PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
DIOCESAN CONFERENCE
SEPTEMBER 2016
Although I had shared it with no one except Hilary, when I
gave last year’s presidential address, I intended it to be my last
one. This year is definitely my last one as you now all know. To
be honest, I had no intention of going on much beyond my 65th
birthday but partly for personal and partly provincial reasons, I
am still here – “Yma o hyd” as the Dafydd Iwan folk song has it.
And as I look back, as all old men are prone to do, I want
to say thank you to you as a diocese for all the changes and
challenges you have been willing to embrace. The diocese is a
very different diocese today, simply because of you. It almost
seems like a different era. When I came, there were very few
diocesan officers and they were treated with suspicion because
clergy felt that to ask them in to help was an admission of
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failure. Now we have many officers, all with their own
expertise, who are in and out of parishes the whole time,
helping not just with buildings and finance but with church
growth, discipleship, youth and children’s work, collaborative
ministry as well as the personal development of clergy in their
own ministries. That is as it should be – we depend on one
another. That is what it means to belong to the Body of Christ -
a body with many limbs and members, all working together for
the common good.
Any individual and any institution if they are to flourish
and grow have to be willing to accept change and we have
done so in terms of our structures, our finances, our
committees and our willingness to take seriously the need for
ministry areas. As one of the clergy in a ministerial
development comment put it “We are beginning to change
from the expectation that the vicar is the chaplain to a gathered
community, to being a resource for equipping and enabling all
God’s people in their own ministries”. Of course, we have a
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long way to go - we will always have a long way to go – that is
the nature of Christian discipleship and cultural change takes a
long time to bed in.
Seven Sacred Spaces has helped us all to deepen our own
understanding of the faith, enabling us to engage with and
serve our communities in new and imaginative ways and
helped us to grow the church so that others may be drawn in to
the life of faith. 7SS built on the course “Exploring Faith” in
which hundreds if not thousands were involved. The diocese
offers many courses on a whole host of things - bereavement,
parenting, safeguarding and prayer to name but a few.
Ministry areas are being set up across the diocese. Each
one will be different, depending on the particular locality and
particular circumstances of each community but not setting one
up is not an option since the Governing Body has passed
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resolutions to that effect. I have been asking each deanery
questions such as:
1. Identify groupings for working as potential Ministry Areas
within your Deanery – what rationale did you use for
this?
2. What characteristics did you identify for Ministry Areas in
your Deanery? (e.g. lay and ordained leadership, ministry
finance, resources, collaboration, mission, community
development etc.)
3. What will be different in terms of mission and ministry?
4. What do you see as the role at the Diocese in the
formation of Ministry Areas?
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The united parish of Pontypridd summed up the definition of a
ministry area perfectly. It said:
“A Ministry Area will encompass those communities which form
part of an area where the responsibility for leading, growing,
encouraging and enabling mission and ministry is shared by a
Ministry Team.
Sharing mission and ministry amongst all God’s people is at the
heart of our diocesan vision. We have inherited a culture and
model of ministry which is individualistic. “Going into ministry”
meant only one thing – ordination and a career as a Parish
Priest. It’s a bit like an engine at the front, pulling a train of
carriages. There are only so many carriages that you can hitch
to the back before the train stops completely!
So models of leadership need to change with:
Clergy being both facilitators and leaders of teams, which
include lay and ordained members.
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All members of the team offering and sharing their God
given gifts together, supporting, encouraging and learning
from each other.
Ministry teams having a shared responsibility for mission
and ministry, between lay and ordained.
The role of the leader is to make working together happen.
Teams working together release gifts, creativity, energy and
make a difference for the good of the community and the
church.
What of our rich tradition of ordained ministry for some people
fear that a strategy of collaboration will undermine past ideals
and weaken pastoral care. This is not so. The sharing of
ministry, with lay and ordained working together, will
strengthen church life and witness in the community.”
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Bishops by the very nature of their ministry can see what is
happening across the diocese. Between us, Bishop David and I
are probably in around at least six parishes a week for one
reason or another – taking confirmations, licensing new
ministries, preaching for special events, and filling in when
parishes need an incumbent, apart from visits to organisations
or parish centres.
We conduct ministerial reviews with others, of all the
clergy, and therefore have an overview of the whole Church.
Many organisations in our society would collapse were it not
for the involvement of Christians and it is wonderful to see the
diocese involved in messy church, food banks, dementia cafes,
community gardens, helping and offering advice on issues
around debt, helping people to complete job applications and
setting up credit unions and community shops.
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Some may ask what has all this to do with the Gospel?
Quite simply, the Gospel challenges us to be involved whenever
there is human need of any kind and at the hurting points of
our society. And out of all this, a new church is beginning to
emerge, a church that is willing to take risks, willing to
experiment, willing to fail and willing to engage with all kinds of
people and organisations so that the values of the Gospel are
lived out. In many places, churches too are experimenting with
different forms of worship.
