Chelmsford Diocesan Evangelical Association Meeting with Bishop Stephen Cottrell 2nd April 2011

Saturday 2 April 2011

Meeting with Bishop Stephen Cottrell

(followed by AGM)

Meadgate Church Centre

Meadgate Avenue

Chelmsford

CM2 7LJ

10.00 to 1.00
Coffee from 9.30
 

Our new bishop will lead us in a Meditation on Scripture, followed by a 'question and answer' session.

Annual General Meeting begins at 12.30pm

Enquiries 01245 492741

Parish Share: time for change

On Saturday we had a meeting of the Chelmsford Diocesan Synod. For the last few years Synod has been a bit of a ‘trial by ordeal’ of dull presentations. This time, however, we had what I must say was the best presidential address I have heard in many years, by our new bishop Stephen Cottrell — full of vigour and challenge. Amongst the notable things he said, incidentally, was that we need more stipendiary clergy, not fewer. Hurrah for that idea!

Unfortunately, the following items then had a depressing sense of déjà vu, not least when it came to finance.

Once again, we are in the red, but this time the number of ‘defaulting’ parishes has doubled from previous years, despite an overall increase in giving levels and strenuous efforts by the diocesan finance team to improve matters.

There are a number of possible reasons why this is so: lack of effort, lack of commitment, lack of awareness of our ‘mutual responsibility’ — all of these are things that have been identified and addressed.

There is, however, another possibility, which is simply that the whole system of parish share, on which our diocesan finances depend, is wrong. Given that it has never actually worked satisfactorily in all the almost thirty years I’ve been in the diocese, there is something to be said for this view.

In The Road to Growth : towards a thriving church (London: Church House, 2005), Bob Jackson is fiercely critical of the share system and is worth quoting at length:

A parish share system is a subsidy arrangement. [...] Most churches, however, have come to believe that what is actually a benign subsidy system to them is in reality a wicked taxation system upon them. [...] It drives a damaging wedge between parish and diocese. The diocese, the operator of the subsidy system, gets bitten by the mouths it is feeding because the owners of the mouths believe, wrongly, that the diocese is taking their food from them. ‘Bringing in the share’ has become the major point of contact between many parishes and their dioceses. Often, when church hears from its diocese, it is in connection with a demand for money. Diocesan leaders often appear to assess local clergy and churches not on the basis of their effectiveness for the kingdom of heaven but on whether or not they are paying their parish share. (157-8)

The last point is particularly apposite. In 2008, Chelmsford introduced an official ‘award’ scheme for parishes, based entirely on their contribution to ‘parish share’, with ‘Platinum’ at the top, followed by ‘Gold’, ‘Silver’, ‘Bronze’ and ‘Won’t Pay’. Parishes are actually told which bracket they come into, and those in the ‘Won’t Pay’ category are subject to sanctions (and a visit from the finance team). Surely nothing could drive home more unhelpfully the idea that ‘the diocese’ is only interested in financial performance?

Intense and detailed attention has been given to this issue, yet the scheme never works! Indeed, as was admitted at the Synod, last year was worse than normal.

Is it not, therefore, time to risk trying something else? The obvious approach would be to shorten the ‘supply lines’ between costs and payments — in other words, to get parishes to pay their direct costs as directly as possible.

(As it happens, this would be quite straightforward to initiate, with PCCs paying the minister a proportion of stipend which is then declared on the minister’s annual return of income and credited to the PCC against ‘share’. The computers will take care of the rest.)

It is deeply frustrating to hear the same debate every couple of years, and yet it was greatly refreshing to hear the bishop speaking convincingly about growth. So I will close with a quote from the ‘blurb’ on Jackson’s book:

Bob Jackson’s The Road to Growth confronts us with some truths about ourselves. Sometimes uncomfortable, always provocative, and ultimately helpful, this is a book that helps us imagine a new future.

The author of this commendation? Stephen Cottrell, Bishop of Reading. There is hope for us yet!

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The Bishop of Chelmsford and Human Sexuality — here we go again?

