Time, place and context

There were ten of us for the midweek Eucharist at St Catherine's this morning. Mother Frances spoke to us about the imminent formation of the new West Cardiff Ministry Area, grouping Canton Benefice with the Parishes of Glanely, Caerau with Ely and Fairwater. The existing benefices will be legally dissolved to merge into one Parish six historic parishes, in what will be, in effect, one giant Rectorial Benefice of the kind now commonplace in many rural areas of Britain. Incumbent clerics will be licensed as priests in charge, and the status of curates and NSM will be much the same, except that they may be required to work across old borders I suppose, not that it doesn't happen now when need arises. 

Mother Frances is Team Leader designate. What a job to take on when she's only been here a year and two months. It's a new role and it will involve a great deal of admin given seven church buildings and a team of seven clerics and heaven know how many lay people in voluntary or paid specialised roles to manage. I'm sure she's capable enough to do the job, but she came to us because she wanted to return to parochial life from a diocesan role which by its nature would have involved much admin. Out of the frying pan into the fire, unfortunately.

Never has there been a time when collaborative ministry his more necessary to care for people in a geographical area of about eighty thousand people, of whom less than a thousand may be committed contributing churchgoers. Far more people than those who believe enough to attend look to the church for rites of passage and support in times of crisis, let alone those who engage with church youth and educational undertaking, and this dimension tends to be quite locally based, although not exclusively. It's hard to see how a wholesale reformation of institutional structures is going to work out. 

The structures we have represent the consolidation of historically based missionary enterprises. Church planting went on from ancient times in Wales. It started with the christianizing of pagan holy sites, or with monastic settlements set up near trade routes, which later grew into towns. From Norman times the sub-division of territory into parochial areas was imposed by the state, and fragments of many historic boundaries still remain as part of Church in Wales diocesan maps. Some larger ancient territories were subdivided or merged since the reformation due to the demise of settlements in one place and emergence of new ones elsewhere. 

When urban populations expanded during the industrial revolution, new parishes were carved out of the old, and church planting went ahead at a phenomenal rate in an effort to meet the pastoral needs of the masses. In this century when the masses have turned their backs on the church, the assets of a former generation have become today's liability. Cardiff has less than half of the salaried clergy it had when I returned from Europe eighteen years ago, and a quarter to a fifth of the membership. Certainly radical measures are required when the institutional church is dying, but we have no idea of what a resurrection of the church could look like. 

Church structures and the people who serve them can be tinkered with and altered, but plans fail when circumstances change and how we've witnessed this during the pandemic! Planning is essential, but it's vital to focus around qualities and values. How can ministers and communities become more resilient and flexible, creative in response to change? What's needed to make a worshipping body sustainable if not re-grow from scratch, in the absence of resources? Where do we start while things are still falling apart? Questions I've pondered on for years. The response so much depends on time, place and context.

Biblical metaphors that relate to the propagation of the Gospel are chiefly organic and to cultivation - parables relating to fields, seeds whose form must die to flourish and be fruitful, tiny things that grow into big things, trees and bushes that need pruning. Time, place and context, i,e, environment, are all essential, and it seems to me that grand plans, however well informed and designed, may not achieve all that has been achieved by piecemeal effort, starting with individual responses. It's not about resources. "Silver and gold have I none." said St Peter when he dived straight into healing ministry soon after Pentecost. And St Francis standing in the ruined chapel of Porziuncula, hearing the Lord say to him "Francis rebuild my church!" and then picking up first of many scattered stones to add to a broken wall. The spontaneous expansion of the church in China and Africa happened through the actions of untrained laity, whether or not they've had clergy leadership or support. Growth actually slowed down when clergy were imported to head up the mission in places where it was already well under way. A church which is clerically top heavy in leadership may be doomed to extinction. I hope we don't lose sight of such lessons from scripture and missionary tradition.

Having cooked and eaten lunch, I fetched this week's organic veg bag, then walked in the park for an hour, and got back at sunset. Then, Clare and I sat and watched the last three episodes of 'Fear by the Lake', which turned out not to be about countering bio-terrorist plot, but a psychotic primary school teacher on a personal revenge mission. A bit far fetched, although the portrayal of the the response by the major incident medical emergency response team showcased medics and the gendarmerie working at fictional pace to establish city wide lockdown, deal with violent incidents and get a field hopsital up and running by the end of day two. An experimental antidote was knocked up at fictional lightning speed by a top expert in under a day. Would that real life could be fast forwarded to a happy ending like a movie.

There was a telling mini-story line in which a group of a dozen or so asylum seekers escaped from their lock-down at a reception centre and presented themselves for duty at the gendarmerie field hospital, as each of them had been doctors or nurses in their home countries. A neat piece of movie fiction advocacy to champion the cause of asylum seekers to work and be useful in their place of refuge. It's a hot potato political issue across Europe and beyond. 

It was a good watch and less difficult to get the gist of what was going on (with or without the subtitles) because the past ten months have exposed us all to the vocabulary of medical statistics in a way without precedent. Not so much a feel-good movie, but one perhaps to make us feel less bad. We'll get to where we wish we were, eventually.