I have pleasure in welcoming as Official Visitors to today’s Synod:

as Methodist representatives – the Revd Daphne Twinem from Fivemiletown together with a member of her congregation – and I do so on your behalf in a year when church leaders in the persons of Dr Harold Good (and his successor Dr Winston Graham) and Archbishop Eames have found that they have green fingers and as a result the Covenant has being nurtured between both churches through their good offices and the industry of people from both affiliations;

as Presbyterian representatives – the Revd Jack Drennan whose ministry overlaps with the Monaghan part of our Diocese and Mr Cochrane from Clabby;

Mrs Margaret Crawford, MU President Clogher Diocese, a dimension of our diocesan and church life which is vital in mission, ministry and service;

Mrs Janet Maxwell, Central Director of Communications and Head of General Synod Services in Church of Ireland House and Assistant Secretary to the General Synod.

All of you are very welcome as you join us in this meeting of Clogher’s ways.

The wider world in which we live gives us cause for alarm on a scale perhaps never before envisaged in the lifetime of the emerging generation. Continuing warfare and ethnic terrorism in the Land which is Holy to three major world religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam - alarms us as we contemplate the volatility of that part of the world with its high emotions, its deep expectations, its geographical territorialisms and its microscopic subtleties. The aftermath of September 11th 2001 in terms of human devastation, loss of confidence in the First World and the economic securities, so long unquestioned certainties in the investment and pensionable world, continues to invade our attempts to move forward because we cannot possibly move away. The human horror, the terrible tragedy, the density of degradation simply cannot be effaced. This is reality at its most real. The prospect of war in the Middle East reflecting this cocktail of creed and capitalism, ethnicity and economics, again is something from which we turn away only in the realization that it is still there when we turn back. 

The precious and fragile peace which sprouts but does not flourish in Northern Ireland is something which we must cherish and to which we as Christian people must contribute on the ground. Morale is not high in the Northern Ireland of today. We need to cling to the Godly hopes of justice and peace-making every bit as much as to the human hopes of normality and peace-keeping. The fear is widespread and surely not unfounded that it may all once again elude us, that evil will triumph where good does not abound and that we may all simply be a society incapable of grappling creatively with the idea of shared community. This is something, however, which we must do our utmost to avoid and strive vigorously to change. We are being called upon to stretch the known limits of our commitment to the future of our island beyond what we have ever done before. We are being summoned to serve in a context where the local possibilities and opportunities challenge the rhetoric of political assemblies. We are being challenged to come of age as Children of God in a world which discerns less and less need of what we hold dear and manifests less and less comprehension of what we have rarely dared to explain to the uncomprehending and the hostile – the pain and the glory of our lived faith. And yet one fears that religious indigestion is now every bit as much a feature of this Land of Saints and Scholars as is religious hunger. But we are, as Holy Scripture tells us, the new creation and new in every age. The work of God in our generation needs us and needs our collaboration.

Where do we look for survival and indeed for inspiration in all of this? One evening in August I visited Old Derryvullan Churchyard in preparation for the significant Celebration of 150 years under the guidance of today’s rector Canon Stewart of what I suppose I have to call New Derryvullan. I was immediately struck by the strategic acumen of Tigernach who is credited with the foundation of that now ancient church in the early middle ages. This was no ‘heritage religion,’ no ‘theme park pietism.’ Far from it! You need only to stand within its perimeter walls to see that its location is pivotal to its importance. To left and right it commands a view over two significant foreshores of Lough Erne. But you need also to use your imagination and your faith if you are to understand this place so representative of the cut and thrust of earlier Christianity in this area where today we carry on God’s work. 

For it was indeed a place where faithfulness to God and realism about the world where such faithfulness had to be lived out combined geographically and religiously to save you from being caught unawares, from being encircled and entrapped. In doing your religion you had to keep your eyes open, you had to look around you as well as within you. Our Diocese remains a place of watchfulness, of caution and of adventure. The spirit and the energy of those who have gone before us is something which we can and must harness towards the future. We cannot live tomorrow in the past of our glories or of our limitations. The church itself has to move forward in the midst of all of this, otherwise it will be ‘ring-roaded’ by the world. What we hold dear is sacred, vibrant, living but not in any abstracted sense of those words. We must be so, so careful that the church can never be accused of being the last resort of the unreal. 