Long-term readers of this blog, and that under the heading Chelmsford Anglican Mainstream, can hardly have been ignorant of the significant difficulties experienced by conservatives and traditionalists in the Diocese of Chelmsford caused by former Bishop John Gladwin’s stance on human sexuality.

Bishop John was, amongst other things, a patron of the campaign group ‘Changing Attitude’. The fact that he took up this position in 2006, whilst already in difficult face-to-face discussions with representatives of those conservative and traditionalists in his own diocese did much to heighten the tension.

The stance of Changing Attitude, incidentally, may be gathered from the following comments in its Tenth Anniversary Report on the ideas put forward in a book titled Same Sex Intimacies: Families of choice and other life experiments:

Social changes are affecting both non-heterosexual and heterosexual lives alike, underpinned by a widely accepted friendship ethic in which men and women who have rejected the ‘heterosexual assumption’ are creating ways of being that point to a more diverse culture of relationships than law, tradition and the church have sanctioned. [...] Many individuals in contemporary society have a strong sense that opportunities now exist on a greater scale than ever before for the construction of more open and democratic relationships than are allowed by the traditional family.

The disquiet with Bishop John’s approach began before his appointment to Chelmsford. Interviewed on Channel 4 news at the time of Gene Robinson’s election, Bishop John was asked rather directly, ‘Either a practising homosexual is to be appointed as a bishop or he is not. Which way should it go?’

His reply was thus:

Well, that’s just exactly the sort of way not to approach this problem and this issue. If this move is something which is good to the Holy Spirit ... um ... and to the people of God, it will flourish. If it isn’t then time will wither it upon the vine. So I think we need to exercise a little bit of patience and to allow some space to see whether a development like this is going to be wholesome to the Church or otherwise.

The response of many us would be, well we’ve waited and now we know.

As a Diocese, therefore, Chelmsford does therefore have ‘form’ with regard to the position of incoming bishops on the issue of human sexuality and their comments to the press. It was thus with some concern that I read the following in the Church of England Newspaper for April 1^st, regarding newly-elected Bishop Stephen Cottrell’s views on Bishop James Jones’s recent highly controversial remarks to the Liverpool Diocesan Synod:

Bishop Cottrell said: “I think it was a very helpful and interesting contribution to the ongoing discussion. I think one of the things which probably distresses me the most is that we’re not very good at actually having an open discussion about these issues. It can often be a kind of megaphone diplomacy, or megablog diplomacy!”

‘Helpful and interesting’ was certainly not how Bishop Jones’s remarks were regarded in conservative and traditionalist circles — ‘alarming and divisive’ would be more like it, especially when one takes into account Bishop Jones’s apparent attempt to position his diocese halfway between Africa and TEC (and therefore not with the rest of the Church of England!)

The really difficult point to accept, however, is Bishop Stephen’s assertion that there has been a lack of ‘open discussion’. On the contrary, one sometimes feels there has been discussion about almost nothing else for more than a decade. I myself was on a working party, put together by the Bishop of Chelmsford before John Gladwin, which drew up a study document on this subject for use around the parishes.

In any case, one must ask whether more discussion is what is required. It has long struck me that the first ‘dialogue’ in Scripture, recorded in Genesis 3, did not end well for the human race — and that one also began with the famous word, “Has God indeed said ...?”

Bishop Cottrell is well-known as a member of the Liberal Catholic body ‘Affirming Catholicism’, which also includes Dean Jeffrey John amongst its members. It is perfectly reasonable to ask about the Bishop, therefore, what it is in the ‘AffCath’ approach to life and faith that he finds particularly appealing. It is also reasonable to ask, since he has called for “open discussion” what exactly he thinks on the subject of human sexuality and how and why he has reached these opinions.

The truth is, though, that I wish it were unnecessary.

John P Richardson
17 April 2010

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"Use your vote!" says the Diocese of Chelmsford (from my dire Synod)

A couple of days ago I posted on how I'd Saturday's meeting of our Diocesan Synod was dire. Well, as a sample, here is the address given by the acting Bishop of Chelmsford, Rt Revd Dr Laurie Green. Not that this was itself entirely dire - I just thought people might like to see, and perhaps comment on, what was a fairly average part of the presentations we were given. Maybe it was just me! (And anyway, it plugs his book.)

