Category: Blog Entry

Always tempting to say that one situation is ‘just like’ another situation – and then to over-press the comparison to make it fit. But I couldn’t help allowing my mind to play with this one.

I recently wrote in Inspires about the way in which the Scottish Episcopal Church is caricatured as the ‘English Church’. The implication, it seems to me writing in my Irish accent, is that we are less Scottish and less ? than others. And when I nudge people to think more bravely about mission I find that our thinking about the Church of Scotland as the national church with the territorial parish system comes into play. We are the small fry .. looking after our people ….

And the parallel … In Ireland, the 1937 Constitution gave a ‘special position’ to the Roman Catholic Church and gave to churches such as the Church of Ireland the status of ‘recognised churches.’ The implication was, presumably, was that to be Protestant or Church of Ireland was somehow to be less Irish and maybe less Christian too .. And through the working of the Ne Temere decree, the minority church grew ever smaller.

A tempting parallel and maybe just maybe there is some truth in it.

We emerge blinking into the light of day after three days of Clergy Conference. It seemed to me to be a good experience – an excellent speaker, a very good turn-out of clergy and a very high level of engagement. And in the midst of all the serious stuff, we even succeeded in writing a hymn/canticle, a creed and a rap based on Ephesians 1 for our final eucharist.

And what makes the relationships interesting for me … It’s the fact that I find myself in a very close working relationship with people whom I know and like and yet hardly know at all … and vice versa. So just occasionally, like people in a marriage, we find that we suddenly don’t understand each other. Sometimes it shows itself when we use the same words but mean very different things by them – sometimes we feel passionately about something because of experience we have had. But it’s different experience and we haven’t had long enough to share it with one another.

None of that’s a problem – in fact it’s enormously stimulating. Probably a bit like it is to live and work using a second language – sometimes missing the nuances and not understanding the jokes. But definitely worth working at.

Strange thing to be confined in a monastery with a group of clergy. We’ve had 41 here – which is a wonderful turn-out for us. Our guest has been Rev Peter Neilson of the ‘Church without Walls’ Project of the Church of Scotland. We’ve been looking at the question of how the church adapts to changed circumstances and how it engages with the very secular society which Scotland now is. But apart from that … the most important thing for us has been to begin to understand that the Kirk is now a church among churches – no longer expecting to have exclusive territorial rights. We therefore are free to move from being a vulnerable minority community to be also a church among churches. That is a big mindset shift for us – but it is good news for our clergy who sometimes feel that they have to ask permission to move outside the circle of ‘our people’.

So it’s off to the Clergy Conference tomorrow. The numbers are very good and some clergy from our link diocese of Meath and Kildare in Ireland are coming to remind me of home. Partly because of how spread out we are across the big spaces of central Scotland, our clergy don’t meet all that often. So I am looking forward to seeing them all together and working through some things as a group.

As well as the ‘main business’, we have a number of bits of policy to talk about – things like how we deal with second marriages, how we work with ordination candidates and how we see our links and partnerships in Ireland and Brazil.

Still reading Alan Bennett. He quotes this extraordinary poem by Ian Hamilton:

We are on a kind of stair. The world below
Will never be regained; was never there
Perhaps; And yet it seems
We’ve climbed to where we are
With diligence, as if told long ago
How high the highest rung.

Sometimes the phone rings but when you pick it up it’s dead. Sometimes the voice – which may be in Basingstoke or Bangalore wants to sell you a new mobile phone contract or insurance. You can block the calls but they still get through. Yesterday I had an E Mail telling me that I had won £3,987,470 in the National Lottery. I just deleted it. We are all consumers and the pressure from people who want to sell us things is insistent and persistent.

Insistent and persistent. It was when the Lord called Samuel for the third time – and when Samuel went to Eli for the third time that Eli realised that the call was the call of God. And he tells Samuel to be a servant with open ears – ‘Speak for your servant is listening.’

I don’t know why it has taken me so long to introduce the subject of Poppy, our brown Burmese cat. Those who talk to me on the phone will be familiar with the sound of her voice because she is the family member who has been most upset by the move to Scotland. We think it may be because this house was formerly DOG territory.

And why is she better now? Could it be because, instead of putting her into the posh kennels at Scone Palace after Christmas, we took her with us first to Belfast and then to Donegal. Maybe she was so glad to get home after all that …

I’ve been thinking about leadership again – particularly as our Clergy Conference comes closer. I’ve been reading Sotirios Christou’s ‘Evangelism and Collaborative Ministry in the Local Church’.

‘Give people a clear understanding of what the situation is now and what you believe it can be in the future.
Show them the discrepancy between the two, which is the arena of challenge and faith.
Explain the process of change which will take you from where you are now to where God wants to take you in the future.’

That sounds fine to me but …. … the magic seems to me to be in the tension between the need for the leader to state the vision clearly, restate it even more clearly and restate it ad nauseam …. and the need to involve people in the vision so that they respond to it, own it and are able to influence/adjust it … recognising that the best answer may not be the first vision of the leader.

After that, the rest is easy.

Today is being spent in talking about communication – one stage better than talking about the use of silence in worship! What’s our problem in communication – after all, we have the gospel! But, somehow, we seem to become a sort of content-free zone when it comes to communication – or we are apprehensive about putting ourselves ‘out there’ in engagement with the world. But how do you communicate in words – in soundbites, if possible – depths of compassion, forgiveness, caring, love, understanding. It always seemed to me that words were there to frame the silences – and when the best communication was taking place – words were almost an intrusion.

Off this morning for a quick check on the new house. It’s going to be a lovely place to live – new house built as part of a group of four inside the walls of an old steading and out in the heart of the Perthshire countryside. I’m doing my best to stay engaged with choices of tiles, carpets, etc. As this particular saga comes to a happy conclusion, it reminds me both of the amount of time I spend dealing with property issues – and of the fact that most of the real heartache which I have experienced in ministry has been to do with the problems of living in tied housing, managed by committees. More about that another day – but I suspect all who have experienced what is sometimes muddle – and sometimes teeters on the edge of being an attempt to exercise control by proxy – will know what I mean.