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Busy, Opinionated and Gobby

20 July 2011 By 4 Comments

Am spending time today gathering material and writing stuff for inspires, the printed magazine of the Scottish Episcopal Church.

I’m the editor of the mag but for complicated reasons not to be gone in to here, I’m being a more hands-on editor this month than I have been hitherto and will be commissioning articles for the next one almost as soon at this one has gone to the designer tomorrow.

Most of the good articles that we receive come when we ask people whom we know write well to write about their passion. Occassionally people submit unsolicited articles and sometimes they are good and get included. The best articles that we include have a direct relevance to the life and experience of the Scottish Episcopal Church, whose members ofteh appear to be busy, opinionated and (ahem) rather gobby. Not a bad set of qualities for the production of a magazine.

I’d be interested to hear from anyone either directly or via the comments to this post whether they have any ideas that they would like to see incorportated in future issues of inspires. Suggestions for topics, writers and articles are always welcome.

I share some of the decision making with others, particularly Rosemary Hannah, so it is not simply what I want that makes the cut. I can’t promise to include everything that people suggest, but I can promise that everything will be considered. I am always interested in hearing from people who write well whom I’ve not discovered yet. They often emerge as a result of someone else’s recommendation, so if you know someone who ought to be writing for inspires then don’t be shy.

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Mission Plans

17 June 2011 By 8 Comments

I’ve written (and lots of people have commented) on previous mission and ministry plans, policies and plots – here and here.

We now have a new Provincial Whole Church Mission and Ministry Policy to absorb. It is fourteen pages long and has some good things in it. Like lots of long documents, it also has some things that don’t seem quite so good and some things which are not easy to understand.

I balked at the idea that what we need to do is move further towards emphasizing individual dioceses rather than the whole Scottish Episcopal Church in our mission and ministry planning. It seems to me that although some dioceses do well in that world (Edinburgh is doing conspicuously well at the moment) the news for the whole church is very different. The faster we move resources and decision making away from the Province and towards the dioceses, the faster, it seems to me on reading the annual statistics, the decline progresses.

Quite often our mission plans emphasise the things that we are not particularly good at and aim to improve them. That’s really quite a tall order and the very opposite of what someone in a business would try to do. Lots of our churches are not particularly great at working with children for example, but do much better with different constituencies – thirtysomethings or early-retireds or mobile professionals or whatever. Yet most mission plans make working with children a touchstone of success. Working well with children is something that is of great importance and in places which can do it well, needs to be resourced and supported to the highest degree. However, for other churches in the Scottish Episcopal Church, work with children and young people is a bit of a fetish. Something we think we need at all costs but which simply might not be what God (or the world around us) is calling everyone to excel at.

Here in Glasgow and Galloway, we are supposed to be working on

  • prayer and spirituality
  • learning and discipleship
  • missional leadership
  • numerical growth, welcome and integration
  • children and young people
  • imaginative outreach into local communities

Those are not bad things, indeed they are good things. Are they the things that we can achieve enough change with to start the turn around the statistics though? At that point, I’m not quite so sure.

Someone said to me that if I have other ideas on what might stem the decline from our churches, I ought to be up front and say what they are.

Well, that’s a fair request.

Here goes.

I think that very many of our churches would attract more people if the preaching were just a bit better, the singing were just a bit more fun and the congregational (not, for heaven’s sake the diocesan) website were a bit better too. That’s three things that I would make big priorities which I don’t really see reflected in current diocesan or provincial thinking. They are three things we think about quite a lot here and things that can always be improved. What’s more, they are things that can be improved without spending an enormous amount of money.

So, those would be my priorities over three years:

  • preaching
  • singing
  • websites & social media

That’s for stemming decline. If we want to grow then we need to plant some new congregations and use the resources from closing congregations to do so.

What do you think? Are those things as important as I suspect they are at this stage of our common life?

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What the Primus actually said

9 June 2011 By Leave a Comment

The Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, the Most Rev David Chillingworth gave a good charge to the Synod yesterday and a text has been released on the Scottish Episcopal Website containing the bare bones of what he said. However, his actual charge to Synod was a good deal more interesting and engaing, particularly in what he had to say about the new politics of Scotland and also what he had to say about the Anglican Communion.

You can read the released text on the SEC website here.

