Ready or not?

Another cold day, sunshine but with clouds coming and going. After breakfast I did my share of the house work, then prepared next weekend's Sway and routine distribution of liturgical readings before cooking lunch. Fresh sardine fillets today!

I had surprise visit from a colleague after we'd eaten, and we chatted for a good while about our crisis ridden churches in crisis ridden times, and how we reset our priorities for rapidly changing circumstances overtaking us. I couldn't help look back to the time when I was ordained, when some at least in the church recognised the onset of decline. 

There was a surprise recruitment dip in the mid-sixties when I was training for ministry. The cohort I was part of was the smallest in a decade. Numbers ordained went up again after my ordination year but never returned to the numbers of young ordinands between '45 and '65. The numbers ordained in their fifties and sixties increased. The number of ordained non-stipendiaries increased. The number of young ordinands on the path to lifelong ministry didn't increase. Women's ordination made a difference, though not a lasting difference. Decline continued but was prolonged, reflecting the decline in the numbers in active faithful worshippers. 

Some of us could see this emerging trend over fifty years ago, and did everything we could to reverse it, without success. Those of us who weren't broken by this experience worked hard and having given it our best efforts, have little to reproach ourselves for. But that background sense of failure is inescapable. It's been like helplessly watching a slow motion car crash. With what's going on in the diocese at the moment, it seems to me we're not far off coming to a half, with the silence that follows. After that, picking up the pieces, asking - how can we rebuild? What do we need to re-build from the little that remains? It's time to look much further ahead, and ask ourselves again what are we Christians here for now, without falling back on glib dogmatic formulae.

Twenty years ago our faith leaders encouraged us to think and act in a counter cultural way, not to go with the flow of contemporary secular consumer society. This didn't prevent churches from co-opting business management techniques and values in an effort to reform its institutions and their often haphazard ways of working, but religious organisations are not businesses, faith isn't a commodity. The pastoral and spiritual heart of the church and the humane relationships it nurtures cannot be made more efficient, productive or profitable. Members of Christ's Body are not 'resources'. The church's pastors are 'ministers and stewards of  the mysteries of God' not asset managers.

The 'Joyful News' message of Brother Roger of Taize calling for a Council of Youth back in 1970, when I was Curate of Saint Andrews in Caerphilly, was more far sighted than I understood at the time, not just the aspirations of an idealist. I found the full text tonight. It relevant to a situation in which the church has lost popular support, and is losing its assets and well as its influence, and can no longer rely on managing its resources. Only on God.

The Risen Christ comes to quicken a festival in the innermost heart of man.
He is preparing for us a springtime of the Church:

a Church devoid of means of power,

ready to share with all,

a place of visible communion for all humanity.
He is going to give us enough imagination and courage to open up a way of reconciliation.

He is going to prepare us to give our life so that man be no longer victim of man.” 

I guess it's what my generation was inspired by. We have to accept it's still a work in progress, but are we, fifty four years on closer to being 'a Church devoid of means of power, ready to share with all.'? I hope and pray so.

It was sunset by the time I went out for exercise, and walked one big 8km circuit a quite a good pace, as it was bitingly cold, but invigorating. 

After supper, I watched this week's double episode of the new series of 'Silent Witness' on iPlayer. It was an investigation into a serial killer who was never caught but disappeared, with a big twist in the tale in the last five minutes delivered so briskly it was difficult to figure out exactly what had happened.

Meanwhile this evening, a couple of brief showers of light snow, just enough to give cars in the street a dusting of white. Unless the temperature dips below zero later tonight, I don't suppose it will stick around for long.