I know that numbers in terms of electoral rolls, average
attendees and Easter and Christmas communicants are down in
this diocese as well as the rest of the province, and we are
trying to address these issues in lots of ways. But people are
engaging with the Church and the Church is engaging with the
world in different ways from our predecessors, and you can
never tell what a single act of kindness or the effect of a
sympathetic word can have. Not one of us needs to look for a
ministry – it is available to us in front of our eyes.
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As I have said, there is a gap between our average
attendees and electoral roll numbers. We need to bridge that
gap so that we are not starting cold or from scratch but with
people who say they want to belong but actually do not. The
way we engage with people during important and critical
moments of their lives can make a huge difference to them and
to us and the way we deal with organisations who want to use
our buildings and facilities can make an impression for good or
ill.
Of course we need intentional evangelism where we invite
people to come and worship and Bishop David will talk about
that later and we need to talk about our faith but we also need
to realise, as those of us who went to the Clergy School at
Oxford earlier in the year were told, (one of the best if not the
best school we have had) that not everything can be quantified
and assessed. How can you gauge the effect of a bereavement
visit or time spent visiting an old people’s home or time spent 9
with a mother and toddler’s group? And here I am talking
about all our ministries, not just those of the clergy. The
answer is you cannot. The Kingdom of God grows like a seed in
the ground, initially in a small way and very often all we can do
is plant such seeds and leave the harvest to others and to God.
Quick results are not always possible and it is also a fact that we
who do the ministering are very often those who are
ministered to.
You can see what I mean in encounters with children. We
think we are their teachers. They very often teach us. When I
once asked a class of children why I wore a slate cross,
expecting the answer that since I had once been a bishop of a
diocese with slate mines that was why, one little boy said that
the thing with slate is that you could wipe it clean every
morning and start again as you could in your relationship with
God. Totally unprompted my three grandchildren, after a
service one Sunday morning in August in the Cathedral said that
before they went to have squash and biscuits, they wanted to
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go and light a candle for granny because she was with God.
Having done so, Izzy aged six said in a serious voice “Now that
we are here, we might as well light another candle.” For
whom?” I asked. “For my three dead fish” she replied solemnly
and that’s what we did. And Bishop David tells the story of a
young child who said that prayer was being kissed by God.
And as you will know from the GB in September, and as
you will read in my letter in Croeso next month, the Church in
Wales has decided that baptism is the full and complete rite of
initiation and that nothing else is necessary for them to receive
communion. Anyone who is therefore baptised, whatever their
age, can receive the sacrament if they so wish, without the
prior need for confirmation, instruction or full understanding,
for which one of us fully understands what it means to receive
the Body and Blood of Christ?
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Why has this been decided and what happens to
confirmation? There is no doubt that in the early Church,
baptism, Eucharist and first communion happened at the same
time. From about the fifth century, the Church in West (but not
the Church in the East) separated the sacrament of baptism (in
which a person becomes a member of the Body of Christ) from
the ceremony of confirmation, when the bishop as chief pastor
welcomed the newly baptised, laid hands upon them
(confirmation) and gave them communion for the first time.
From the thirteenth century it became the custom for no-
one to be allowed to receive communion without first having
been confirmed. So the three ceremonies which the early
Church had held together, were separated and so the pattern
with which we are familiar was established, namely baptism in
infancy, confirmation at puberty with people being enabled at
that point to receive communion. The fact is however that
theologically speaking, once a person is baptised, he or she is a
member of the Body of Christ, incorporated into Him and
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logically what that means is the privilege of being able to
receive communion. In other words, nothing except baptism is
required to become a communicant.
In the light of all this, the Bishops have decided that from
this Advent Sunday, we are giving permission for all who are
baptised to receive Holy Communion, except of course that no-
one should be obliged to receive if they do not wish to do so.
That is a personal decision for each individual but no barrier
should be erected to prevent anyone who is baptised from
receiving communion. Confirmation then becomes not the
gateway to communion but the response of those baptised, if
they wish to do so, to affirm their faith as members of the
Church and as a commissioning for serving God’s Church and
world.
This is not such a huge change as some people may think.
Since 2002, we have admitted children to Holy Communion, on
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an experimental basis, without first confirming them. We are
now recognising that since baptism is biblically and
theologically complete in itself as initiation into the Body of
Christ, we ought not to deny communion to all who are
baptised.