What he actually said about the Anglican Covenant however, was this:

It has been a great privilege for me, as a representative of this church to begin to move around more than I have done in the rest of my life in the wider Anglican Communion. It comes as a surprise to me, and it shouldn’t, frankly, but it comes as a surprise to me to find that we are honoured and respected and that people want genuinely to know what we think. And I think that part of that, to be political for a moment, part of that lies in our history and part of it lies in that we represent a strand of Anglicanism which is not for the most part entangled in the conflicts which surround some of the major players, shall we say, in the world church. We are free to build relationships across the communion in a way which can be good both for us and for the communion. Because, what we are trying to do is to learn to live with and be enriched by diversity. And of course that diversity, as we all know is not just experienced between provinces on an inter provincial-basis, it is also experienced within each province on an intra-provincial basis. And so we come in these next days to discuss the Anglican Covenant and whether or not we should adopt it. And we are going to use this year, as you will hear an Indaba discussion because that has become the way of choice for the Anglican Communion in having discussion across difference. I think that part of the reason that we do that is to enable space for us to give respect to our internal diversity. Some might want to move faster to a decision, this is about respecting and giving space for our internal diversity to be experienced, so that whatever the decision is at the end, and I believe that either adopting or not adopting, can be seen as enriching for the Anglican Communion, that we all internally have been enriched by our own diversity.

I think that the suggestion that either adopting or not adopting the covenant could be seen as enriching for the Communion is a welcome point well made and I’d like to hear him expand on it. I’d also be interested to hear whether any of the other members of the Primates’ Meeting have publicly suggested that the prospect of their Province not adopting the Covanant would be enriching for the Communion.

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Prayers ascending

18 May 2011 By 2 Comments

Prayers ascending from Thurible Towers today for the Diocese of Brechin as the Electoral Synod there meets this evening to choose a new bishop.

Episcopacy is a funny business. We seem to be pretty much convinced in the Scottish Episcopal Church that we want bishops but I suspect that what we want from the Episcopacy is far less clear and I’m guessing that is not a terribly comfortable ministry to inhabit for those whom we call in God’s name to be bishops amongst us. However, Jesus promised his followers a cross not comfort and that applies to all of us, whatever liturgical headgear we are called upon to wear before the altar of the Lord.

My thoughts today are very much with the candidates. There are five candidates for the Diocese of Brechin who are under consideration by the voters. They make themselves very vulnerable by this process, particularly candidates who live and continue to work in Scotland.

Here is a quick and inadequate guide as to how we select bishops in Scotland.

  1. Preparatory Committee is formed which considers all nominated candidates. (Anyone can nominate, even people from outside the church).
  2. Preparatory Committee produces a short list of candidates.
  3. Candidates meet Electoral Synod (lay person from each charge and the clergy of the diocese). Candidates get to speak and answer questions. Then there is a gap for reflection (a week or so) before the next meeting.
  4. Electoral Synod meets and begins voting process. Candidate is elected if they get more than two-thirds majority in both House of Clergy and House of Laity. Several rounds of voting are allowed, with low scoring candidates being knocked out successively.
  5. If Electoral Synod fails to elect, a new mandate can be issued for them to begin the process again. If this subsequently fails, the right to elect passes to the College of Bishops.
  6. Candidate is elected and then Consecrated ie ordained as bishop and put in their cathedra (ie throne) in their cathedral.
  7. Peace and Harmony break out in the diocese concerned and other candidates thank God for the gifts and skills they have, which were affirmed by the process and resume their diverse ministries with thankful hearts.

Stages 1 – 6 of this process are described in Canon 4, which can be read in all its lengthy precision on the Scottish Episcopal Church’s website. (pdf files inside a zip file).

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Prayer Resources for Advent

28 November 2009 By 6 Comments

I’ve updated the Daily Prayer page with some new resources, specifically two bookies containing Evening Prayer for Advent.

In the Scottish Episcopal version of Daily Prayer, we have prayers with the title Anticipation which we use for Advent. There are two files for evening prayer. One for the first three weeks of Advent and another for use from 17 December onwards. This last set has the glorious Advent Antiphons before and after the Magnificat. It is these antiphons which are giving shape to our Advent Carol Service which takes place tomorrow evening (29 November 2009) at 6.30 pm.

If you are looking for a list of bible readings for Advent, you’ll find them on the last pages of the Calendar that I published last year.

All these and the bookies for Morning Prayer and Compline are over on the Daily Prayer page.

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New Blogger – Cliff Piper

6 November 2009 By 2 Comments

Could you all go over and see Cliff Piper over at http://morayrosscaithness.blogspot.com/ He is obviously not getting enough attention as the Dean of Moray, Ross and Caithness so he has started a blog.

He is taking his first steps in the Blogosphere and needs our encouragement and compassion. He says on twitter that its scary. However, I can’t work out whether he is frightened of everyone reading what he says or whether it is a fear that no-one will read what he says. Anyway, off you go and say hello to him and add him to your rss feeder. And be nice. Don’t upset him.

He is talking about politicians and golf at the moment, but it will be parrots before Christmas, I’ll be bound.

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Twitter and the Church

18 June 2009 By 7 Comments

I remember a couple of year’s ago taking out my laptop at General Synod and starting to blog. “You’re doing what?” shrieked the incredulous crowd. Well, actually, the crowd in synod was not terribly interested though the crowd beyond the synod hall was fascinated. Actually it was Mother Ruth who shrieked in derision, though not for long.