General Election 2010

Christianity believes fundamentally in incarnation – it believes that God has become intricately involved with the world and its issues through the life of Jesus the Son of God. Incarnation means, in other words, God is down to earth.

The Good News is that God’s grace is changing the world so that it might conform to God’s reign of justice, peace, love and mercy. The Church community therefore has the responsibility to work alongside that divine grace and so be in the forefront of the business of, as the bible has it, “turning the world upside down” because of God’s hopes and plans for it. The Christian life of witness must therefore have this same mark, and engage the thorny issues and complex challenges of life together on this planet and turn it upside down – that is, the Christian life must be politically engaged. Little wonder that the widely accepted ‘Five Marks of Mission’ ¹ describes one element of mission as “transforming the unjust structures of society”. So the upcoming General Election might be seen as nothing less than a mission challenge.

Let’s look together at the earliest pages of the Bible, for whilst science helps us discern how creation may have happened, the book of Genesis goes much deeper and tells us that the meaning of creation is that God brings order out of chaos, society out of anarchy – and what’s more that we have a duty laid upon us by God to work with the grain of that creation and to be stewards of it. A steward is one who tends, one who cares for and ministers, and the Book of Genesis tells us that we are here to be stewards of all creation and to minister to one another. Now this term ‘minister’ is the same word quite rightly taken by the leaders of government – ministers – because they too have this same mandate, to be servants and stewards in the service of the people in the society they serve. So politicians and the Church share in many respects this duty of care for the society we share, and indeed the Church must encourage vocations to the political life – that we should minister together in this way, caring for the whole of God’s creation, and especially for the human beings within it.

Genesis also tells us that God creates us ‘in his own image’. So any lack of respect and care for one another in society is therefore an affront to the image of God that is in us, and must be challenged and sorted out. The quest for Christians is therefore to seek out those situations where the image of God in our fellows is not being respected or where that image is marred, and to do something about it. This is why the prophets, and Jesus too, condemn those who use power or privilege to take advantage of the underprivileged, for that very action mars the image of God in those being oppressed, and indeed mars the image of God in the oppressor.

Now, the Church talks a lot about this in its prayers and in its teachings but the Bible goes further. The Bible does not just talk of principles of stewardship and care for God’s image in us and in others – as wonderful as those principles are – but consistently connects those principles with concrete behaviour. It sets out specific means of redressing wrongs rather than merely rehearsing a list of abstract notions about it. The most obvious example is the Ten Commandments – and this because, as Jesus puts it, “by their fruits you shall know them.” Again, in Matt 25:32ff, the parable of the sheep and the goats, the right relationship with God is equated with concrete acts of compassion and justice towards the less fortunate. The passage asks us, when did we last clothe the naked, feed the hungry or visit the local prison – it does not just talk about that being a nice ‘idea’. So the Bible is calling for us to engage with these issues, not just to think or talk about it.

We might note too that some people try to argue that whilst the Bible is concerned that we care for individuals, the Bible does not spell out that we should engage in politics, first because that is not so much about individuals as groups and the wider society, and second, we should rather keep ourselves pure, and politics may corrupt us. But look again at the Book of Genesis. God creates the individual – ‘Adam’ – but it’s not long before Adam is pestering God for companionship. He could not stand to be alone because God has made him a human being for companionship – a social being. In the Book of Exodus, Moses builds a society – not simply a person for God but a ‘People of God’. Similarly, Jesus gathers his discipleship community – the new Israel – and tells them that, when two or three are gathered – the godly revolution is on. God certainly does care about individuals, but the Bible tells us even more about the building of godly communities. Because we are children of the same heavenly Father we are brothers and sisters on the earth and so we seek not just the good of one, nor even some, but we Christians seek what has become known as the ‘Common Good’ – the good of all and every one of God’s children.

