Thoughts on the shape of mission, ministry and the church's deployment of resource in the years to come...

The Bradwell Area Team - a group of resource/sector workers serving the churches of south and east Essex - sat down last week and had a wide-ranging discussion arising from the questions which emerge in consideration of the document currently being consulted upon in our Diocese of Chelmsford, Principles for the Deployment of Ministry 2009 – 2016. We wanted to think out loud about our theology of mission and ministry...


We began with various understanding of the role of the priest
• Does s/he need to be the church leader or the chair of the leadership team?
• Maybe a better model would be that of Barnabas in Acts; drawing all ministries together in harmony and making one Body; using his/her God-given tools the sacraments
• Priesthood derives its importance from the centrality of the Eucharist which shares the Body of Christ
• The priest does not define what is meant by Church, but derives from it
• Whether a priest is to be locally deployed or deployable will not define the level of training and formation s/he needs. All will need the same
• The nature of the priest in the Early Church was not a jack of all trades

We then looked at the Eucharist
• The sacraments are a first order issue; whereas the nature of priesthood (sacerdotal) is a second order issue
• The Eucharist is central to the worshipping community; but this can be worked out in two ways: either it should be celebrated as often as possible and at least on every Sunday; or it should be celebrated infrequently as an important part of the life of the Church with everyone giving it priority and preparing themselves appropriately.

We sought to understand the nature of mission, ministry and growth:
• A positive definition of mission could be “Seeing where God is and joining in”, its corollary being “being there to maintain a presence”
• Caution is needed with language about growth. It can tempt us to deploy resources where things are going on and to abandon places where nothing is happening to their fate. However, the language of growth is worldly and consumerist, and we are called to be counter-cultural
• Is our vision of Church that of a ministering community or that of a community gathered round a minister?
• We need to distinguish between ministry (a task life-long or time-limited to which God has called an individual) and discipleship (the life-style and values to which all baptised Christians are called with consequent actions)

How do we get from where we are to where we want to go?
• How much does our carnal baggage get in the way of hearing where God is leading us?
• We need to frame what we do in our current context and not seek to reclaim some “golden age”
• We need to discover the essential spirituality of our age through critical (but never judgemental) reading of the Bible and Church history
• Do we trust small, struggling groups of Christians to do their theology and discover their spirituality? Or are we still wedded to the 19th century idea that they need external programming by an expert (a theologian) in their midst? Do we trust small communities if they do not have an expert?
• Small communities do not thrive on external programming
• We need areas with communities of different sizes making the minster model a first preference rather than a second best
In the light of our discussion, we then looked at the vision document we drew up at Aylesford Priory in July 2007
• Our role is to take a strategic overview, free of local distraction but leading to effective resourcing of local communities
• Under the 19th century model of a priest (an expert, theologically trained) in each parish, Episcopal oversight was only needed if things went wrong
• However, the model towards which we are travelling of ministry teams without an expert necessarily in their midst, more oversight will be needed
• The team will need to help people see the wider picture
• It is part of our vision and history that we affirm the local. A local Christian presence is not disempowered if it lacks an expert
• The Deployment document is not an exercise in down-sizing but an opportunity to rethink the need of a paid expert
• Local congregations can be set free from the expert; leaving the experts free to perform a wider brief. E.g. currently, in multi-church benefices, the pattern of worship is determined around whether the priest or reader can be present; it would be preferable for each church to have some form of worship every Sunday whether or not a priest or reader is available