Press Releases08 Jun 04

Connor Diocesan Synod presidential address

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

delivered by
The Rt. Rev. Alan Harper, OBE, BA, Bishop of Connor
to
The Synod of the Diocese of Connor
on
Tuesday 8th June 2004
in
the Lagan Valley Island Centre, Lisburn

Members of the Diocesan Synod,

My presidential address for our annual meeting will touch on three major topics. Two of them are closely related, one is an issue which stands alone but has particular relevance to the life of the community in this diocese.

I want to begin with the ?stand alone? issue and then move into the inter-related topics which should occupy the bulk of our attention today.

The condition of community life in significant parts of the residential areas of what is popularly called ?loyalist? north and west Belfast, together with other areas like them elsewhere in the diocese, should be a matter of not local but national concern.

Wherever you look, whether it be in relatively homogeneous housing areas such as Highfield, Glencairn and the Shankill estate, or more diverse areas such as Tiger?s Bay, Shankill Road, Crumlin Road, Ardoyne and Glenbryn, there are certain characteristics which should fill the breast of every observer with serious concern.

* There are high levels of social and economic deprivation.
* The collapse of traditional employment opportunities based on ship building, engineering and linen; together with an extended cycle of community disruption (as much the result of flawed re-housing and redevelopment schemes as of community destabilisation through the Troubles,) has spawned a total lack of confidence in the ability of the community to do well. These communities, which once took pride in what is often called the ?protestant work ethic?, have succumbed to the dependency culture, something of which they would once have been fiercely critical.
* There are low levels of educational attainment.
* Worse still, there are low levels of belief in the educational process as the best way out of deprivation and dependency.
* There is widespread disenchantment with politics and dialogue. This is made worse by two things: a pervading sense that the tide of history is flowing against the destiny of Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom; and a loss of confidence in the ability of people who feel disempowered and left behind by events to articulate their real needs and aspirations.
* Then there is the all pervasive presence of paramilitary organisations. Paramilitarism grew out of vigilantism, in response to perceived threat and community fear. But paramilitaries are now experienced as criminal associations whose structures are tolerated and sustained through fear and the exploitation of a residual community solidarity. The truth is that communities are being destroyed by the very organisations that arose to be their protectors. Paramilitaries consume and destroy their host community.
* There are high levels of criminality, intimidation and racketeering, much of it perpetrated or licensed by paramilitary groups.
* There are high levels of substance abuse, including alcohol, illegal substances and prescription drugs, the trade in which is seen to be under paramilitary control.
* There are high levels of hopelessness and feelings of helplessness and as a result people seek respite in the false promises of the mood altering substances supplied by drug barons.
* There is a distrust of the reliability, effectiveness and commitment of the policing service. There is scepticism as to whether, if the police are called, they will respond. Will they respond in time? Will they stand back from responding on grounds of political expediency or for operational convenience?
* There is a perception among the people living within the areas of which I speak that there is no one left to give the kind of leadership required to restore hope, dignity and self worth. Such perceptions become self-fulfilling prophecy because they sap self-confidence, undermine the credibility of potential leaders and progressively de-motivate the entire community. Worse still, those perceptions are untrue, and here I call to witness the very success of the paramilitaries. Whether we like it or not, some locally based paramilitaries exhibit some of the qualities of leadership which, if properly directed, could contribute to community well being rather than suffering and harm.

Let me say directly, therefore, to paramilitary leaders: you are currently destroying, and will ultimately completely destroy, the communities to which you belong, unless you take a different course. I recognise the immense pressures that you are under. I also recognise the immense financial rewards generated by the activities engaged in by your organisations. But those rewards are generated at the expense of your own community. You are consuming your own people. You are yourselves the greatest threat of all to the people you call your own.

Furthermore, consider the long term moral effects of the activities that you engage in upon your own communities, the message given by the values that you stand for, and the lifestyle that you promote. Whether you like it or not, you are role models for the young people, and especially the young men, growing up in your midst. What message does it send when young men and young women are forced to conclude that the only way to ?make it? where they live is through violence, intimidation and racketeering?

After all, it did not start out that way. When your organisations were born, the original motivation was to protect, not exploit and destroy, the communities in which you live. The problem has become this: that when young people see violence day and daily they take it to be a normal and proper way to conduct human affairs and resolve human disputes. Your communities have been de-sensitized, even de-humanized, by what they continue to experience at your hands. I accept that many violent incidents on our streets or in the home have no direct link with paramilitary organizations. You must accept, however, that much violence and antisocial behaviour is a direct result of the culture, values, morality and norms of behaviour which paramilitarism has come to live by and to promote.