Last year, blogging was much more mainstream at synod. We have internet access in the hall now and you don’t need to dash out to have coffee in a wifi enabled coffee show to post updates as I did the first year I did it.

This year it was the turn of twitter to fascinate the episcopalian technorati. A number of us were doing the one line updates directly from the synod floor. If you don’t know what twitter is, check out this article which will tell you more.

One of the things that the I and C Board had arranged was for Mother Dunblane to come and give a lunchtime seminar on twittering for beginners. It certainly had the desired effect, with a number of people, including the Bishop of Edinburgh having a go.

We had feedback via twitter during the synod from, amongst others, clergy who could not be at synod, someone in the Alban Institute in the states, someone in Kentucky (one of Glasgow and Galloway’s companion dioceses) and Dave Walker the Cartoon Blogger (who put it on the Church Times blog).

Meanwhile, out in a world made darker by repression and violence, twitter is allowing Iranians to tell the truth about what they are seeing on the streets.

Twitter is just fast and furious one-line blogging. And as Bishop Pierre has observed, it gives us revolutionary power.

It is a revolution inside the church, as well as outside, and you can find me revolting, twittering here.

Any ideas what we should use it for next?

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Being an Inclusive Church

16 June 2009 By 23 Comments

One of the main themes emerging from this year’s Scottish General Synod was the issue of inclusion. I’ve mentioned before the phenomena of getting just about any group of Scottish Episcopalians together and asking them what our church is about. The answers are always the same – good worship and being an inclusive church. (Interestingly, no-one ever defines us as having anything much to do with having bishops. I remember one provincial conference where I’m sure everyone would have voted to change the name to the Scottish Inclusive Church if such a thing could have been proposed).

And all this came up again last week. In the long debate about mission and in other parts of the synod, the ethos of the Scottish Episcopal Church was claimed to be being an inclusive church. I’ve long had a suspicion that part of this is that Episcopalians in Scotland are all a bit odd in one way or another and when we say we are an inclusive church, part of what we mean is, “Thank God, I’ve found a church that welcomes me. There is no-where else to go”.

Anyway, on and on it went. “We are an inclusive church” sayeth the crowd.

Yet I’ve come to the conclusion that this is aspirational talk rather than something that we have already achieved. Some of the most interesting things said at the synod were when people said things that suggested that perhaps the church was not quite yet as inclusive as they would like it to be.

Marion Chatterley got us to agree to a gender audit.

Analu Waller reminded us that cutting grants for buildings could mean cutting support for access for disabled people. She also challenged us to go back to our congregations and count the disabled people there and then ask whether we are really an inclusive church.

Ian Ferguson from the big evangelical congregation Trinity Westhill in Aberdeenshire said, “Inclusion is not just about the gay commmunity”. (And everyone nodded along).

I said that the bishops’ current policy on gay blessings and ministry was not something we could all support. (The bishops are directly stating that they are discriminating against gay people for the first time in our history).

And then there was the Faith and Order Board saying that inclusive language amendments to the liturgy would do tucked into the back of the book as an appendix of permitted texts. It was me again, who reminded them that the liturgy committee has been trying to get us to think of liturgy as formative for faith and that making inclusive language merely optional was not really the kind of thing that lots of us are hoping for.

All these things were comments from people complaining that we are not inclusive enough for them. Yet still we say (and indeed our new Primus seemed to reiterate), “We are an inclusive church”. It is a distinct theme and one which needs a bit of thought throughout the church.

What’s the most important next step?

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New Primus Elected

13 June 2009 By 1 Comment

The Rt Rev David Chillingworth who blogs at http://www.bishopdavid.net/ has been elected as Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church. I think he probably becomes the first blogger to become a primate in the Anglican Communion.

Congratulations to Bishop David and best wishes for the next part of his journey

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Provincial Conference Cancelled

30 April 2009 By 5 Comments

I’m sorry to hear that the Scottish Episcopal Church’s Provincial Conference which had been planned for October this year has been cancelled. It must be very disappointing and frustrating for the organisers to get to this stage and then have to cancel. I like organising things like that and would have quite enjoyed working on a big project such as the Provincial Conference, so it is easy to appreciate how they will be feeling.

It seems to me that Ruth’s analysis of some of the issues around this conference are quite right. The only thing that I would add to what she said about this conference is that I think that perhaps people underestimate how much the internet has changed the world. There were a number of things that might have helped, such as drip feeding stories through the Episcopalian bloggers about the conference and also using the web for sign-up, payment and pre-conference activity (discussion/group allocation/lift sharing). I know that a lot of people don’t like the fact that the internet has changed people’s lives as much as it has done, but that is the way things are.

The cancellation is more significant in the life of the church than it first appears. It is quite a major failure within [Read more...]

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