Nonetheless, lest you think that I have neither sense of nor respect for the tradition, there still is something in both the aspiration and the inspiration of the pioneers of our faith for us to grasp and with which to move forward today and tomorrow. That is precisely the reason we have a Calendar of Saints and where better to start in contemporary Clogher than with Macartan, synod-ing as are in St Macartin’s Cathedral Hall by gracious permission of St Macartin’s rector, Canon Courtney? I use the prayer for Macartan’s Day, March 24th:

Heavenly Father, we thank you for Macartan, faithful companion of St Patrick, and builder of your church in Clogher: Build up your church through those whom you call to leadership in this generation, and strengthen your church to proclaim the gospel of reconciliation and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

This is no sentimental retrospect. As Macartan is owned by us the Diocese as the one who built the church in Clogher so we – called in the words of that Collect to leadership in our generation – ask God to build up the church through us. Standing stones simply are not enough for us today. We need to participate in a new and radical programme of construction in church and community, in sanctuary and society, which goes far beyond repair and conservation in order faithfully and deliberately to collaborate with God in God’s work. Our Agenda is clearly and simply set out: proclaiming the gospel of reconciliation and peace. We cannot afford to be like those of the days of Noah. They were out for a drive, they were getting married and attending weddings, they were shopping in Safeways and Tescos, they were filling up forms, they were watching television, they were working the land, they were cutting their grass, they were surfing the Net – and suddenly – WHAM! – it was all a thing of the past. They knew nothing of the present any longer. Past gone! Present gone! No sign of a future! 

And that surely is the great challenge facing the contemporary church, the honest anxiety of church people in our more reflective and realistic moments: 

• Does it, do we, understand the world of today?
• Does it, do we, try to get to grips with the thinking and expectations of the diversity of life within which the witness of Christian people today is set?
• Does it, do we, think it is any longer, in the idiom of l’Oreal, worth it?

My suggestion is not that we seek the information in order blandly to agree, to say: Yes, in order to look more modern. Far from it! My invitation is that we seek the information in order to comprehend, to engage and to challenge what the hymn-writer called, perhaps with too much clarity for our liking: an old and weary earth. Critical engagement not compliant acquiescence, not cynical detachment is what is asked of us now.

The danger for us in looking in blank incomprehension at this range of questions is that we reveal that we know all too little of the context of mission today. The same danger holds if we think that these questions are either not worth answering or deserve only the response: No, no, no, no! The seed bed of mission may not in fact be need but death. In the Biblical tradition of service so much has always had to die in order that life in all its fullness might erupt. Our contemporary world has largely contrived to be unfamiliar with and anaesthetized from death. So it finds it virtually impossible to see the seeds of life in any type of death. But Scripture has ever told us that: unless the seed dies, there will be neither growth nor yield. Shocking though it may seem, this is, I feel, a deeply Biblical insight which has eluded us as we ourselves have colluded with the modern as a definition of the important, with success as a definition of service and indeed with productivity as a definition of discipleship. In my own simple way I have always felt that the church must become more humble in order to be more effective, must listen intently in order to speak authoritatively, must act consistently with its Biblical Title Deeds if it is to be taken seriously as a focal point of justice, mercy and love. I also feel that the quest for the modern leads to repeated disappointment. We should be looking for the essential. We should not be dissipating our energy in a quest for the superficial whether it be how we do, or even more alarming, what we do. 

Too often in the Church of Ireland we indulge ourselves in party politics – high, low, liberal, traditional, evangelical: each is and all are a focus of ridicule and suspicion to someone somewhere somehow. This partisanship is doing little other than eating away at our strength and confusing the people who are our parishes. If clergy and laity alike are to share – and perhaps even more of a challenge: accept – ministry with and from one another, then we need to identify and grasp essentials, fundamentals and begin to begin at the beginning – synodically: coming together in open trust in order to go out again strengthened, informed and energetic in our proclamation of reconciliation and peace. Reconciliation and peace: the process has to happen first and only then can we expect to have the dividend. And it has to happen within the Church of Ireland itself as well as between church and society, pew and platform if we are to contribute afresh to the new life waiting to happen in our countries. 