You would expect me to say that I should rejoice in the overnight disbanding of all paramilitary organisations and the de-commissioning of all weaponry, and you are right, I long to see it happen, sooner rather than later. I know, however, that it cannot and will not happen without a massive change in the hearts of many people. But that is not all that we have to say to one another. Therefore, I should like to say to you that because you have demonstrated clearly a genuine capacity for leadership it is tragic that you should use that ability for criminal ends. You have both the capacity and the opportunity to enrich rather than impoverish the communities to which you belong. You are rooted in those communities, they are your people and you are theirs. You can do what outsiders so often cannot do: motivate and lead and inspire from within.

Perhaps the only other coherent social groups, rooted, as you are rooted, in the local community are the churches. We belong there also: we are bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh. If you were to put away the trappings and the ethics of the gun and the baseball bat you would find that the churches, which are utterly committed to helping local communities to re-build trust, self respect, new prosperity and true security, would welcome the energy and leadership you could bring to a common task. We need communities at peace with themselves, self confident, motivated, able to articulate their needs, ideals, hopes and fears so as to be taken seriously within wider society. Why not be a part of that? Why not put your energies into a confident future and stop allowing yourselves to be the whipping boy for all the problems that result in so much human misery? Be part of a confident future rather than a self destructive past. Think about it. Think about the things that really matter. The status quo is not the best option. I, and many like me in the church, long to see you using your gifts for good: learn to be creative turn your backs on the merely destructive. We, in the Church, should like to be helpful and supportive, but not at the risk of lending the appearance of legitimacy to illegal or anti-social activities. We will roll up our sleeves and, as far as resources permit, put our money where our mouth is. Christians believe in the dignity and the worth of every individual created in the image of God. We believe in forgiveness and compassion and the opportunity for a fresh start. We also believe in the value and necessity of creating genuine community as the context within which each person may explore the richness of his or her human potential. Are these not goals that you also could share? Commit yourselves to a better tomorrow.

I turn to the second topic of this address.

On your seats and in the reports circulated in advance of this synod you will discover a series of documents which demonstrate the energy and initiative being invested in addressing issues surrounding the future shape of ministry in the Diocese of Connor.

Those of you who are members of the General Synod were probably present at this year?s presentation by the Commission on Ministry and the debate which followed. Many synod members expressed themselves disappointed that the Commission on Ministry and the Summit on Ministry process has not resulted in specific, hard and fast proposals for change. But the Summit on Ministry process was never intended to be like that. Rather than telling the dioceses what they must do, the process was intended to encourage dioceses to experiment with new initiatives and to report on their experiences. In Connor we have been exploring new possibilities for some considerable time. The question we are all seeking to answer boils down to this:

Are the patterns and expectations of ministry in the Church as we have received them appropriate for sustaining the Church?s mission now and in the future? If not, how should we change, how should change be managed and at what pace?

I want to explore that general question and set out what are for me some fundamental principles.

