Partners in MIssion recalled

Another cold dry mostly overcast day. After breakfast and prayers, I resumed work on transcribing my Jordanian travel diary after several weeks inattention. It was interesting to realise how much detail of that trip I've forgotten. 

I finally received an email this morning confirming receipt of my messages about the incorrectly written cheque, asking me to return this to the funeral director at the crem. It turned out he'd not been briefed. The chapel attendant who briefed me on arrival I hadn't met before. She told me proudly that none of the staff at Thornhill had gone sick with covid over the past year, despite the throughput of hundreds of mourners daily. Kudos to the city's bereavement services team for staying on top of the Health and Safety demands in the work place.

When I returned from a funeral, I sent a message to the funeral arranger say I'd handed over the cheque, and received an email to say a new one would be in the post. I mention this in full, because it's the first time in decades of officiating at funerals that a glitch like this has occurred. All my emails carry my full name and contact details, so I wonder who slipped up?

This evening, I came across an obituary for Bishop Humphrey Taylor, who died on Ash Wednesday. I first met him when I was a University Chaplain and he became the national coordinator of Chaplaincy work in Higher Education in the early 1970s. He'd been a mission priest in Malawi, expelled by the authoritarian government for his pastoral work among prisoners. We met up again fifteen years later when I worked for USPG and he was a staff member, and then General Secretary of the Society. He went on from there to be Bishop of Selby until he retired. He was a quiet wise thoughtful man with a wry sense of humour, a passion for racial justice and he was a champion of women's ordination. 

His predecessor as chaplaincy coordinator, John Dudley Davies had been expelled from South Africa for witnessing against apartheid. He then went on to be Principal of USPG's College of the Ascension on the Selly Oak mission campus at the same time Humphrey was in charge. John later went on to be Bishop of Shrewsbury. Co-incidentally both had done national service in the RAF. I'm still in touch with John, in his nineties, still writing books with a cutting edge, and getting them published. I'm grateful to have served alongside both, and in their company to have learned what being a missionary priest means for today.

I also learned this evening that church marriage registration is going digital in May this year. No longer will clergy have the painstaking onerous task of filling out church registers in duplicate, with a spare paper copy to send quarterly to the Chief Registrar's office, and all for a pittance. This will be replaced by a form containing all the legally required details, which will then be sent for entry into a national digital database.

Records in their present format date back to the Marriage Act of 1820, and maintaining duplicate church registers was always part of the cleric's duty when solemnising marriages. Prior to that there may have been a separate parish register of marriages maintained, or else marriage entries were made, along with baptisms, burials and regular worship events in one grand service register. Ancient parishes like Cardiff St John the Baptist have records dating back to the restoration of the monarchy, still kept in a great fireproof iron document safe in the vestry. 

I very much regret that documentation of this kind becomes redundant in favour of an exclusive digital record. No doubt a signing the register ritual photo opportunity will persist, even if only a paper record is to be signed. I wonder what the carbon footprint is of a register which may have an active life of ten to fifty years depending on frequency of church weddings in a parish, and the combined carbon footprint of an equivalent set of digitized register entries, held on multiple servers in perpetuity? OK, let's say 400 years, as long as some current registers have been preserved. Just for fun, I have emailed the BBC Radio Four 'More or Less' programme team to pose this question to them. 

Grass roots pastorate

A few weeks ago I was in touch with Fr Chris Reaney, a friend and colleague, since the days when I worked as Wales USPG Area Secretary in the eighties. He's been Vicar of Troedyrhiwgarth in the Llynfi Valley near Maesteg, and we haven't seen each other since his induction, nine years ago. So I arranged to meet him for coffee and lunch in Maesteg, and travelled up by train rather than using the car. As the day return ticket only cost me £5.50 with my rail card, cheaper than driving and better for my carbon footprint!

I went to the station by bus and missed the 10.18 train, due to a lengthy traffic queue on entering Westgate Street. If I'd known, I could have got off the bus a St David's hospital and walked half the distance to the station in good time. The trouble is extensive sewer repair works in the lower section of the street creating a choke point for buses and commercial vehicles accessing the city centre. Still, it gave me time to pop into a Market shop and buy some memory foam cushion insoles, as the ones in my winter shoes have worn thin enough to make them uncomfortable to wear. It left me with plenty of time to queue for a ticket and take the 11.18 instead.

The fifty two minute journey is pleasant, passing through a still verdant rural landscape after leaving  Cardiff suburbs behind. There are touches of autumn colour here and there, but most of the leaves are now darker, almost olive green, as a result of milder air temperatures and no frost. The train takes the main line westwards, passing St Fagans and Pontyclun, then turning north after Bridgend to enter the broad Llynfi Valley. 