As we are all too well aware, we live in a divided and complex society. Fear breeds its own inertia, suffering breeds its own hopelessness, sectarianism breeds its own End Game. We struggle day in day out both with reality as it is and with reality as it might yet be. Some of us are here by birth, some by accident, some by design, some by calling, some by profession – but we are all here under God. Such is the challenge laid down before us by 1 John 3:2 Dear friends, we are now God’s children; what we shall be has not yet been disclosed …Here surely is the point at which reality as we shy away from it and reality as it advances to meet us come together. The future shape of the church’s witness is largely in our hands. What are we going to be and what are we going to do to bring to bear on our fractured and frazzled society the strength and the gentleness of God’s Kingdom which we say is already our Kingdom. How is that Kingdom to come in our time and what will inform its enactment? 

From our religion today we should ask a number of things: 

• Personal piety
• Public responsibility 

but the third P:

• Political pronouncement

is something about which we should be increasingly wary. I know full well that it is what many people want to hear and that it has become in so many quarters a definition of leadership but it is riddled with problems. The rhetoric of blanket condemnation or bland approval is dangerous for an institution such as ours – the church – precisely because the Word of God is also the Action of God. In contemporary spin – if I may divert and indulge – the talk of God is the walk of God. A danger of frightening proportions is to be found when the talk out-walks the walk and begins to out-talk itself. We then look foolish and leave ourselves wide open to the sort of perception which erodes our credibility as people of God, contributing vitally and often perforce invisibly to the shaping of tomorrow’s society today. Because one of the great watchwords and war-cries of today’s society is: What you see is what you get. I draw you back to my suggestion that we need to become more humble in order to be more effective in our present life beyond death.

There are two words – each of them sadly overworked and terribly tired in the language of today, yet desperately in need of fresh life and vigorous application - at which I want to look as we begin a process of radical appraisal of ourselves as a Diocese, as the people of God called to witness, worship and convey the Good News of Christ in our time and in our place. We are here and we ought to be delighted to be the Diocese of Clogher, the Church of Ireland and the Anglican Communion in the same place and at the same time. It would certainly be an insult to the Gospel were we to dare to keep it for ourselves, polishing it up occasionally like a piece of family silver produced only at Christmas for in-house enjoyment. We need always to push out our boundaries, stretch our spiritual imagination, as we ask that fundamentally Biblical question, coming as it did from a hopeful but floundering proto-disciple like any one of us: Who, then, is my neighbour?

The first word at which I want to look is mission, the second is ministry and each of them lies deep in the best of what is Clogher Diocese. 

The mission of the church is an activity which we all both give and receive. Were it not for the pioneering work ascribed to Macartan this Diocese would not have the shape, the feel which it has. Its boundaries would be different and, as history beyond the control of any of us has dealt us its hand, it would not have the cross-border reality with which it now has to cope. At the heart of the active life of every baptized Christian is the sense of belonging to two worlds – being a citizen of the earthly kingdom and being a citizen of the kingdom of heaven. I make no apology for using words, phrases which seem quaint and irrelevant in this post-modern age of ours. In fact if modernism had no room for us, post-modernism with its much more open agenda ought to have. This overlap, this doubleness of being is what gives us the urgency of faith – to proclaim and to do. We are, as I said earlier, in the words of John’s Letter not yet what we might be. 

