Diocesan News29 Sep 08

The Bishop of Meath & Kildare's address to the Diocesan Synod 2008

The Meath & Kildare Diocesan Synod was held in Wilson’s Hospital School, Multyfarnham, Co Westmeath on Saturday 27 September 2008. The transcript of the Presidential Address given by the Bishop of Meath & Kildare, the Most Revd Richard Clarke, is provided.

Much of what the Church in this country does  - and how it does it - is based on the presumption that we still live in what I might term “a believing society”, by which I mean that we tend to presume that the setting in which we, as the Church, do our everyday business, is one in which most people still have some kind of belief system whirring away inside them. That presumption is of course becoming more and more open to question. You and I seem to be existing, instead, in the middle of a belief-free zone, certainly among the indigenous Irish among whom we live.

I am talking therefore about the fact that we live in a culture where serious belief in God and in the real demands and the deep obligations accompanying religious belief are seen by an increasing majority of people – young and not so young - as a bizarre leisure pursuit for a shrinking minority who would be better employed getting more of a life.. But I also believe that the decline in committed belief in our society is far more widespread than a fading of specifically religious belief.

• We have surely to fear that belief in the values and the obligations of living in a modern democratic society - where parliament, political parties and politicians must be taken seriously if such a society is to survive - have by now been seriously eroded. People are simply not interested in what is meant by a just society (or, indeed, any kind of society) unless there is a risk to their physical safety or to their standard of living. The active membership in most political parties of western Europe is at an all-time low. The British journalist Andrew Marr in an excellent book, A History of Modern Britain, suggests very convincingly that the 60 years since the end of the Second World War has, in our culture, marked the victory of shopping over politics.
  
  
• We have also and dangerously shed belief in the fundamental importance of a legal system that is not subject to a tabloid-inspired lynch law. Legal judgements which we may find strange but which most of us are not qualified to gainsay, can be held up to ridicule in radio phone-in programmes by those who know little or nothing about the law, or have any interest in the mountains of evidence that may have been considered in a particular court case.
  
  
• With more justification, we no longer have any confident belief that a stable economic system is a given for our society, or for any part of the developed world. And one can almost smell the rubbing of hands by self-styled pundits and equally self-styled experts at the meltdown of global economic stability, a collapse which will inevitably cause infinitely more distress to those who had little enough in the first place than to the real perpetrators of the greed and irresponsibility.. or to the gleeful commentators of the downfall.
  
  
• And, of particular interest to us: We scarcely need to be reminded that belief in what the Church is has become a matter for juvenile lampooning and adolescent ridicule on a wide scale in the Ireland of today. Casual blasphemy seems to be regarded as acceptable as a media columnist’s stock-in-trade, presumably on the grounds that “no-one serious really believes in that sort of thing anyway.”   

But behind all this collapse in belief and trust is another uncomfortable truth, the reality that people will ultimately and inevitably look for a belief of some kind or other to see them through when things get bad. If, for economic reasons, shopping is no longer a realistic leisure option to while away the hours, people will find some belief, because, when all else is taken away, it is belief of some kind that provides a meaning and an identity for people, and hence a sense of self-worth. It does not however have to be religious belief.

One does not have to be a particularly avid historian to see the kind of beliefs that people will find, especially in the wake of public disillusionment and gloom.  Hitler fed on a public need for a shared belief in something new, amidst the economic and moral chaos of the Weimar Republic. Stalin discovered the need for people to be given a communal belief system, following the final overthrow of a dishonoured and ineffective Romanov Empire.

In each case the belief being offered was belief in a salvation through idolatry, an idolatry of either the nation or a shiny new political system.

-    It was belief in salvation through the scapegoating of minorities.
-    It was belief in salvation through totalitarian brutality
-    It was belief in salvation in being told what to do and never daring to think for self.

Do not ever be so foolish as to imagine that this country would for all time be spared from the merciless blackness of totalitarian evil.

We are living, then, in a society which seems increasingly suspicious of faith or of vision, and in such a context it is more than ever essential that the Church has a clarity of vision for what it is to be and to do. This is the setting for the Church of Ireland’s House of Bishops’ Vision Statement for the Church. The Church of Ireland must have a vision beyond believing that we can limp on for ever, relying on the after-burn of what we once were, but are no longer.

What is it that we once were, but are no longer? A long-established minority Christian tradition, slightly pretentious about itself but generally respected, set in the surroundings of a far larger Christian tradition within a country where religious belief came as naturally to most people as breathing. That is not the reality any longer, and to strategise around such an understanding of ourselves is arrant nonsense. And so, as I have tried to make clear already through the Diocesan Magazine it would be a mistake to read this Vision Statement as a sermon for the central Church but of no concern to dioceses or to parishes. We need to have a clear vision about what we are to do, and to where we are to move, if we are ever to convince an increasingly sceptical society - and I include the rising generations supposedly still within the Church of Ireland - that we are worth a second thought. Our bible study this morning reminded us that our vision of God’s purposes for us must be constantly expanding and never contracting.

I am not going to spend very long at this point on the Vision Statement but my hope is that each parish would try to think through the implications of the statement for it, as a parish. The diocese must do the same. We may then have a special synod (as we did with the Hard Gospel a few years ago, and I think good came from that meeting in Trim) to work through what the vision is to mean for us, as a diocese and as parishes.

Our “non-synod” slot this afternoon (assuming that you allow me to raise Standing Orders) will look at two things:

1. First, on how we can communicate better via the Internet, as parishes and a diocese, because this is how many people may learn of our existence. If we have a vision, this is an important way to communicate it.
   
   
2. The second aspect will be to look at practicalities of what we can do with our physical resources. It seems to me that people will frequently have a creative idea over the use of our buildings and our human talents but are frightened to pursue such ideas because of fears about litigation, about health and safety, about insurance and a dozen other things. If we were less afraid of the practicalities, we might indeed be more visionary in what we might do for our communities.

So, in brief conclusion, what is the vision statement asking us to look at, in the weeks and months ahead? Worship, Unity, Service. I’m going to suggest one or two very brief headings and questions we might look at, as parishes or as a diocese.

Worship – how good can we make our worship? This is a question not just for the clergy but for everyone. How much opportunity can we provide, by the way we do our work in our local settings, so that people may come to know more of God, learn more of God, and worship God with more meaning and vitality?

Unity – How high on our agenda is continuing to work for the unity of Christians? What do we know of those of other faiths? If all that people around can see is a competitiveness, a lack of a co-operative spirit, and a mutual fear among those who claim to serve God, how can they ever come to believe that religious faith is of any importance? How much do we care -  together - for the creation that God has given us to protect? Do we think of that as an essential part of unity with God?

Serving the world around us – this is how we are judged by those among whom we live. It suggests the most serious question of all: “What difference does our parish make to anyone but us?”

As we proceed now into our business we should hear that same question looming over us in respect of the diocese – “What difference is our diocese to make, to anyone but us?”