1. Society has changed out of all recognition in my lifetime but the ministry of the Church of Ireland has not kept pace with that change. For example, when I was a boy, in the town where I grew up, fresh bread was brought to our door daily in a large wicker basket carried by the local bread server. The basket was replenished when necessary from the back of a horse drawn bread van that was led around the streets. I remember the bread server?s name ? he was Jack Storer ? the horse?s name was Sandy. The dahlias in our garden always flourished courtesy of Sandy the horse! What?s the point of telling that story? Simply that the world of Sandy and Jack Storer has passed away: cart horses have gone, bread to the door on a daily basis has gone, there is no one at home during the day except the housebound. Both husband and wife go out to work, bread comes from the supermarket and is kept fresh in the freezer. The same fate awaits the doorstep pinta. The rag and bone man has gone, the door to door insurance man has gone. Homes are unoccupied from eight in the morning until six at night, many homes are unoccupied for months on end because they are second homes. Motor vehicles allow us to commute long distances to work and also to take weekends away throughout the year. Hospital treatment could not be more different: where once you were hospitalized for weeks, now you are treated as a day patient or merely kept in over night. ? I could go on and on. The world I knew as a boy has gone for ever and with it many things I am glad to see the back of like polio myelitis, short trousers and cod liver oil and malt. But our expectations of what clergy should do and how they should do it have remained stubbornly unchanged.
2. The mission of the Church of Ireland is to proclaim the word of God and minister the love of God to all people throughout this island. Ours is not a congregational Church. We do not minister to and within a closed community of adherents, we are an open community, looking out, not merely looking in. Therefore it is right that the whole territory in which we are called by God to minister should be organised in such a way as to enable people to be appointed to take responsibility for coordinating and leading the work of the church in each area. Those areas of responsibility are respectively the diocese and the parish. The definition of the boundaries and extent of individual diocesan and parochial units should respond of whatever is appropriate from time to time. Structural flexibility in response to changing circumstances will always be an important consideration.
3. There should always be sustained an unbroken link between leadership of the worship in church and pastoral care and oversight in any location. A ministry of itinerant clergy, detached from the daily pastoral and temporal concerns of the community is not desirable. It may become a temporary necessity during a parish vacancy but it is an inadequate response to the requirement for a holistic approach to ministry.
4. Ministry in the Church is not merely or solely the work of ordained clergy. The only complete ministry is the ministry of Christ himself in and through His Body, the Royal Priesthood of the people of God. Ordained ministry has an essential part to play within the whole ministry of the Church. The ordained priest is called and ordained to specific functions, but he or she is also, in his or her person, an ontologically distinctive sign within the community. Priesthood is both ontological and functional. Ordained clergy are called to serve God in the Church in order to lead and enable the whole people of God to be an assembly of worship, mission and care: the ambassador community of Christ. Ministry in its essence is intended to be team work.
5. If, as I specifically assert, the work of ministry is the work of the whole people of God, part of the task of ordained clergy is to assist others to discover and develop and use the specific gifts they already possess for the work of ministry to which, in Christ, they are already called. This is a ministry of discernment and empowerment ? a difficult and heavy responsibility, and one for which some clergy may not feel themselves well equipped. It will be part of the work of the wider church, at diocesan and national level, to help in the process of discernment, empowerment and training. There is nothing mysterious or new about this as generations of church musicians, choirs, church and glebe wardens, secretaries and treasurers, Sunday School teachers, youth leaders and many others have shown. All of these are already well recognised parts of the ministry of lay people, but this is not necessarily the limit of ministry to which lay people are called.
6. The reason first and foremost why new spheres of lay ministry are being explored is a result of fresh theological thinking and a renewed understanding of biblical concepts of mission and ministry. It is also a result of the massive social changes to which I referred earlier and which still continue apace. Those changes have radically reduced the numbers regularly attending public worship; the numbers of those offering themselves for ordination to the stipendiary ministry have fallen; the age at which men and women seek ordination has increased significantly and therefore the length of service that can be expected is reduced; the cost to the parishes of meeting stipend and other financial obligations has risen significantly; clergy spouses are now seldom available as unpaid curates assistant because most are in full or part time paid employment. Added to these factors are the risks inherent in parochial visitation should clergy find themselves alone with a parishioner and in particular the dangers of offering pastoral support on a one to one basis to persons in distress or to a child. In today?s climate, the entire basis of the inherited but unexamined, expectation of the ministry of parish clergy is seriously challenged.
7. All in all, with many fewer clergy than at any time in the past fifteen centuries, with increasingly limited ?windows of opportunity? for home visitation, with a well educated and highly mobile laity, and with the development of a fresh and deeper theological understanding of ministry and mission it seems inescapable that much of the expectation that we have inherited from the past is no longer appropriate. The time has come, therefore, to re-examine and consciously reshape the ministry of the church in this diocese to meet the new challenges and the new opportunities of the 21st century.
8. Furthermore, we must be prepared to take the long view. We should aim to shape our ministry not just for the present but more specifically for the future. Our diocesan motto is ?Building for Generations?. We have set our hand to shaping the church for generations yet unborn. Therefore I will tell you what I think future ministry in the diocese may look like.
* I believe there may be fewer stipendiary clergy.
* I hope there will be many more non stipendiary (that is Auxiliary) clergy.
* I believe that the diocese will have fewer parochial units.
* In most cases each unit will be greater in area and greater in population than at present.
* Each unit, I believe, will have a Parochial Ministry Team (PMT) and, as part of that team, at least one stipendiary priest supported by other priests or readers according to need.
* Each team will include other, mostly unpaid, specialists. They might be youth leaders, teachers, lay pastoral visitors, people devoted to the care of the elderly, musicians, administrators, team leaders of all kinds. The mix will depend upon the needs of the parochial unit at a given time.
* Team members will have been identified, trained and commissioned for their individual tasks and this will be in large part a diocesan responsibility. New styles of ministry will make additional demands upon the clergy. It may be that future clergy training will have to take account of other, so far non traditional, clergy skills such as human resource management. It may be that parish management itself will be undertaken by the laity.

For some of you here, what I am suggesting may appear little short of a vision of hell. Indeed, my crystal ball gazing may turn out to be very wide of the mark. That is why the Diocesan Council, supported by bodies like the Training Council and an ad hoc group set up jointly by Connor and Down and Dromore to look at a scheme for Commissioned Lay Ministry, has begun a process of thinking and planning for the future. You may be aware that currently there are nine vacant parishes in the diocese. There will certainly be other vacancies before we meet again in diocesan synod. Several I can anticipate already, others may arise as a result of filling current vacancies. There will be only three deacons ordained in Connor this year, only one to full time stipendiary ministry. We shall ordain only four priests, three for stipendiary service. These are trends that we cannot ignore but which need not betoken a reduction in the quantity or the quality of ministry. Rather, they force us to look creatively at how new forms of ministry can contribute to the renewal of all ministry so as to meet the changing opportunities of changing times. They also require us to encourage young men and women to consider whether they may not be called to serve Almighty God in the stipendiary ministry.