The Rev’d Dr Jeremy Duff, the Principal of St Padarn’s
wrote to me after I said all this at the GB saying “A great joy in
my last parish was sharing communion with children and seeing
children growing in faith from their earliest years. It was also a
joy seeing children receiving and over following months
bringing their parents and siblings to the church and those
parents finding faith. The Kingdom of God does not just belong
to children – they are key to the advancing of the kingdom and
are evangelists by nature.” Amen to that I say and we know
that Jesus said that “unless we become as children, we cannot
enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
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You will also have read comments about my presidential
address to the GB. The aim there was not so much to speak
about same sex relationships but the wider question of how do
we read the Bible and how do we discover God’s will by paying
serious attention to Scripture. In other words, what is Scripture
and how do we handle it in looking at various issues that
confront us?
You will be pleased to know that I am not going to repeat
anything I said in that speech. I only want to say something I
did not say and which as Christians we take for granted but
sometimes fail to realise its significance. We do not worship
the Scriptures but God and Jesus, to whom the Scriptures bear
witness. For us, Jesus is the Word of God – the one in whom
God is made supremely manifest and the Bible, especially the
New Testament, bears witness to that truth.
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Bishop Rowan puts it all very succinctly: “God through the
Bible is saying “This is how people heard me, saw me,
responded to me; this is the gift I gave them; this is the response
they made ……. ” He went on to say “If in that story we find
accounts of the responses of Israel to God that are shocking or
hard to accept, we do not have to work on the assumption that
God likes those responses. For example, many of the early
Israelites in the Old Testament clearly thought it was God’s will
that they should engage in ethnic cleansing, that they should
slaughter without mercy the inhabitants of the Promised Land.
Does that mean God approves of genocide? If God does, that is
hideously at odds with what the biblical story as a whole seems
to say about God and the teaching of Jesus.”
We read the Bible in the light of the life, death and
resurrection of Jesus and, says Bishop Rowan, “reading the
Bible involves coming to recognise patterns of faithful and
unfaithful responses to God in the light of Jesus. In Jesus we see
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the terrifying compassion of God breaking through”. Anything
less than that will not do.
Which is why I have said what I have said about refugees.
The Christian faith compels us to affirm the dignity of every
human being and to offer help to anyone in need. Britain has
always in the past shown generosity, kindness, solidarity and
decency to those facing persecution, even at times of greater
deprivation and difficulty than the present time. In May this
year, in a survey by Amnesty International, 83% of Britons said
they would welcome refugees into their neighbourhoods and
households. Under the present immigration rules, a British
doctor of Syrian origin could not bring her parents from a
refugee camp in Lebanon even though they were refugees and
she could support and house them. A Syrian child who arrived
alone in the UK could not bring his parents from a refugee
camp in Jordan even if the child was a recognised refugee and
his parents were also refugees. Families in these situations can
currently be reunited only by resorting to desperately unsafe
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irregular journeys, sometimes ending in avoidable tragedies.
All the main humanitarian aid and refugee agencies have
adopted four refugee principles:
1. That the UK should take a fair and proportionate
share of refugees – those within Europe and those
outside it.
2. Safe and legal routes to the UK and Europe need to
be established.
3. Safe and legal routes within Europe should be
established.
4. There needs to be access to fair and thorough
procedures to determine eligibility for international
protection wherever it is sought.
We have to remember that refugees are people fleeing for
their lives, without any means of support. Countries around
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Syria have taken in vast number of refugees – Turkey 1.9
million, Lebanon 1.1 million and Jordan 630,000 – countries
that are far less prosperous than ours and we are discussing
whether 20,000 is too many, and we are certainly not on track
even to meet the Government’s commitment to resettle 20,000
Syrians by 2020. The United Nations estimates that at the end
of 2015, 65 million people were refugees or asylum seekers –
that is more than the total population of the UK. We, as a
church, have a crucial role to play in trying to eliminate
expressions of hatred and xenophobia which seem to be on the
increase.
What of European migration? After the vote to leave the
European Union, many European nationals already living and
working in this country have become fearful of what might
happen to them and that has not been helped again by hateful
comments against immigrants. Many who have lived and
worked in this country for years have said that they have
suddenly felt unwelcome.
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The Prime Minister has said that the Brexit vote means
that Britain does not want the free movement of labour to
continue in the way that it has done in the past and that there
must be controls of movement of people coming in from the
European Union. In fact, of the 270,000 EU migrants who came
to the UK in 2015, 200,000 came with a job offer and in 2013-
14 paid £3.1billion in tax – five times more than they received
in benefits. They are, in other words, net contributors to the
British economy and our Health Service would be in a parlous
state without them both in terms of not having the more
mundane and menial tasks done but also in terms of fewer
doctors and consultants, many of whom are Europeans.
The Christian faith is about loving God and our neighbours
and it is often in and through our neighbours, be they far or
near, that we encounter God. The face of God comes to us in
many guises but according to the Bible it is encountered
especially in the poor and the strangers within our gates.20