Any arrangement in society that favours the rich over the poor or the strong over the weak is in violation of the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Beatitudes of Jesus. Any such exploitative arrangements are in opposition to a biblical understanding of the Common Good and our duty as Christians. From the Genesis mandate and through to the vision of the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation, we are exhorted to work to change such unjust systems.

Seeking the Common Good, finding structural ways of loving our neighbours, is otherwise known as politics. Of course, the world of politics may not appeal to all of us, but we all have that mandate upon to engage it in some way or other from the moment in our baptism when the sign of the cross is made upon our forehead and those words are spoken by the minister – “do not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified” – in other words to get our hands dirty – “and fight valiantly” against all such evil and sin: to risk ourselves in the battle for the Kingdom of God.

In the end, we must ask ourselves the simple question: ‘Am I happy with Britain today?’ If I feel that this society of ours conforms in every respect to my vision of the Kingdom of God then I might try to convince myself that there is indeed no need for politics. But if I feel that mandate upon me to change the world, to turn it upside down so that it more readily conforms to the values of God’s Kingdom, then engagement in politics, at least as a committed and informed voter, is my duty and the duty of us all.

And when it comes to determining how to vote we should not simply apply the usual criterion of ‘what policies are in my own best interest?’ but ask rather, ‘what policies offer most opportunity for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven?’ For those who have time it is therefore well worth while to submit each policy on offer to the scrutiny of a theological analysis rather than merely apply the secular criteria of utility or expediency. To help you do just that you may wish to refer to the new edition of my book ‘Let’s Do Theology’² which shows you how to take a particular issue or concern and apply biblical and theological analysis to it. Otherwise, surf the web for theological reviews of specific policies. However you do it, make sure that the way you vote is determined by a prayerful and Christian perspective. Play your part in God’s mission to ‘transform the unjust structures of society’ that they may more conform to the Divine will for this wonderful world God has created.

Bishop Laurie Green

1 There are five things which the Diocese of Chelmsford is committed to doing:

1. Proclaiming the Good News of the Kingdom.
2. Teaching, baptising and nurturing new believers.
3. Responding to human need by loving service.
4. Seeking to transform unjust structures of society.
5. Striving to safeguard the integrity of creation and to sustain and renew the earth.

2 “Let’s Do Theology” is now available in a completely revised and updated edition from Mowbray/Continuum. 2009.

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The 'indigenous people' of Chelmsford

One of the (many) things that people seem not to like about Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party, is his use of the term ‘indigenous people’ to describe the white population of the UK. Thus the BBC report on his appearance on Question Time describes how,

... those he described as the “indigenous people” felt shut out in their own country. “We are the aborigines here,” he said.

I was thus somewhat amused to read the following in the ‘Statement of Needs’ produced to help the Diocese of Chelmsford in its search for a new bishop:

There have been significant areas of church growth in some of the most multi-cultural parts of the Diocese and in our more rural parts we have seen the ageing of the indigenous people and this is particularly so within the Church.

Not only, it seems, am I a member of Griffin’s indigenous people, but the Church of England has to rub my nose in the fact that I am getting old!

John Richardson

(Exits left, Morris dancing awkwardly)

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Great Success for CABC 9

The ninth Chelmsford Anglican Bible Conference today was, I'm glad to say, a great success. Over 230 people came to the Central Baptist Church, Chelmsford, to hear Paul Perkin speaking on the Servant Songs from Isaiah.

The day began with a welcome from the Bishop of Barking, the Rt Revd David Hawkins, pictured right with his wife. David  welcomed the delegates and affirmed the aim of CABC, to put biblical teaching at the heart of the Diocese of Chelmsford.

Prayer and Praise times were led by Chris Taylor and a team from St Peter's Harold Wood.

This was the largest attendance at CABC since it was launched at the Cathedral nine years ago. The reason for moving to the Baptist Centre, however, was quite simply the ease of the venue, which offers great facilities at a reasonable price!

My personal thanks go to Carolan Casey and all those who helped to make the day run smoothly. We must now look forward to CABC 10 - the last one planned in the present series - when we are welcoming Don Carson to teach on John's Gospel.


