All Souls Langham Place - 07/01/04

And Jesus went about in all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom and healing all manner of disease and all manner of sickness among the people. Matthew

Thank you for coming to pray with the bishops of the Diocese at the beginning of this New Year. I am also grateful for the mostly courteous letters I have received from those of us who are unable to be present.

Looking back over the records in preparation for our 1400th anniversary, I must confess that it is obvious that Bishop's charges are not what they were. My predecessor Bishop Tait required a seaside holiday after his charge in 1858. It was 122 pages long and took almost five hours to deliver.

It is rare that I receive much spiritual sap and juice from the reports of Church of England working parties but there is a recent exception. "A Mission Shaped Church" soon to be published is the fruit of the reflections of a group which includes our own Archdeacon of Hackney.

The picture given of the society we are called to serve rings true. The mainstream of thought and action concerned with social, and even spiritual betterment, according to most contemporary commentators, no longer flows from the altar of God or even by the church door. The authors of the report echo Adrian Hastings' judgement in his History of English Christianity 1920-1990. "If it is remarkable how little histories of the eighteenth century and nineteenth century mostly bother to say about the weight of religion - that of the Church of England especially, - for the twentieth century they have been almost entirely silent, except for the occasional caricaturing aside." We know the truth of that. The good we do will only rarely be reported but anything risible or scandalous will receive great attention
Those of us who live inside the church know that this prejudice is strange and unfair. The London Challenge video of 2002 was the merest snapshot of a church "preaching the gospel of the kingdom and healing all manner of diseases" with an imagination and verve provoked by the diversity of contemporary London.

Canon Bob Jackson's work about the Diocese, "A Capital Idea," is a record of growth and energy, which ought to be read as a tribute to what has been achieved in the partnership between clergy and the faithful in every area where we serve.

But let us not waste time complaining about the unfairness of it all. There is no progress in the spiritual life until we can let go of self-justification. In any case, our combined electoral rolls amount to less than the increase in the numbers of new Londoners officially recorded for one year, 2000, the year of Christ's Millennium. There is a liberation in facing the fact squarely that we are no longer called to defend the curtain walls of an entrenched institution, part of the actual establishment. Instead we are free to be God's joyful subversives with the advantage that we still have many sympathisers within the camp through which the mainstream now flows.

If the Holy Spirit is at work amongst us then there is no room for anxiety. We can detect and reject the loveless deflection of our anxieties on fellow members of the church and treat with compassionate humour the suggestion that if only everyone believed as I believe then there would be no problem.

We can be confident but clear-sighted. The thesis of "A Mission Shaped Church" is hard to resist. With the diversion of the mainstream away from the church door, any church organised exclusively on a "Come to us" basis must dwindle. It is time to change the emphasis to "Go to them". "Jesus went about in all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the Kingdom, and healing all manner of disease and all manner of sickness among the people."
We do not lack for ideas in the Diocese of London but sometimes we have had less zeal for consistent implementation. Bold policy statements, without constant re-iteration and not translated into persevering action, breed cynicism. The past two years have, I believe, helped us and equipped us with a corporate agenda for action and a clarity about our situation which releases fresh energy.

Last year we concentrated on relating our spiritual ambitions to our resources as we respond to the financial revolution which has flowed from the dramatic contraction of the historic asset base administered by the Church Commissioners. Because of prudent management in the Diocese, defeatist and mischievous talk of bankruptcy or melt down is out of place. Please discourage such talk. We are however confronting the salutary challenge of husbanding our own resources for the sake of the work of Jesus Christ in London and beyond the borders of our own Diocese.

Thank you for your part in responding to the Time for Decision Consultation and for the generous level of pledges to the Common Fund. As part of the follow up to the comments made in the 2003 exercise we have been exploring ways of offsetting necessary administrative costs with a more imaginative use of our property assets. I am glad to be able to tell you that from July this year, about a quarter of the costs of the office in Causton Street will be covered at a stroke as we welcome a new rent paying tenant to take over the ground floor of the building.

The Consultation did, however, reveal other things. There is a call for radical action on all hands but only if it affects the parish down the road. There is constant reference to "them" or "the centre" which suggest that we have some way to go before we live and breathe as a Church worthy of the name. Le centre c'est toi and we are partners in the gospel. We can do miraculous things for God in his power if we do them together. There is no place for parish, area or even diocesan chauvinism. We need to make one another our work of art. There must be cross fertilisation and mutual support and accountability between all the communities in the Diocese. We must not withdraw to the pockets of prosperity and quit those places where the poor are our teachers and the church is renewed. Beloved let us love one another for love is of God.

In 2002 we faced the London Challenge and enlarged our understanding of what God was already doing amongst us. In 2003 we faced the Time for Decision and the task of matching resources to spiritual ambition. In 2004 we turn to London Visions and a re-imagination of our life as a Church in this world city.

The programme for the year has the teasing title London Visions - Back to the Future. This is not a reactionary slogan. The contemplation of Hebrew verbs conjures up a picture of our addressing the future rather as a sculler makes progress on a river. We cannot see the future, which is all the while flowing from behind our back into view. All we can see is the way we have come.

