August 2009

Dear colleagues, 

I was thinking of following up the recent brief ‘swine flu’ letter with some interesting facts from history. I could have written of Augustine in early fifth century North Africa maintaining that infants and young children unable to eat the eucharistic bread fully received the sacrament with a small amount of wine; of resistance to receiving from the cup as the Middle Ages wore on, which was condemned by central authority; and of how that authority did a volte face and restricted communion to bread only – around the time of the bubonic plague.  I could, moreover, have elaborated on what is for me a greater concern, which is best summarised in the following way. Babies are great receivers and transmitters of infection. Whereas the Prayer Book requires the priest at baptism to take the child in his arms there is no such direction in the new services. My own practice has for long been to leave the child in the hands of the mother or godmother because I’m not exactly agile. But I haven’t gone into any of that at length, and look forward to the day when the Archbishops’ recommendations are revoked. 

Instead, my mind has been concentrating on going through all my books and papers, some of which go back to when I was a student forty years ago. This has involved both a massive clear-out and the constant experience of living through the past, sometimes quite vividly, especially when looking at a letter or a note of some kind, or even a sermon long since forgotten. I suppose it prompts in me two considerations - past influences and the future. 

First, influences. I often ask ordinands and clergy when they come to see me what were the main influences on their journey of faith towards ministry. Usually the answer is about someone they knew, or someone whose book they have read or address they have heard, and sometimes it is both. As I go through my books and papers, even though he doesn’t occupy much space among either, the name of Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1961-1974, keeps coming up, someone I knew in his retirement, and whom I heard preach and lecture on a number of occasions.  

Two of his books I keep recalling. One was his penetrating study of the Transfiguration, reputedly a favourite of his, published in 1949, while a Professor at Durham. But it is his earlier book, ‘The Gospel and the Catholic Church’ (1936), written while Sub-Warden of Lincoln Theological College, which is probably his greatest. It appeared at a time when not much was being produced on ecclesiology – unlike today, when rather too much is coming out, often to justify this, that, or the other. It has worn particularly well, and has been reprinted a number of times.  

The book speaks eloquently of the incompleteness of the Church, and the ‘travail’ in Anglicanism’s soul; that much we need to ponder far more than we do. But what is his abiding message? He makes a strong plea for seeing the nature of the Church primarily in the dying and rising of Christ – which becomes a way of viewing the ups and downs of history, of eyeing up sectarianisms that appear from time to time, and above all of seeing our discipleship in a constant call to ‘holiness’, a real Ramsey word. 

I have kept that book in the pocket of my mind all through my time here in Portsmouth – and I am profoundly thankful for it. Exclusively juridical approaches to the nature of the Church do not do justice to our humanity, and – though superficially attractive – run the risk of signing us up to a far higher doctrine of ‘communion’ than we can ‘service’ in real terms. Such a gospel-centred, death-and-resurrection insight came from a man with a naturally sunny expression on his face who had to practise frowning when preparing to meet with Dr Vorster, the enthusiast for apartheid, when he visited South Africa, and who was angrily snubbed in the House of Lords when he voted for the ‘consenting adults’ legislation. Holiness can be a costly and unecclesiastical virtue.  

Second, the future. Ramsey’s vision is not a bad starting-point for praying and planning about mission. But it’s only a starting-point, and far from being some kind of blue-print strategy. This is a process that has to be rethought and worked out according to circumstances, as is happening in the diocese at the moment. But what of the shape of the Church to come, a theme about which Ramsey was invariably both firm and optimistic? He always maintained that it is God’s Church, not ours, and what is to be in the future may well look very different from how things are now.  

That particular insight brings with it a twofold challenge. One is our sheer humanity. In a year when Mark’s gospel is central to the Lectionary, it is worth pointing out that he regularly emphasises the disciples getting the wrong end of the stick. But misunderstanding Jesus can extend to such areas as how we expend our energies – and there are some glaring examples from current controversies to shame us here. But we are not going to grow in holiness unless we are a Church that is prepared to recognise this constant need penitently to refocus priorities. 

The other challenge lies in how we travel on the journey of ‘becoming’ the Church of the future. I have been singing a bit of a mantra in recent months about travelling more lightly, more generously, and more prayerfully. Our structures are often too cumbersome, so that we run the risk of becoming a Church that spends too much of its time going to meetings. There will be demands on our generosity, not only in the area of finance, but in the way we relate to one another – and recent events in the Anglican Communion only serve to underscore that particular truth. And I keep being struck by the need for worship that is more prayerful. If I were to sum up the biggest challenge facing a bishop today, it is to model a ministry of being and doing – in what can nowadays be a very busy and bossy Church.  

Were I to have my time here all over again, I would pay far more attention to this balance than I have. Ramsey’s famous frown in South Africa is a reminder that, for all our internal preoccupations, we ignore the world’s concerns and its pain at our peril – and that includes its search for some kind of spirituality, even if it appears at first sight to be partly-formed, individualistic, and anti-institutional. A recent article in a weekly laments the ideological bankruptcy of so much of our political life – ‘the death of ideas’, as it’s been called. We, in our turn, cannot afford to become a Church burnt up by a pragmatic activism wholly lacking in an underlying vision and theology of where and how the Kingdom of God is leading us. Ramsey’s paradigm of the dying and rising Christ could perhaps be of some help here.  

With every blessing 

+ Kenneth