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Going down: the 'inexorable' decline of rural churchgoing?

One of the things I am doing at the moment is chairing the Saffron Walden Deanery Church Growth Task Group - a bit of a mouthful, but it was set up in the context of establishing our 'Deanery Vision' to come up with practical suggestions as to how to increase Sunday church attendance.

In general, it has been a positive exercise, but in preparation for this week's Synod meeting, I sought to update the initial figures we started with when establishing our 'base line' for growth. These were derived from the annual 'Statistics for Mission' submitted by each congregation. Previously I had the figures for what is called 'Normal Sunday Attendance', for the years 2001-2006. I have since been able to add the figures for 2008 (as yet, I've not got hold of the 2007 figures).

My reaction when I saw the apparent decline was to go back and double check the figures for 2006. Sadly, they turned out to be correct.

As a caveat, I have to point out that these figures do not include every congregation, and therefore are not an 'absolute' total for the whole Deanery. There are also variations in the ways that congregations establish and submit these figures, which means that they are difficult to compare between different churches. However, I have assumed they will remain reasonably consistent within the same congregation over the (relatively) short span of eight years.

The graph does not make happy viewing! I did suggest that we might be turning a corner, if it turns out that 2007 was actually lower than 2008, but I suspect this is unlikely. The truth is, we are quite possibly seeing a predictable sharp decline due to the bias towards the 65+ age group in our congregations. Intriguingly, the biggest losses have actually been amongst the biggest congregations -but there is no obvious reason why this might be so.

I am not saying from this 'we're all doomed'. I am saying the church in our area could be in real trouble very shortly - not least because declining membership results in declining income. And trouble here spells trouble for the rest of the diocese since, because we are rated as a 'rich' area, our parish shares are proportionately higher than in other parts of the diocese, which therefore rely, to some extent, on giving from areas like our own. If we cannot meet our payments, we are not the only ones to suffer.

The Diocese of Chelmsford has just told us that it has to lose 47 stipendiary clergy by 2016 - one of whom will be from our area. As things are going, we will soon have just four conglomerations of parishes (either that, or, as someone else cynically put it at the Synod, there will be just one big Parish of Essex). The smallest will be ourselves with three, and the largest Saffron Walden itself, with over a dozen. These will be run by maybe no more than half-a-dozen stipendiary clergy and probably the same number of non-stipendiaries.

I passionately believe we could overcome the challenges this brings, but we need to be allowed three things: first, the authority to start our own initiatives, using lay people to lead services and to preach and teach; secondly, the ability to raise and disburse funds locally; thirdly, the ability to recruit and deploy locally our own church workers (whether lay or ordained).

So long as we remain tied to a central authority which insists on controlling local strategy, we will continue to be frustrated in our hopes and efforts.

John Richardson

15 October 2009

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Is the Diocese of Chelmsford Christian?

I have just been having a quick read through the Dioceses’s Statement of Needs, which has been prepared as part of the process of looking for a new bishop. This process is something in which I’ve already taken a serious interest, following the failure to give sufficient notification to clergy and church members to encourage their contributions. A ‘public consultation’ at which just one person turns up has clearly failed to hit the right publicity buttons.

Nevertheless, we have been assured that everyone’s views, including those of more conservative and evangelical groupings, have been heard and represented. Reading through the Statement of Needs, however, far from being reassured I find myself convinced that something is seriously adrift, which even the extended consultation period could not rectify.

Some of the statistical material is bad enough. We are now in a situation where fewer than 2% of the population of East London and Essex attends an Anglican church (p8 —interestingly about the same percentage of the population as are Hindus). Perhaps not surprisingly, Chelmsford also has one of the smallest levels of church attendance per stipendiary minister —just 116 (p8). Furthermore, between 2004 and 2008, the Normal Sunday Attendance in the Diocese fell from 28,180 to 27,236 —over 3%. Just as seriously, the electoral roll figures declined by almost 10% in the same period.

Such problems, however, are not new. Neither need they be insuperable, provided the church applies itself to mission. The real difficulty I had, however, was discerning in this Statement a truly Christian understanding of that mission.