The sense of movement, the new direction is what lies within the sending which is mission. Such sending and being sent is vital precisely because it lies deep in the being of God. But the whole scene has changed and has had to change. Cultural sensitivity, local context, personal identity have emerged as vital components in appropriate and effective mission. These developments are, however, in direct conflict with an unreflective understanding of what it is to be a Reformed religion and there is so much work to be done in understanding twenty-first century mission by those of us long familiar with mission in our own church. The other thing which has changed is that Christianity is no longer a new religion. The challenge to us now is to grapple with brown field sites and with opportunities for in-fill. We need to plant, to nurture long before we or any succeeding generations presume to reap and to knead – much less attractive options than what we fondly imagine to be the green field sites of Paul, Peter and others of their generation but real to us and probably unpalatable to many if not most. These sites are local every bit as much as they are foreign. We need to dig much deeper today in our missioning if we are to avoid the disappointment which lurks behind every corner of initiative. These are the questions we dare not articulate:

• why does nobody want to come?
• why does nobody want to hear?
• will they ever come back?
• where have they all gone?

In Clogher Diocese we are very fortunate to have the ingredients of mission comprehensively and imaginatively understood. For many years – and in this regard I wish to pay tribute publicly to my predecessors in the Diocese – we have had much of the coming and going of individuals in mission which has enabled us to picture and to participate in the internationalism of mission. We also have well-established organs of home mission, tried and tested in the past and the present and themselves grappling courageously and creatively with the changed scene: the Mothers’ Union, whose President Mrs Crawford we welcome today and whom we congratulate on a most effective tenure of office, the Youth Councils throughout the Diocese, the radical Board of Social Responsibility, Board of Mission, Ministry of Healing and Board of Education together with many others challenging young and old alike to send and be sent. Mrs Crawford will address us this afternoon and I hope that we will all be back in the Hall to hear what she has to say. The continued integration of these individuals and bodies is very much our work of the next years together with an openness to fresh directions and contemporary expressions – informed and inspired at all times both by the gifts of the Gospel and the knowledge of the world around it and its secular agencies. The initiation and development of links, what the Anglican Consultative Council calls Bonds of Affection, within the Anglican Communion and the Porvoo Communion of European Protestant Churches is for me a priority of enrichment, of two-way traffic within our wider self-definition and an opportunity to share our faith beyond our own familiar field of experience. 

The versatility offered by both the Church Hymnal 2000 and the Book of Common Prayer 2004 will contribute significantly to this openness of access and to the expression of our faith today. The Hymnal is already established as the norm across our Diocese and I have authorized for use and intent to make available soon a number of the Services approved by General Synod from what will be the Book of Common Prayer 2004. And I’ve done so in order to enable us all to be familiar with it before 2004, to enable us to launch it in knowledge rather than in ignorance, in joy rather than in fear, in expectation rather than in resentment. It will be for clergy and readers with congregations across the Diocese to use it effectively and sensitively but with an eye to the future as it is, again to use 1 John, part of what we are yet to become. It is, in fact, not an Alternative to anything that has gone before. It is the Church of Ireland’s contemporary Book of Common Prayer and we are the contemporary Diocese of Clogher.

Synodical Reform is very much on the agenda of the General Synod of the Church of Ireland and the Working Group of the General Synod is to report with concrete proposals in the near future, within the lifetime of those to be elected to Membership of General Synod this year. It seemed entirely proper that as a Diocesan Synod we should have a debate on this issue. Our own Canon Courtney who is significantly involved in the wider debate has kindly agreed to lead this discussion and I very much hope that for this reason as for others you will all return for the second half of Synod this afternoon. 

Ministry I have deliberately taken after looking at mission. Ministry is a provision which the church makes for the facilitation and carrying through of God’s mission in the world. This ultimately is something we understand only in part. Even before the Church of Ireland called its Summit on Ministry for earlier this month the ordained ministry has been in deep crisis and, having attended the Summit with other members of the diocese, I have to say remains in deep crisis. And my own impression is that the same holds for lay ministry. Here we find ourselves at a cross-roads and not for the first time. Perhaps the real alarm is that we are still at the cross-roads and have not moved on. Our commitment is and rightly has been to provide ordained ministry country-wide not as an end in itself but to facilitate the regular and instinctive ministry of people to one another and to our neighbours in God’s name and in God’s way. It was never the intention of the church to invent a clerical caste over against the people of God. The coming and going of people who share a common faith and exercise it as lay and ordained is how the church is conceived and this is how it works best. Knowing one another is the best chance we have to develop trust and dialogue. The church is local because it is universal and it is universal because it is local. And this oscillation, this elasticity is important because the Anglican voice needs to be part of the debates, the planning, the consolidation, the activities which mould the society we are yet to become and it has to be articulated and enacted through its people on the ground, its leaders in this generation, laity and clergy. 