Inevitably, whenever there is talk of re-shaping ministry, people immediately assume that churches are scheduled for closure and immediately the wagons begin to circle. But our project is not about church closure it is about the renewal of ministry. Many will rightly point out that it is the small parishes with small congregations that attract the highest percentage of church attendance and the most sacrificial levels of giving. Large parishes may have numerically larger Sunday congregations but they attract, pro rata, a lower proportion of the total parish population. What larger numbers do offer is human and financial ?critical mass? permitting the development of a variety of specialist ministries for the benefit of the whole church. Similar ?critical mass? can be produced when adjacent units work together, while retaining the individuality, integrity and coherence of each of the constituent parts. Self evidently, there is little point in keeping open redundant church buildings if they are a hindrance to ministry and a drain on finances which might otherwise be used in better ways. Closure, however, it seems to me, is a decision best taken at local level within the parish with the support and guidance of the Diocesan Council.

One thing, however, we can surely all agree: the proliferation of Select Vestries and therefore of meetings within grouped parishes is wasteful of time and energy. It seldom contributes to effectiveness in ministry or, indeed, to the internal cohesion of the group. My belief is that if parishes are grouped there should be an implementation plan in place to move swiftly from Group to Union on the basis of a pre-agreed timetable. We should avoid creating groupings without such a plan and timetable in place.

The situation I have been describing and the future of which I speculate leads me to my final and related topic.

I am increasingly concerned about increasing levels of pressure and stress within clergy families. Notice, I do not refer narrowly to stress among clergy. Rather I have a genuine anxiety about high levels of stress within many clergy homes.

The status of clergy in society and the respect with which they and their families are held have markedly declined in recent decades. Nevertheless, clergy spouses and clergy families endure levels of scrutiny and a range of projected expectations which parishioners would not accept for themselves and which frequently intrude upon family life and happiness. Often it is the spouse, usually a clergy wife, who is singled out for hard words of criticism, complaint or spite directed through her against her spouse. I believe that the problem may be less for the husbands of female clergy.

We are experiencing a contemporary work culture in which the efficiencies of technology, in speeding the completion of an existing workload, have added to the range of tasks able to be undertaken in a given period. That culture has loaded available time with additional commitments rather than affording additional personal protected space. Furthermore, in the contemporary workplace, output, progress and success are relatively easily monitored. Performance indicators are a source of pressure but they are also measures of achievement, often acknowledged by enhanced remuneration. Output, performance, success and progress are slippery and elusive concepts in the clerical life. Job-satisfaction, so called, may be very high for many clergy, but completion ? the satisfaction of knowing that all ends are tied up, the task is finished and the desk is clear ? completion is an experience practically unknown in the clerical household. There is always more that we know we should, and that if we worked longer and harder, we could do.

The situation is complicated by the customary clergy experience of using one?s residence as an office, the organisational centre of one?s ministry. This means that the home is not a haven from busy-ness but the focus of it. It may be timely to warn society more generally that the current fashion for home based working may not bring the benefits of leisure and efficient time management that people suppose. In the case of the clergy, the inability of some, amongst whom I number myself, to set aside sufficient time for family; the difficulty of making compatible the differing timetables of clerical and secular life, especially where both partners to a marriage are in employment; the constant call of the telephone at all hours, including during what should be protected time; the ethic of availability 24/7; the reality that clergy have many fewer clerical colleagues to call upon for support than in decades past; the challenges of mundane things such as negotiating who is to undertake the school run or be the child minder during school holidays; all of these things and many others, in any combination, mean that the complexities and the attendant pressures in clergy households are very great.

I have been both gratified and also alarmed by the success of the programme for clergy support which we have created in this diocese in the past two years. The panel of professionally qualified people who make up the independent clergy support team have responded to a significant volume of requests for help. The support is available to serving clergy and their spouses, almost all of whom self-refer. The take-up rate makes it clear to me that not only is the service essential, it is also indicative of a significant, on-going problem which it will be necessary to monitor and address.

In saying these things in open synod my intention is to stimulate thoughtful and sympathetic debate at home and in the parishes. I am proud of the diverse and talented clergy team in the Diocese of Connor. I want my clerical colleagues and their families to know that they are valued and cherished by us all, and that their well being is vital to the well being of the whole people of this diocese in which we are privileged to serve together. I hope that in ventilating my concerns it may be possible for parishes and clergy to begin to address a matter that threatens the happiness of some and indirectly affects us all.

Thank you all for listening and for your patience.