Take, as a starting point, this from the ‘vision statement’, reproduced on the front of the document:

Our Passion: Our Passion is Jesus — Proclaiming and living out God’s love for all people.

Our Aspiration: To be a Transforming Presence in every Community, Open and Welcoming to all, and Serving all.

The idea that Jesus is the embodiment of God’s love is, of course, entirely biblical: “God demonstrates his own love for us in this,” wrote the Apostle Paul: “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8). But it is hard to be sure that this is what the Statement of Needs has in mind when it talks about ‘proclaiming and living out God’s love’.

In particular, we may ask what precisely is understood by the notion of ‘transformation’ behind the ‘Aspiration’ to be “a Transforming Presence in every Community”. Who, or what is being transformed, in what way, and how, if at all, does this come back to God saving us from his wrath and reconciling his enemies to himself through the death of his son (Rom 5:9-10)? One may search through the entire document and find no mention of the words ‘salvation’, ‘saved’ or ‘saving’. Indeed, there is seemingly no mention of the cross or Christ’s death at all. (Nor, incidentally, is there any mention of ‘Bible’, and there are only two mentions of ‘Scripture’.)

There is, admittedly, a great deal about mission. But it is couched in terms which, whilst making much of ‘God’s mission in the world’, make it hard to see what is precisely the nature of that mission in relation to what Christ has done. Thus at one point we read,

The Scriptural record reveals to us that God’s mission in Christ creates a new human community as witness to God’s redeeming purpose for all creation. That new community — the church born and nurtured in the risen life of Jesus Christ — is called to be the servant of the mission of God. (p 22, ‘Deanery Vision’ template)

But what, exactly, is the ‘mission of God’ and what, precisely, are we supposed to be doing about it? That, it seems, is open to interpretation.

I am reminded of the diocesan gathering at which the words of Stuart Townend and Keith Getty’s In Christ Alone were arbitrarily (and illegally, in violation of copyright) altered from saying that on the cross “the wrath of God was satisfied” to “the word of God was satisfied”. The explanation offered when this was queried was that many clergy in the diocese would be unable to go along with the first version. Quite so.

Thus when it comes to mission, the diocesan Statement of Needs seems to have little to say about God’s work in reconciling the world to himself through the death of his son in the light of coming judgement (indeed, words like ‘reconcile’, ‘reconciling’, ‘reconciliation’, ‘judge’, ‘judging’, ‘judgement’ are also entirely absent), and focuses instead on the church joining, as it were, with God in transforming the world in which we now live, so that it will express in the present what its final state will be in the future. In expressing their own commitment, the Bishops of the diocese thus state,

Jesus ministry was centred on the now and not yet of the Kingdom of God. This included attention to the seemingly least important in the present age, eg children and the poor. A Kingdom focus will expand our horizons beyond the church to embrace all the institutions and people of our communities as the focus of God’s mission.

But what is that mission? They continue,

In keeping with the example of Jesus, our mission and ministry needs to be contextually relevant and self-giving as we seek to demonstrate what it means to be fully human and whole. We are called to serve our communities as they live through enormous cultural and social change. This applies on the grand scale of community regeneration as well as the pastoral care of individuals. We are called to find ways to live a holistic lifestyle in a complex mix of cultural expectations.

The tragedy is not only that this is unclear but that it is scarcely discernibly Christian. Somewhere in it there may be buried St Paul’s affirmation to the Corinthian Christians,

Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures ...

Perhaps —but one cannot help feeling it is buried very deeply indeed. Of course, a biblical gloss can be put on what is contained in the Statement of Needs. It would be an even more remarkable document if one could not. Yet it is precisely a gloss —it is not what the Statement itself sets out to declare with clarity and conviction. And here is the worry, for if the next Bishop is chosen to match the understanding set out in the Statement, then he himself will hardly need to be a man of clarity and conviction.

Revd John P Richardson
1 October 2009

 Bible quotations ©The Holy Bible New International Version 1996, c1984 Grand Rapids: Zondervan

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