passes.
The motion on quota is put, It appears to pass unanimously.
John Riches speaks about the Provincial Conference. It may be a conference to respond to Lambeth 2008. It will be in late 2009.
Today is the Feast of St Columba. Nine years to the day since I was priested in Perth.
One of the sad things that has come to pass in recent times is that our bishops do not seem to be able to organise themselves around the Christian calendar. Neither of the two bishops elect that we have at the moment are to be consecrated on auspicious days and it seems such a shame. I wonder how I would have managed without the patronage of Columba. I shudder to think.
Anyway, I must keep uncharitable thoughts to myself and instead reflect on the years that are passed. I must dig out the sermon that was preached at my ordination. (Oscar Wilde featured somewhat) and I must start to think about how to celebrate my decade next year.
Synod this year seems to me to have passed by without great rancour. There have not been very many decisions made and very few close votes indeed.
As I was sitting reading my morning newspaper in the Point, I could not help but reflect on the fact that there was nothing in it about the SEC. That is because we have given them nothing worth reporting.
We have to find new ways of communicating what we are up to in the church. So many of the reports about interesting things have been dull presentations given to an interest group of 150 people from a lectern. How about next year, we give the Boards and Committees the technology and the skills to produce a 10 minute video on what they have been doing for the year? We could send the videos out by DVD for the synod members and post them during the synod on youtube for the wider church and the wider world.
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