There were once coal mines lower down the valley, but Maesteg was built on the benefits from the early iron industry, and is the main town of the old Borough, with an ancient Parish church, Llangynwyd, first planted in the sixth century on the hilltop ridge road, as with other ancient Celtic Christian sites in South Wales.

Chris met me at the station, which is quite close to the town centre. Just beyond the end of the line is an Asda supermarket so there's a large car park, to support both shoppers and park and ride travellers. A useful late twentieth century re-purposing of old railway properties, I think. We walked to the main square and had lunch there in a cafe opposite the town hall, an All Day Breakfast for both of us.

The town hall itself is a huge complex of well used buildings, with a covered market at ground level and a large auditorium above it, an outdoor market and the Town Council offices adjacent. The covered market is redundant since the outdoor market acquired a collection of retail units around its periphery, and is being re-purposed as a library. It's an imposing collection of late Victorian municipal buildings, substantially built in stone and brick, visible across town as they rise above the three storey shops in the main street.

We had much to talk about and shared worries about the continued contraction of the Church in Wales and its public ministry, in the Valleys as well as the city. He worries, as I do that the organisational changes which group Parishes into larger entities in which fewer full time clergy chase around looking after a smaller, more dispersed and mobile membership, will detract from the traditional pastoral role of being present and available in the community for all, knowing people and being known, whether church members or not.

Given our shared history, inspired by world mission through our relationship with USPG it's not at all surprising that we both see the present and future of the church based on the call to flourish in the grass roots of local community, growing its plans for witness, service and proclamation from the bottom up not the top down.

While we were in the cafe getting lunch, I noted how many people Chris stopped to greet and chat with as they came and went. His Parish is the neighbouring one, although he also works Maesteg town itself, and after nine years is a familiar local figure uo and down the Llynfi Valley. That's how it should be for an Anglican Parish Priest.

I've never doubted the need for structures to hold us all together and support us, but they're still too top heavy, to my way of thinking. Perhaps grass roots mission won't flourish again until much of the top heavy component withers away. It's possible this will happen, and one of the casualties will be the loss of its paid professional ministries. It would hurt badly. It would be tough getting there and recovery would be far from certain, but an entirely voluntary kind of ministry for most pastoral purposes would only take us back to where the church started from at the beginning. Would that be so terrible?

I was home again by four, and then did the week's grocery shopping before supper. The train I was on advertised that it would stop at Ninian Park station, fifteen minutes from home at the other side of the Parish. I was pleased at the prospect being home earlier, but the train didn't stop, it sped on to Cardiff Central, and had the usual 61 bus journey back instead. A programming error in the heads up display probably, using a Match Day train schedule instead of the standard one, most likely.

  

Epiphany Day

I celebrated the Eucharist of Epiphany Day this morning at St German's with a class of thirty children and sixteen adults present. The sun shone and filled the church with cheerful light. The cross I'm to give to Hamid at his baptism was on the altar with the consecrated Gifts during the service, the customary way of blessing such a special object - by association, rather than with words. Afterwards, churchwarden Peter and I discussed the forthcoming asylum appeal tribunal hearing for Hamid, due to take place next week. Peter had received a message from Hamid's lawyer requesting statements from us both, prior to our attendance at the court hearing. 

I emailed the lawyer when I got back and later received a phone call, during which she interviewed me, drafted a statement, and then sent it to me for correction. I also need to prove to the court who I am and how I come to be ministering at St German's. The lawyer had said that you cannot assume that a law court knows anything about the church and its procedures of authorisation or the status of its representatives, and to be fair these things differ from one church to another. Apart from making a statement we conversed about matters religious, as there were things that needed a personal kind of explanation for her, since she was a Hindu. What a privilege for me to do this!

Sending a scan of my passport was easy. Statement correction took hours. I also had to write to Archbishop Barry to ask him to confirm my Permission to Officiate (PTO) in the Diocese and my role as locum priest at St German's, for the benefit of the court. A PTO isn't the subject of a certificate issued by the church. I'd quite forgotten that, and hunted around for a while in my files trying to find one. The only PTO document I could find dated back to the eighties. It was signed by all six Welsh Bishops allowing me to represent the work of my employer, mission agency USPG in the Province. Quite a rare document, of which I am proud, a relic of a very formative period in my working life in which my ministry as a missionary priest and preacher was established permanently, on the frontiers of mother church, rather than at its centre. Thank God, I'm still there, still being blessed.
   

