Money

It’s been a surprising month in the Malmesbury & Upper Avon Group as we’ve diverted from the usual post-Easter texts and wrestled a bit with a four week teaching series on money, imaginatively titled ‘Money’. (Can you guess what our summer series on Moses is called?) In case you missed ‘Money’, or left the building just in time, in Week 1 (Malachi 3:6-12 & Luke 11:37-42) we considered that tithing (giving 10%) to your local church was an expression of spiritual freedom and an acknowledgement that everything comes from God – not just a dreary church-tax. In Week 2 (Habakkuk 3:16-19 & Mark 12:38-44) we noted that people can rejoice and give proportionately, even generously, in the very worst times. In Week 3 (Proverbs 3:1-10 & Luke 12:22-34) it was our hearts that were under the microscope and we reflected that when we worry we are living with the anticipation that God will neither provide nor protect us - and that undermines our discipleship. Finally at Pentecost (Deuteronomy 14:22-29 & Acts 4:29-37) it was pretty inspiring to be reminded that when the Spirit fell on the early church their attitude to possessions, each other and the poor was radically transformed.

I’ve been vicar in Malmesbury for over 8 years now, and this has been our first series on finance, so I felt a little apprehension as to how we would handle this together. But it has been good to see the issue of money brought maturely to the heart of our community, to rediscover just how spiritual matters of cash, credit cards and consumerism really are, and to reflect on where we are as a church financially.

What now? It’s simple really, no arm twist, this is between us and God. Maybe we revisit the texts above when we have a moment to spare, and then we are honest with ourselves and God about what is really fair that we give regularly to our local church. If this is a time when you might begin or increase your standing order to the Abbey then we’d appreciate it if you could do that in the next two weeks and it will help the church council plan wisely for the future as we make important decisions in June & July. If you don’t yet GiftAid your giving and you are a UK tax payer, it is very, very beneficial to the Abbey if you do so as soon as possible. Our Abbey Treasurer Chris Jager (chrisjager@malmesburyabbey.com) or GiftAid secretary Jim Druett will be happy to help, confidentially. You can get their phone numbers from Sandie in the parish office (01666 826666). Please note that myself and the Abbey leadership have no idea what anybody gives unless you bring your offering in a large sack every Sunday. (Thank you Eric, greatly appreciated.)

My prayer is simple, may our giving be holy, and may our leaders be wise.

Answering the Phone 101

As he abrubtly hung up I had mixed feelings about having the vicarage phone number displayed on a large blue sign outside Malmesbury Abbey.  It was my day off and I broke my rule by answering the phone. The reason I answered was that I knew, yes I knew that it was my daughter phoning to tell me she’d be back soon and we could leave for a swim. So I picked up with a cheery ‘Hi!’ and got ‘I've driven 40 bleeding miles to sit in the grounds of Malmesbury Abbey with my family and the gates are locked and I want to know why.’ I started a courteous answer, angry with myself that my Philips Answer Machine wasn’t dealing with Mr 40 Bleeding Miles. ‘The Abbey is open between 9 and 5 in the summer but’…the line went dead. He missed ‘but we can’t leave the gates open, particularly on a Friday evening, because occasionally, late at night, people confuse our fine Norman porch with a urinal or a vomitarium, and brides tend not to be too impressed by that on a Saturday morning in a £1000 dress.’

It’s not all that bad, occasionally it’s really left field and rather fun. When I was a curate I had an enquiry that nobody’s theological training can prepare them for: ‘Eyup, vicar, can you tell me what Kum Ba Yah means?’ I nearly replied ‘if you can tell me what Eyup means’ but by this stage I was starting to realise that occasional politeness could help in Christian ministry on the telephone and directed him towards the local scout leader. In Australia, we discovered soon after moving in that the phone number of our minister’s house was one number removed from Pinky’s Pizza; ‘two large pepperonis with a side of coleslaw and a large Coke, fine, would you like your child christened with that?’ (Poor old Pinky’s closed down a couple of years later.)

