Press Releases30 Mar 11

Archbishop of Armagh's Sermon at Tuam Electoral College

SERMON AT THE EPISCOPAL ELECTORAL COLLEGE FOR THE SEE OF TUAM, KILLALA & ACHONRY, GIVEN BY THE MOST REVD ALAN HARPER, OBE, 30TH MARCH 2011

The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ…
Ephesians 4.11-12

The responsibility of an Episcopal Electoral College is to seek the mind of God through the promptings of the Holy Spirit in order to identify one who is called and equipped to be a bishop in the Church of God. That exercise is conducted in a particular context: that of a vacant see with all its individual idiosyncrasies, challenges and opportunities; but we are here to choose a bishop for the Church and not solely for the vacant see.

St Paul, in the Letter to the Ephesians, makes clear that it was never intended that any one individual should possess all the ministerial gifts. On the contrary, only some were to be apostles, only some prophets, only some evangelists and only some pastors and teachers. If any should have all the gifts, the rest of us would be surplus to requirements. Part of the role of a bishop, therefore, is to seek to build a team within which the requisite gifts are to be found and wherein those gifts may be deployed, in order to equip the saints for the work of ministry.

The group which is described by Paul as “the saints” comprises not solely the clergy but the whole people of God. The ministry of the Church is the ministry of a ministerial community. The bishop shares his ministry with his clergy and says so specifically in the service of institution when he says;

“the care of God’s people in this parish is committed to you and to me. Accept the responsibilities and privileges of this ministry as a priest in this diocese, in communion with the bishop.

The bishop gives the priest responsibility for sharing with him in the care of God’s people. That caring includes the task of freeing and equipping the whole church community to minister – to be a ministerial community – through the deployment of individual gifts for the common good. It should never have been the case – the default setting in the Church – that “ministry” became the sole prerogative of ordained clergy and bishops. Such a situation is certainly not tenable now. We have to build new structures of sanctified interdependence in ministry if the mission of God is to go forward in and through the life of the Church. This will mean different things in different circumstances, but be in no doubt: to rely on the default setting is to embrace necrosis.

A bishop is given particular jurisdiction in and to his own diocese. Those who gather round their bishop, to whom that bishop in a special way belongs, and who belong reciprocally to her or to him, constitute (in the theology of some,) “the local church.” Thus specific responsibility and jurisdiction belongs to the bishop in the local church. Yet, just as the people of Tuam belong to a greater entity – the Church of Ireland, and the Church of Ireland to a greater entity – the universal Church of God, so the Bishop of Tuam co-relates to those greater entities also, and must be equipped so to do, not least so that she or he may be that organic link which relates the local to the universal and the universal to the local. So, we are not here today to elect an archdeacon or a rural dean, for these are merely internal diocesan functions; we are here to elect a bishop whose breadth of vision and responsibility must encompass the parochial, the diocesan and the global.

We are also here to recall that the Church and the times, “they are a-changing.” Change is the normal condition of humanity and all life on earth. That parody of the famous hymn which runs: “Like a mighty tortoise moves the Church of God, Brothers we are treading where we always trod,” is far from admirable in its cynicism. The universal message of the Gospel is timeless but needs to be given expression in the contexts and accents of the continuous present.

A bishop is called to be an interpreter of the times to the Church and an interpreter of the Gospel to the times that are in it. We are not here to pay homage to the status quo ante; we are here to build up the Church in conditions that are different, fresh and new every morning. A bishop may be a comfort, in the proper sense of “one who brings strength,” but a bishop may never become a “comfort blanket”. He or she is not here “to do us our day” but to point to and lead towards the new dawn and the new day.

The worst thing we can do for our children is to smother them with a comfort blanket of our making. And I specifically intend, by making reference to “our children,” to direct the thoughts of this Electoral College towards the future we are required to shape rather than to a past by which we are held in thrall. We need to elect bishops who future proof the present rather than perpetuate the antique – and I speak as an antiquarian!

ENDS