Historically this ministry had been carried out in parishes. Bishop Duffy’s brother, Patrick Duffy’s Landscapes of South Ulster, a Parish Atlas of the Diocese of Clogher which I received via Bishop Hannon makes abundantly clear the settled and shared parochial nature of our society. But the parochial model with one church building and a resident incumbent has long been under strain, has long ago been re-thought, too often at the last moment when crisis is unavoidable and the past is unsustainable, when the prospects of an appointment of such an incumbent are not real. Groupings and unions have become a norm and many previously independent parishes have, to their surprise, found that they have a new life in the changed circumstances. But even these are remaining, in that dreadful word ‘vacant’ for longer and longer. Parochial incumbency has long been stretched beyond sustainable limits and the reasons for this are not hard to find. The urban focus of our world has largely stripped the assets of our rural populations. The thirst for individual fulfilment has eroded the sense of community whereby people came together in and out of church. Isolation and job dissatisfaction eat silently at the morale of clergy. Deep anxieties about the sustainability of a livelihood in the country from farming, so long and so integrally part of our human landscape and in a way which needed so little explanation, lived as it is so naturally, obviously and tangibly close to God, again have opened up seismic cracks in what was once benignly predictable. The farming population grapple with BSE, Foot and Mouth, water-logged ground as harvests rot and infection spreads – and all in a world which is groaning under the re-shuffling of over-production. And our Diocese is among those with the greatest concentration of rural members of the Church of Ireland in the whole island.

New forms of ministry will have to be found, forms of ministry which are no longer new but which still need to be implemented will have to be tried in this Diocese. A conservative prognosis would lead me to suggest that by the year 2020 – towards which the Church of Ireland’s Commission on Ministry is doing its work – there will be far fewer parochial units here in Clogher and that the effective staffing of those parishes will then be no easier than it is today. Delighted though I am to be associated with the same School – Portora - as the hymn-writer Henry Francis Lyte, I fear that the ready identification of change and decay in all around in his universally loved hymn Abide with me does nobody any favours when facing the reality of change. Too easy is it to envision a Golden Age when all was better, the Good Old Days, the seductive allure of Music Hall unreality. We are acutely aware of this in today’s Clogher with 6 (and soon 7) of our incumbencies ‘vacant’. And I can only presume that this realization has been around for a long time. The question: When are we going to get a Rector? has been replaced by the question: Do you think we’re going to be able to get a Rector? And there is another real question: Are we going to be able to hold a Rector? This is a dangerous situation for all of us. Stipendiary clergy are becoming a collector’s item. When parishioners begin to feel unloved, when clergy begin to feel important, the church needs to read these signs with care and compassion, with the sharp focus of realism as well as with the soft touch of concern. 

In honouring those who lead worship, I should like to pay tribute to our retired clergy, one auxiliary priest, parochial and diocesan readers who minister faithfully week by week and sustain the witness of Sunday worship in parishes across our diocese. We should be grateful for their service and commitment to the life of our Diocese and the needs of its people. I should like to record with gratitude the ministry exercised by the Revd Colin Bell – now gone - in Colaghty Parish and by the Revd Dr Brian Crowe – soon to go - in Galloon Group of Parishes and to wish both of them well in their new paths in life. I should also like to welcome the Revd David Cole to Carrickmacross Group of Parishes, the Revd Ian Berry to Monaghan Group of Parishes and the Revd David Luckman to the assistance curacy of St Macartin’s Cathedral Enniskillen.

The collaboration and the courage of all members of this Diocese will be required for us to grow in faith and in ministry over the next two decades. Our local thinking, planning and acting will have to be done by us just as strategically as did Macartan and Tigernach do theirs in their day as we seek to respond to the call to leadership in our generation and seek God’s strengthening to proclaim the same gospel of reconciliation and peace.