Anticipated Transfiguration

We celebrated the feast of the Transfiguration today, in advance of tomorrow. It was good to be back again, with a congregation of two dozen mostly familiar faces. After lunch, I took the train to Aigle where churchwarden Jane met me and drove us up to Villars for the evening Eucharist with fifteen present. This was an occasion for me to remember in prayer Roy Damary, Reader at Holy Trinity Geneva, who died back in June. He was up in Villars bringing Communion from the Reserved Sacrament to a group of Christmas Day worshippers, a couple of weeks before my last visit there in January. 

I talked briefly about him coming at great personal effort driving 120+km from Geneva on Christmas Day, stepping in when they had no priest to serve them. An expression of his concern that the church shouldn't fail to maintain its round of worship, and naturally that's what being a lay minister was all about. After the service, nobody made mention of this to me. Then, it occurred to me that there may not have been anyone present on this occasion who was there on Christmas Day, such is the fluidity of attendance among regulars as well as visitors.

Maintaining pastoral relations with mobile people in dispersed congregations of this kind is never easy.  There's always a risk that ministry becomes nothing more than than cordial but transient engagement between consumers and producers of religious events. It's already characteristic of funeral and wedding ministry, despite efforts made to ensure the occasion is charged with personal meaning. Does publicity and marketing of church ministry make any difference? I doubt it. Good quality information may encourage people to take church ministry and ministers seriously, but time is needed for lasting relationships to grow, and in an increasingly mobile rootless world, this is far harder to achieve. I don't have any answers. There's more to learn about this new world, to know what the right questions may be.
  

Evolving patterns of diaspora ministry

There were four of us for the midweek Eucharist at St George's this morning. We celebrated the feast of Saints Peter and Paul a day early, giving thanks especially for the third anniversary of St George's Voluntary Curate Doreen Cage's priesting at this season. Given the changing demographics of expatriate Anglicans in many places around Europe, I think the future is likely to be somewhat different from the past. Reduced numbers in some places make it harder to reach the critical mass of financial support that the traditional Chaplaincy model of hiring a full time priest requires. 

Recruiting a paid part timer is an option, but there may not be sufficient suitable candidates to meet the need. There has been healthy development in lay reader ministry over recent decades, and that's a positive sign, but over my lifetime, change in the shared spirituality of worshipping communities has led to churches becoming far more dependent on clergy for Eucharistic celebrations. Not all lay readers may feel called to offer themselves for ordination to perform sacramental functions, though some do. But the truth is, more ordained ministers and now needed for the exercise of leadership in worship at a local level, especially where the area covered by a chaplaincy team grows larger. 

The priest ordained and commissioned just for local ministry usually in later life, doesn't expect to make a career of it or move on. They serve under authority and with local community support, meet chiefly the pastoral needs of a community and locality which is home to them, as part of its team of ordained and lay people leading worship and offering pastoral care. It cannot amount to a grand strategic plan. It's a variable response to developing circumstances. Importantly, this is Voluntary ministry, like that of the Licensed Lay Reader. It costs far less to sustain than a full time priest, or a paid administrative co-ordinator. 

An expatriate chaplaincy enterprise still needs someone to represent it in the larger community of churches, to state authorities and in civil society, but this doesn't have to be a professional priest any more, especially in a modern Catholic country where many such functions are delegated by church authorities to lay men and women. This may take Anglicans more time to get used to than other church groups, as we've become so accustomed to being led, taught, represented and care for by a professional class of clergy. So this is a time for learning new ways organisation as church, that address the problems of dispersion and the continuing need for pastoral care and oversight, with a little lateral thinking. The role exercised by the professional cleric has already changed a lot over my working life. I've changed too, and have now spent a seventh of my ministerial career as a Voluntary Priest. How different my life might have been if I'd had the confidence and taken the initiative to pursue this path much earlier!