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If the Catch the Vision process is to change the Church, it will inevitably mean changes in the way we all, ministers, elders and members, carry out our ministry. John Ellis explains some the proposals coming to Assembly from the Ministries Committee
District Council
met in a depressed dockyard town. The United Reformed Church building
was vast and it was no coincidence that its Victorian builders made sure
the spire was taller than the tower of the parish church. The pews were
hard, the décor tired and the place so cold it was formally proposed the
meeting be abandoned as a health hazard. It was the Council’s turn to visit Chatham again a few weeks ago. Members sat on comfortable chairs with the carpet reinforcing the impression of warmth. The congregation’s life was illuminated by stories from the Anglican and URC ministers, both released to focus on the ecumenical church project, and by the resident Youth Worker. They were helped by a Powerpoint presentation with contemporary music and by contributions from the two youngsters’ groups also meeting that evening. The church was growing and growing younger, thinking hard about adding new ways of reaching their community and planning a major buildings development. So what were the key ingredients behind the transformation? They included:
equipping the saints in
local churches When the
Ministries Committee offered to last year’s General Assembly the report
Equipping the Saints as part of the Catch the Vision process, our aim
was to help the transformation of local churches. Assembly responded by
immediately sending two recommendations to all local congregations for
action. They encouraged each local church to assess how far its
activities were connecting with its community. They especially urged
churches to think about how far church activities were equipping members
for Christian witness in all the places they go outside the church
buildings. Many churches have now told us how they responded to this
challenge from Assembly. Of course there are many Chathams who have been immersed in such rethinking since long before 2004. We have been encouraged to hear of many more places where Equipping the Saints has given a new impetus to wrestling with these questions, and not always by holding traditional meetings. In Annan URC in Scotland, for example, a word search was put in the church magazine to stimulate ideas. We have still
heard few stories about churches helping their members in their
non-church activities, for example at work, but there are plenty of
places finding the courage to reshape church activities. At Bingley in
Yorkshire they have a tent at the Agricultural Show and stalls in the
local market, while at Shanklin on the Isle of Wight they have
progressed from a float in the local carnival to offering a prayer booth
in the midst of the town’s Christmas Fun Day. Braunton in North Devon is
one of the places where a midweek service is firmly established and
attracts a larger congregation than most of our churches see on a
Sunday. Ramsden Street URC in Cumbria finds Monday evenings the best
time for ‘Sunday School’.
using our resources: elders
and ministers Equipping the
Saints recognised that a crucial element in local churches moving
forward is how our various ministries are used. The 2004 Assembly sent
out for consultation various recommendations about ministers and elders
and asked for feedback. We are grateful to hundreds of writers who have
reported back to us, including representatives of the majority of
Districts and Synods. This year’s Assembly will be asked to press ahead
with ideas that the Church has said catch the right vision. We will seek
to do this in ways that are sensitive to the wide diversity of local
circumstances in which our congregations work. We will bring
several resolutions specifically about elders. This is not just for the
good health of the United Reformed Church; it is also because our
ecumenical partners want to see the evidence that we treat this ministry
as seriously as we ask them to treat it. So we shall encourage the
spread of best practice in relation to the selection and personal
development of elders. We shall also propose that the wider Church be
more clearly represented at elders’ inductions and that ecumenical
congregations pay careful attention to how the role of elders is
incorporated into their leadership patterns. We shall also
bring resolutions about ministers. One of the advantages of good
elderships is that congregations become less reliant on ministers as
Jacks and Jills of all trades. Fantasies about having a full-time paid
minister for each congregation are remote from URC reality as only one
in ten congregations today have this leadership pattern. Furthermore,
almost a third of our paid ministers will retire in the next seven
years, which suggests that the number of single pastorates will fall
further. The temptation simply to give each minister a larger number of
congregations – without changing the expectations of the minister’s role
– must be resisted. Instead our resolutions will be designed to encourage the more flexible use of ministers, related to the mission challenges in different settings and their own gifts. We should not assume that the best answer for every church is to have a slice of a minister for their day-to-day leadership, with that minister’s name on the noticeboard and expected to chair every elders and church meeting. In some places lay leadership can cover these tasks. In some places the best answer will be a cluster of churches with a collaborative leadership team, including ministers. In some places the District or Area Council might well discern the best answer is to deploy a minister to focus their gifts and energies full-time on one congregation – not necessarily a large congregation. In some places the best use of a minister will be to base them outside traditional congregational life in roles such as chaplaincy. Assembly will be
asked to give permission and encouragement to District and Area Councils
to deploy ministers flexibly and imaginatively. increasing our options: special category ministers
To assist imaginative thinking, we shall also propose a change at the centre. The United Reformed Church has a scheme called Special Category Ministry. This allows a controlled number of URC ministers to be deployed outside the usual Synod quotas in a variety of pioneering and boundary edge roles. A number of exciting pieces of work have been possible as a result.
As part of Catch the Vision, we shall propose expanding the Special Category Ministry scheme, making more resources available for Districts and Areas who want to develop new models of ministry. The best people for some specialist roles will not always be URC ministers and so part of the proposal will be to make the new posts open to ministers from other denominations or, in some circumstances, lay people. In this way we hope to address several pressure points in the life of the United Reformed Church. For example, we need to find ministers for churches with congregations worshipping in more than one language. Of course these posts will need to be paid for and so there will have to be a clear limit on the number working under this scheme. Nonetheless we believe this is a practical way in which we can equip the United Reformed Church for connecting more effectively with people outside the Church’s traditional culture.
threat or opportunity? We know that talk of fewer ministers, of no guarantee of a minister for the day-to-day leadership of congregations, and of diverting resources into new work, causes alarm bells to ring in some places. We have brothers and sisters who find it hard to imagine local church life without a traditional, reassuring minister figure at the centre. In fact our postbag has provided very encouraging evidence on this point. We have received stories from very different settings of churches who had to let go of traditional patterns and have been pleasantly surprised at what they could achieve with new patterns. When the minister retired without a replacement at Charlton in South London, an existing Pastoral Assistant took over as the church’s recognised leader and the church flourished. At Harecourt in the inner city a recent Church Meeting was unanimous that ‘our church [is] better served by having a lay leader than a small percentage of an ordained minister’s time’. The members of Cowper Memorial Church in Olney, Northamptonshire, had no desire to lose a ministerial leader in 1996, but looking back see that the church has grown under leadership from the elders, grouped around a lay leader.
a question of money
In looking at the whole picture for our ministries, we cannot avoid the fact that money has to be considered. At present our options are limited by the giving of the churches. While that is often very generous, the Ministries Committee strongly supports the United Reformed Church’s policy on financial giving. This includes the request to every member to regard as a norm the giving of 5p in every pound of take-home pay to the Church. If all our members followed their own Church’s policy, the possibilities before us would be wider and our frustrations fewer. To nudge people towards this target, we shall ask Assembly to agree that more accessible feedback is provided to local churches on how the money they give for ministry is spent.
over to you
We hope that when Assembly considers this package of proposals it will discern in them a way of strengthening the whole United Reformed Church for sharing in God’s mission, both when our members are gathered in church activities and when they are dispersed to be light and salt in the world. We need more Chathams.
John Ellis is Convener of the Ministries Committee |
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