Address by the Bishop of Jarrow to Diocesan Synod - 5th November 2011

Last year at this Synod we said that Growing the Kingdom in the diocese of Durham involved us being a diocese where

We are arresting decline in church attendance and churches are growing.
Each congregation is seeking to service its local community, and in particular the most vulnerable members of that community.
We read the Bible together.
Incoming is increasing and we are demonstrating good stewardship of our resources and are financially sound.

And we have been working hard on those areas.

We said that in order to help churches grow we would launch re-imagining baptism to help congregations make the best of the opportunities offered by baptism.

A major part of launching re-imagining baptism was a highly successful Summer Gathering for Clergy devoted entirely to the theme of re-imagining baptism. It is I think fair to say that very many clergy left that Summer Gathering with a renewed sense of the importance of the baptisms that happen in our churches Sunday by Sunday, and with new ideas about how they might make best of those opportunities.

In 2012 we propose to follow that up by providing a follow-up event from the Clergy Summer Gathering and this is already planned for 12th January 2012.

To develop this still further we also propose to

Resource on-going discussion at Area Deans Meetings.
Provide a Diocesan Day for Lay Ministers and others involved in Baptism, and provide ‘Ideas for Baptism’ – a booklet or web resource.

We also said that we would support and encourage more churches to engage in Back to Church Sunday. Almost 100 people attended a highly stimulating morning at Durham High School with Mark Hope-Urwin, a former Customer Service Manager in the John Lewis Partnership, where we looked at how we might make our churches more welcoming.

In the end some 90 churches were involved in Back to Church Sunday. I was delighted to be able to host a meeting at Auckland Castle a few days before Back to Church Sunday where we were able to offer support to each other, and prayer for each other. It was good too last Thursday to hold a follow-up meeting for many of those involved in Back to Church Sunday.

I think that one of the things that we have learned through this exercise is that we have some further work to do in creating a situation in which members of congregations feel able to invite friends and neighbours to come to church with them.

There is also a sense that in a way every Sunday needs to be a Back to Church Sunday, in that we need to be constantly looking both at how we welcome people when they do come to church and develop relationships with them, and also as we start to think what are the best opportunities to welcome people to church either for the first time or people who are coming back after quite a long absence. As some of you will know the research suggests that there are three million people out there who are waiting for an invitation to come back to church.

It is good however to note that there is also not insignificant growth in church-going in our diocese in a whole variety of Sunday afternoon, Messy Church and similar events. We do not yet have accurate figures for these events but it is clear that on a regular basis, we have well in excess of 1000 people in our churches through these events who would not otherwise be in our churches

Certainly in 2012 we want to see how we can build on the experiences of Back to Church Sunday this year. Judy Hirst will be taking responsibility for this and there will be involvement from at least one of the bishops.

A number of deaneries have said to us that we need to look afresh at how we equip, train and support people to exercise ministries, as the number of full-time stipendiary clergy reduces.

Some of you will already know about Wings for Worship. This has been a highly successful project which has taken place in Durham, Newton Aycliffe, Jarrow, Windy Nook, Lanchester, Houghton-le-Spring and Billingham - to name just a few locations. This project has proved to be highly successful in empowering lay people to make contributions as lay people, as asked and supported by their incumbents.

In 2012 we propose to build on the success of this programme by adding modules which will develop people’s skills for speaking in church.

In addition, we want to explore more fully the question of local authorised funeral ministers i.e. lay people other than Readers who after the right training and with the right supervision are able to take funerals.

My experience of this in another diocese is that it has been immensely effective, not least as lay funeral ministers are often to be honest able to give more time and care to the taking of funerals than many parish clergy can, even with the very best will in the world. There is growing evidence that what people want most of all at the time of bereavement is somebody who will care for them and offer a service to the highest possible standard and I believe that in many cases lay people working under the direction of The Incumbent can more than adequately provide this.

As we seek to re-imagine ministry in the diocese we are going to devise and deliver a series of events entitled ‘Your Gifts – Your Call’ to be held across the diocese to encourage more people into authorised ministry.

We are also going to use some of the resources being produced nationally to encourage young people into public ministry. We are already involved in this national initiative through Jonathan Lawson the Chaplain at Hild-Bede who is a member of a national group looking at this and I am also involved in a small way in this myself.

We are doing all this not just to fill the gaps that are emerging as we have fewer full-time stipendiary clergy, but also because experience shows that as people become more involved in their lay ministry their own faith grows and the local church often gains a new vibrancy.

We are committed as a diocese to being a place where churches grow, and I know that this is going to be a major theme of what Bishop Justin is going to have to say to us in the early years of his time as Bishop with us.

We said last year that we wanted to be a diocese where each congregation is seeking to serve its local community, and in particular the most vulnerable members of that community.

We have initiated the Inspired North East project to resource churches as they think about their profile in the community, care for their buildings and seek grant funding for maintenance

The Inspired North East project has established a website with a lot of useful information,

The Project has delivered support to 40 churches in the Durham Diocese.
Inspired North East working across the two Dioceses has laid on 4 workshops with 195 attendees.
Peter Biggers also has putting together a very useful spreadsheet of grant making bodies to help when consulting with parishes seeking grant funding.

…… and the work of that project will continue throughout 2012.

We said last year that we would seek to provide an externally funded post to support parishes and deaneries as they seek to serve their communities more effectively. In 2012 we shall launch the Bridge Project which is an externally funded project which we hope will help our local churches relate more closely to their local communities, and some of you will already have seen the advertisement for that post. We are certainly very blessed indeed that this exciting post is possible through the generosity of the Lord Crewe Trust.

