Preaching in College

This week I've been at St Mikes three afternoon in a row, taking opportunities to meet each member of the tutor group, as well as seeing them together for an hour on Tuesday. Today I preached at Evensong to the assembled two dozen residential studies, and had supper there afterwards before going to my Tai Ch class.

It was the first time I'd ever preached in the College Chapel. I spent a lot of time tinkering with my sermon in previous weeks, and before preaching this afternoon I felt quite apprehensive for no reason I could identify. It had to be just right for the occasion. It was my first time with this group of people, about whom I know little, apart from the fact that all have put their lives on the line to train for ordained ministry. They come from many different walks of life and faith experiences different from my own. Such a responsibility to address them in a way that anyone might glean some insight or inspiration from my thoughts. 

I felt this to be a more demanding task than what I regularly do, preaching to congregations where I hardly know anybody. Yet in a way that's easier. Congregations have their social context, parish loyalties and even age grouping as a point of departure for addressing them collectively. At St Mikes' almost all come from different backgrounds. Forging them all together as a learning and praying community in which at least a third changes every year is a challenge for the staff - and I'm now a volunteer, learning how to be a staff member. This makes me apprehensive. Not that it's so alien to my past experience. The responsibility is so much greater, helping to raise up leaders and pastors for a church which is struggling for survival as it seeks to renew its way of doing ministry and being in mission.

When I was a student here during the era or student upheavals in the sixties, many lived in hope of reviving a past golden age of catholic Anglicanism. A few evangelicals were edging towards the charismatic renewal experience beginning to break out here and there. Third world Anglicanism was still being nurtured by the last big generation of European missionaries, rather than being self-generating and indigenous. A few of us were liberal, wanting to learn from people of many cultures and faiths, sensing our way towards a new kind of world Christianity, struggling with the onset of the demise of the Western church. There was hope in the face of looming challenge, a strong desire to translate received faith into contemporary discourse, and a naivety about the real lasting dangerous impact of a permissive society. Only the religious conservatives seemed to be alert to the threat.

None of our enthusiasms or efforts succeeded in reversing long term church decline. Perhaps my nervousness about addressing this faithful body of students is derived from the abiding sense of failure arising from the decline that's happened when our generation was in charge.