Ignorance of the Christian faith plunges new depths – but perhaps I’ll laugh rather than cry:

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Methodist Conference begins today and runs for a week. One of the potentially most contentious debates will happen next Tuesday afternoon, the 27th, when the Pilgrimage Of Faith report on the question of civil partnerships and related matters will be considered. To the relief of my conscience last week’s Methodist Recorder reported that the recommendation will be that although anyone in the church may enter a civil partnership we should not agree to bless such relationships. We welcome all, but maintain ‘Resolution 4’ of the 1993 Derby Conference which affirmed our commitment to fidelity within marriage and celibacy outside. I had certainly feared the recommendation might be that ministers would be able to conduct such blessing and that those who had a conscience against it would have to refer enquirers to a colleague who would be happy to oblige. Of course we now have to see whether Conference will ratify the recommendation. I pray that it will. (The report can be downloaded in Word format here – it’s number 40 in the list.)

But those who hear me preach know I am loath for we Christians just to be known for what we are against. I would also like to write about something that has not worried me but excited me. Today’s Methodist Recorder publishes the text of the Pastoral Address being given today by the outgoing President of the Conference, Tom Stuckey. His inaugural address at the beginning of his year’s term was exciting and these closing words of his Presidential year are in my opinion no less exciting. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear to be online yet but keep an eye on the daily reports page – hopefully at least a summary will be up in the next twenty-four hours.

However the entire address bears reading and pondering. At heart Tom says God is calling us to ‘repent and believe’, and we have a short window – perhaps only five years – if we are to respond meaningfully. Firstly he talks about ‘Reading The Signs’ and secondly about ‘Reshaping The Church’.He concludes with ‘Necessary Changes’ and then a Postscript. What follows is a quick attempt to précis a dazzling address.

READING THE SIGNS
The destruction of the planet calls for a missionary response, since the covenant with Noah is ‘the foundational covenant of mission’.
The violent clash of cultures means ‘The Church has to jettison surplus baggage and recover essential Gospel values.’ There was violence before the Flood (Genesis 6:6); Christian and Islamic expansion could precipiate further violence; and in Alasdair MacIntyre’s words (in 1981!), ‘The barbarians … have already been governing us for some time.’
The shifting centre of Christianity Declining Western liberal Christianity has to come to terms with the fact that the majority of world Christianity is now southern and conservative. John Drane: ‘We seem to have become a secular Church in a spiritual society.’
The edge of Pentecost There is a ‘kairos moment of opportunity. Martin Luther: ‘God’s grace is like a passing storm which does not return where once it has been … it came to the Jews but passed over … Paul brought it to the Greeks but it passed over … the Romans and Latins had it. And you must not think that you have it forever.’ There are signs of personal response to the Spirit. We need what Orlando Costas calls ‘total growth’: i.e., numerical growth (numbers of Christians), organic growth (flexible structures), conceptual growth (theological development) and incarnational growth (prophetic identification with the marginalised).

THE CHURCH RESHAPED
John Hull: ‘Start with the Church and the mission will probably get lost. Start with mission and it is likely that the Church will be found.’ Pete Ward: modernity provided one ‘solid’ structure after another and our churches have modelled this. But technological innovation is liquefying all that. We need a ‘mixed economy Church’, says Stuckey. Some ‘Fresh Expressions‘ of church are genetically the same as modernity, substituting piano for organ and PowerPoint for hymn books. We need more theologically adventurous ’emerged churches’ which are not planted but spring from a need outside the church and who have a ‘theological consultant’ rather than a pioneer minister or leader. So there could be three types of church: traditional, fresh expressions and emerged churches.

NECESSARY CHANGES
Problems facing us include bureaucracy, resistance to change, ministers being bogged down in maintenance ministry and gifted laypeople who are frustrated in the exercise of their gifts. Action:
1. Encourage growing diversity and focus the national (‘connexional’) leadership more clearly.
2. Appoint bishops, but make them missionary bishops in the Celtic tradition.
3. Recruit younger presbyters and deacons for pioneer ministry.
4. Ordain 100 Local Preachers to a non-stipendiary ministry of word and sacrament.
5. Head-hunt ordained persons who truly could work with ’emerged churches’.
6. A structure of mutual accountability for those presbyters with evangelistic gifts.
7. Annual appraisal for ministers needs to become personal development: from initial ministerial training to ongoing.
8. Release some presbyters and deacons with evangelistic gifts from pastoral charge of churches.
9. Shift power from local churches to circuits and Districts so that resistant churches can’t dig in their heels against change.

POSTSCRIPT
As in John 21:6, we are being called to ‘cast [our] nets on the other side’. He then concludes with this amazing prayer of Brendan the Navigator.

Dave’s thoughts …
I think I just want to reiterate that the cat is out of the bag about the problems with our doctrine of ordination. Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch made the point in their book The Shaping Of Things To Come that the problem with ordaining people to a ministry of word, sacrament and pastoral charge (as denominations like Methodism do) limits the kind of people who offer and are accepted for ordination. Where, they ask, is the rich pattern of Ephesians 4 with apostles, prophets and evangelists as well as the pastors and teachers?

Tom’s section ‘Necessary Changes’ above recognises the problem but doesn’t radically reshape our doctrine of ordination. Many of us in circuit ministry know how the problem rears its head: we may feel the connection between the call to ministry and leading the church, but when it comes each quarter to making the Circuit Plan (the document that shows which minister and which Local Preacher is taking which service at which church) we have to fill in who is conducting the specifically sacramental services of baptism and Holy Communion. We become, in my rather cynical phrase, ‘travelling sacrament machines’ rather than people deployed to lead the church.

Compound this with the problem that proportionately the number of churches has not declined as much as the number of ministers and the ordained staff are looking after more congregations. This means a further dispersal of our energies from focussed efforts.

Tom, I’m very excited by your courage and vision. Now let’s be much more radical than even you are daring to suggest!

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