We also said last year that we would provide parishes and deaneries with the resources to enable them to better understand the nature of the communities they serve. It is probably fair to say that this has not ended up being quite as well developed in 2011 as we had expected simply because of the pressure on human resources, but we are proposing to provide the resources to parishes to do this in 2012, and this will be launched through a series of Archdeaconry taster events.

Some of you will have heard me speak at licensings and indeed may have read an article I wrote for Newslink which says something about the importance of us understanding the communities which we are seeking to serve.

Last year we said that we wanted to be a diocese where income is increasing and we are demonstrating good stewardship of our resources and are financially sound. As we said we would, we have started to provide members of congregations with information to help them to understand something about the way the diocesan finances work, and we shall be developing that further in 2012.

A year ago we said we would discuss during 2011 adopting the target of 5% of net income as the normal level of giving to the local church.

I think that what emerged in 2011 was that while there was general agreement that we needed to find ways of increasing the giving of members of our congregations we were not necessarily agreed on the best way to do this. You may recall that at the May synod I suggested that if every church-going person in the Diocese gave 5% of their disposable income to their parish church that could generate something in the region of an additional £4.2 million pounds for the parishes. I invited you to imagine a world where

we didn’t have to worry so much when the gas bill came in,
where we could have a youth worker perhaps in almost every deanery,
where the bank balance was such that we did not need to spend anything like so much time worrying about money at the PCC meeting and could talk more about how we develop our work with young people or our care of the elderly. Imagine what that sort of world would be like!

In the last year there has been a growing sense that what might work in one parish would not necessarily automatically work in another parish, and it is for that reason that in 2012 we are saying that ‘each parish will be asked to develop its own strategy to increase giving as a response to God’s love and generosity’.

I think I can safely say from conversations that have already taken place between Bishop Justin and his Senior Staff that Bishop Justin will be making the Giving priority very much his own priority in the very first months of his time with us as a Bishop. It is for that reason that we are saying that Bishop Justin’s full knowledge and agreement that ‘Bishop Justin will, with Bishop Mark, initiate a diocesan wide discussion on how Parish Share can be most effectively and fairly raised to ensure that we have the money for the mission to which we are called by God’.

I think that we are conscious that some parishes and deaneries do not necessarily feel that the way that the Share is allocated across the diocese is entirely fair. Bishop Justin I know is keen that there should be discussions about this to really discover whether or not the system that we do have is fair. I think the hard facts are that while we acknowledge the enormous financial pressures that are facing many members of our congregations we do have to look at how we can increase Giving in our congregations.

Over the past two years we have had Reading the Bible as one of our priorities. In the first year we prioritised on the Big Read with many people in congregations feeling that they were engaging with the Gospels in a new way. Last year under Pat Francis and Anne Lindsley’s leadership many were involved in the celebration at the Anniversary of the King James Bible.

The fact that Reading does not appear as a priority for 2012 does not of course mean that people should stop reading their Bibles! It simply suggests that we are going to turn our priorities elsewhere.

Thus the new priority for 2012 says that Growing the Kingdom in the diocese of Durham involves us being a diocese where we are all praying daily and growing spiritually.

A number of you will have heard me say in the time that I have been in the diocese that I have not been clear how we were fulfilling our commitment in the Growing the Kingdom vision to Restoring the Sacred Centre. And it seems to me very good indeed that praying is to be one of our priorities for 2012.

My own belief, which I have talked about at a number of licensing’s in the last 12 months, is that if the life of the church in our diocese is to be renewed, if indeed the Dry Bones are to live, then that will come first of all by a renewal of our own relationship with God, and a new desire to see God at the very heart of our church life where sadly but understandably he too often gets crowded out by so very many of the practical things with which we understandably have to deal.

Amongst other things we propose in 2012 to devise and deliver a prayer and spirituality programme for clergy and Readers, and to develop, introduce and promote a simple form of daily prayer for the use of all laity across the diocese.

We are blessed in the diocese with a number of resources for those who want to explore how they might take their relationship with God more seriously. We have St Antony’s Priory in Durham, we have Minsteracres, and just south of the diocese we have The Order of the Holy Paraclete at Whitby and Sleights and in Northumberland SSF at Alnmouth. However, the practical reality is that for a number of people those places are not entirely accessible, and therefore we are going in 2012 to seek to develop a provision for ‘Retreat in Daily Life’. There will be an opportunity to discover more about this later in the morning from Lindsey Goodhew, but in short Retreat in Daily Life provides an opportunity for people over a number of weeks with a series of regular meetings in their parishes to think about how as individual Christians they are taking their relationship with God seriously.

We are also saying that We are also going to help churches and schools to develop Prayer Spaces for children and young people.

I unashamedly believe this to be an important and exciting priority for our life as a diocese in the coming 12 months, and again those of you who have heard Bishop Justin and watched the video of him will know how deeply this is his priority too.

Two years ago, as some of you may recall, I asked the question of this Synod ‘Can these Dry Bones Live’. I believe that there are real signs that they can. I think we see very encouraging signs in messy Church and Sunday at 4pm initiatives which I have mentioned. We have seen in the past twelve months some real commitments by congregations to make their churches more welcoming I see it day by day as I go around the diocese in a new Church School, in an imaginative community project and so on.

I believe that what we have here in our priorities for 2012 a diocese where we are praying daily and growing spiritually, we are arresting decline in church attendance and church growing, where each congregation is serving its local community and in particular its most vulnerable members, where income is increasing and we are demonstrating good stewardship of our resources and financially sound.

I believe that all this will enable us under God to be people who before our very eyes see the Dry Bones coming to life.

The Diocesan Priorities leaflet for 2012 - click here to download