College generations

Even after a good night's sleep I was tired getting up today. Clare needed to car to get to school, so I walked to College. With just moderate gusts of wind it was bitterly cold. After the Eucharist, there were mini croissants for breakfast along with toast, and that made a comforting change. Porridge might have been better for the weather however. I chatted with students over breakfast, worked in my office  until Peter returned from a meeting at the Baptist College, then after a brief conversation with him I went into town on the bus with a few tech tasks to perform in the CBS office and bring Julie up to speed on preparations to switch over to a new Sage accounts package. 

Tomorrow we're having a training session on aspects of account set-up. After my long conversation with Ashley last night, there were lots of preliminary questions to be asked about what we can and cannot achieve with the new system, so I spent an hour brainstorming and writing them down on a large piece of paper - I know I will arrive after our trainer and it's vital to get as many of our basic questions as possible answered in advance of tackling the hard stuff. By the time I'd done that, I had to return to College in time to welcome Canon Robert Donkin guest preacher for Evensong in the series I prepared for this term. He was in St Mike's three years after I left. We got to know each other when I worked for USPG in Wales a decade later. Now he's Rector of Caerphilly, where I did my first curacy. So, it was a special pleasure to welcome him and introduce him to students before the service began.

In the sacristy beforehand, he admitted he was nervous about preaching in College, his first visit since he left. I told him that was how I felt when I started as a voluntary tutor eighteen months ago. He delivered a beautifully crafted address that stated with great clarity and directness all that I could have wished he might say about formation for a 'Discipleship of Sacrifice' our theme for the term. Back in the eighties, I preached for him several times and looked after Sunday services in Aberaman when he was on holiday. This was the first time I had ever heard him preach. He's a credit to the College, as it was in my era. 

Despite all the flaws and limitations of training in those days, (it's so much better now than it was then) we were blessed with some great mentors and role models.Their influence helped to sustain us through decades of ministry. Many things we learned, we questioned in those days, only later realising their value and feeling grateful we hadn't been spared them.  Now we're the ones mentoring and influencing those in the position we were forty years ago. It's a bit awe inspiring and nerve wracking for us oldies, but what a privilege to share the same vocation and the same passion for mission and evangelism with people shaped by such different environments.

Nobody in this generation of ordinands chooses to engage in Church ministry as a secure option. Very few did forty years ago too, the change of ethos in the world we inhabited put an end to that idea. In my college time, we began learning anew the meaning of mission and evangelism. We were just awakening to the fact that the centuries of established 'Christendom' were over, like it or not. We were still digesting the assertion Paul Tillich made a generation before us, that Christians now had to "earn the right to speak of God"   We were slow learners. You could say were were too late, considering the demise of the church since we were young and full of zeal. What's so humbling is a new generation, eager to continue on the same path, despite challenge and discouragement.

God never leaves Himself without witness.

  

Early morning meditation

I was due in St Mike's college chapel this morning at 7.45am, to lead Matins and give a meditation. I'd spent many hours crafting my brief effort, and retired to bed worried about waking to the alarm. I don't like active early mornings, even if I do wake up at first light. I found it hard to settle. 

I realised that I'd forgotten to mention in my addess that this day in the Anglican calendar is the annual Vigil of Prayer for World Mission.  When I worked for USPG this was a key occasion in the Church's year to draw attention to our raison d'être, and recall some outstanding Anglican pioneers who dedicated their lives to break down cultural barriers to share faith in Christ, often despite of, rather than because of huge expansion of world trade from the 17th century onwards. Important to mention this in a College where some of the students have a limited background experience of the full content and value of the church's calendar year.

Added to this, I was also thinking of Fr Bob Morgan, whose funeral my College duties prevented me from travelling to St David's to attend. After churning and turning, I got up at five thrity and re-wrote an introduction to the address mentioning the Vigil and dedicating it to Bob's memory, as it reflected the kind of incarnational theology we shared in common. You can download and read it here

I went back to bed, slept until the alarm went off, and got to College punctually. I came away relieved and satisfied, then put myself to shame by eating a cooked second  breakfast I didn't need. Hardly a good example of Advent restraint, let alone weight loss strategy. No even a good Chi Gung workout this evening could make up for that. Thankful that I didn't have to go to work after this,  went home and back to bed for a couple of hours to make up for hours lost.

After lunch I returned to College caught up on some Tutor group stuff before our tea time session, and read some sections of Teilhard de Chardin's 'Le Milieu Divin' from both the French and English copies I possess. It's something I haven't tried before, and I found doing this somewhat improved my understanding of it. He was a man of vision, ahead of his time, but his written discourse comes from the learned world of nineteenth century Jesuits, and needs decoding improve my comprehension of his passionate insight into the Christian cosmic vision. Interpretation and translation go hand in hand, I think.