God no doubt has surprises in store for us, which we cannot see but as we navigate into the future a sense of the story of our community diverts the pressure of the passing moment. A lively understanding of the many different ways in which the Church has been steered and organised saves us from being oppressed by any sense of inevitability about where we are now. Some acquaintance with the story of the Church in London and the conflicts and numerous choices, which have been encountered along the way, can deepen our awareness of the choices we have to make now. A memory of our story can give us the spiritual and mental space to respond to the unexpected, not merely to react to it.

We all know that one great convulsion occurred 1400 years ago in 604. The Church was re-established, rather tentatively at first, as the Church of the East Saxon tribe who occupied at that time the north bank of the Thames. Missionaries arrived here from foreign parts. The first St Paul's was begun on Ludgate Hill. New forms of worship and music were introduced. Chanting and plainsong proved to be powerful community builders. Minster Churches, "mission shaped churches" were established from which preachers went "about all Galilee," to the scattered rural communities. As the seventh century moved on there were new life projects for women opened up and communities dedicated to prayer for both men and women were founded. The gospel of the Kingdom was being communicated in ways appropriate to the East Saxon tribe and the truth which was communicated proved to be transformative, not least in the healing ministry of St Erkenwald, once the beloved patron saint of London now undeservedly and temporally in eclipse.

The truth that is founded on the work of Jesus Christ and given by God through his Holy Spirit transcends mere information or description of things whether in heaven or in earth. God's truth transforms.

And Jesus went about in all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom and healing all manner of disease and all manner of sickness among the people.

History's lessons are not directly applicable. It is obvious that we are putting our backs into the future at a very different point in time. There is a cultural and communications revolution. London is no longer the exclusive preserve of the East Saxons. The skyline has been transformed by handsome new mosques and the spectacular temple in Neasden but the Christian community has also been refreshed by the arrival of fellow believers from every corner of the globe. There is great promise and also peril of the kind described in the Astronomer Royal's most recent book "Will the Human Race Survive the 21st Century."

The shape of our church is still, however, largely determined by the fallout following the explosion of that great Christian supernova, the old Western Church with its untidiness and great diversity, its plethora of peculiars, its radical friars at war with parish clergy, and new feminist movements.

All existing Christian churches were decisively affected by the convulsions of the 16th and 17th centuries, which followed the fracturing of the old Church. All modern Christian bodies in the West continue some aspects of the common tradition but all, and not least the Roman Catholic Church, bear the marks of the profound remodelling of church life which occurred in Western Europe during the reformation period.

There were some very positive aspects of this remodelling. The Bible was made accessible as never before. New vernacular prayers and liturgies refreshed the worshipping life of the church and there was a greater investment in the education of the young but there were also some less welcome developments.

Oral culture gave way before the flood of books, paper and texts. There was an increasing bureaucratic rigidity in church structures. Fuelled by violent polemic there was a tendency to over-define mysteries.

The balance of St Augustine's vision of a church in which there was unity in the biblical foundations, freedom of theological opinion on a great range of debatable matters and charity in every thing, was lost. In certis unitas, in dubiis libertas et in omnibus caritas. The middle ground was parcelled out among mutually antagonistic heirs of parts of Augustine's thought. Partisans of his doctrine of grace confronted adherents of his doctrine of the church in a conflict spilling over into a European civil war, which proved to be the context for the birth of a new Enlightenment culture with a decidedly anti-Christian bias.

It was a time of consolidating boundaries between nation states and drawing maps. Ecclesiastical establishments were co-opted into this work.

It is large parts of this inheritance that must change.
Some of the elements of the new Church, that is emerging, are already obvious. Our church must better reflect the composition of modern London. We are still too exclusively East Saxon.

We are still only at the beginning of understanding the implications of the communications revolution.

It is time to play our part in piecing together the fragments of the coming Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of which we claim, with some realism, to be just a part.

In our own life as a church and a Diocese it is clear that role based committee work is less and less attractive to those who have tasted the truth that transforms. There will be much more real devolution and experiment. We shall be faced afresh with the challenge of maintaining unity without resorting to the centralising tendencies of the past. This recalls us as ordained ministers to the vital aspect of our work, which lies in relating the local to the universal. This we do of course by remembering one another constantly in prayer, especially in the Holy Communion. But also by regarding our face to face meetings not as chores but as part of our work of building a community of mutual love, able to interpret and give substance to the gospel for our time. This is the way to release the transforming power of the gospel and rescue it from the scribes.

Sometimes in the past we have behaved as if it was possible to accept the gospel as information and then concern ourselves principally with finding the right techniques for "putting it across". We know, of course, that what convinces is a gospel community that is transformed and really capable of healing all manner of sickness.

The events of this anniversary year give us an opportunity to reflect on the story of the way we have come. We can see that part of the stream of tradition over which we have passed as we have navigated the river. As a new future comes from behind our backs into view, we are being encouraged to re-discover the life giving, liquid strength of the stream of tradition, not as an oppressive burden but as a river that bears us up. These are the true waters of life, which flow through and from the record of God's dealing with his people in the Bible.

And Jesus went about in all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom and healing all manner of disease and all manner of sickness among the people.

The London Challenge Prayer.