There are plenty of meaningful conversations and the odd unprintable conversation to add to the above but I’m left with the nagging question, why do clergy have to be so immediately accessible anyway? I really struggle to think of any genuine emergencies in the last 13 years of ministry, most parishioners tend to go to a doctor or the RAC before they head towards me.

Two things. If we truly believe in the ministry of the whole Body of Christ shouldn’t our energies be directed towards making the Body of Christ interconnected and attentive in the local community and demythologising the clerical collar. And secondly, the ordained, and perhaps all of us, need to pay attention to the ‘radical unavailability of Jesus’ (a great phrase from Bishop Stephen Cottrell) who when grabbed by his disciples in Mark 1:37 with the words ‘Everybody is looking for you!’ replied without hesitating ‘Let us go somewhere else.’

Litigation and Liturgy

While Occupy London was creating a bit of bother both outside and inside St. Paul’s Cathedral, the chapter were given a commission by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, could they compose for her and the nation a Diamond Jubilee Prayer?  They don't seem to have been too preoccupied, and this is the fruit of their labours:

God of time and eternity,

whose Son reigns as servant, not master;

we give you thanks and praise

that you have blessed this Nation, the Realms and Territories

with Elizabeth, our beloved and glorious Queen.

In this year of Jubilee,

grant her your gifts of love and joy and peace

as she continues in faithful obedience to you, her Lord and God

and in devoted service to her lands and peoples,

and those of the Commonwealth,

now and all the days of her life;

through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.                                               

We will be using this prayer at all our Diamond Jubilee services which occur in our group as follows:

Malmesbury Abbey, Saturday 2nd June at 5pm (tea, bouncy castle, BBQ from 3.30pm)

St John the Baptist, Brokenborough, Sunday 3rd June at 10.30am

Holy Rood Rodbourne, Sunday 3rd June at 10.30am

Malmesbury Abbey, Sunday 10th June at 6.30pm with prayer for our new mayor.

Where is Scooby-Doo when you need him?

‘We believe in ghosts.’ The silence was total agony. I was on my two-day selection conference for ordination in 1996 (yes, Cranmer was on the panel) and it was the ‘one-minute wonders’ where we each had to turn over a card from the table and introduce a topic on the card for one minute, without preparation and without any assistance at all from the rest of the group. Then we were to lead an 8-minute discussion and summarise for a further minute. The man to my left turned over his card and read out ‘we believe in ghosts.’ Unfortunately for us all, he then couldn’t think of a single thing to say for 60 seconds; not a single reference to ghosts in the Bible, in society, to Bill Murray in Dan Akroyd in their seminal work, Ghostbusters, not even a Scooby-Doo impression. It was 60 seconds excruciating silence during which I internally vowed that whatever was on my card next I would read it out and not stop talking for 61 seconds. Rambling drivel was far preferable to this communal awkwardness, and possibly a requirement for an ordinand in the Church of England.

So I turned over my card and it read: ‘We regret that there no longer exists a single unifying liturgy in the Church of England.’ I was off. O, how I regretted it, I lamented the loss of such a liturgy. I nearly cried. O that we couldn’t walk into a church in Bradford or Barnstaple and be reassured by the words of 1662 flowing from the mouth of the priest. O, that society no longer carries around Hymns Ancient and Modern (ha!) and says the creeds facing eastwards without reference to our personal leather-bound copies of the BCP. I was off, and nothing could stop me, not even the fact that what I was saying made no sense at all, and that I seemed to be channelling the sprit of a long-dead Victorian cleric. My ramble produced a rather animated conversation, mainly discussing my sanity, and then we moved on to the next card. The agony was over.

I remembered my one-minute wonder at the end of worship yesterday. In the space of 36 hours I had presided at a joyously beautiful wedding of friends in Chorleywood with meaningful liturgy, contemporary worship and music from Toy Story; I had spoken at a Rogation Day Service on a farm where my preaching was upstaged by a cow with her newborn calf; I hosted the passionate African gospel music and evangelistic preaching of Uganda Fire at Malmesbury Abbey; and then finally led Choral Evensong with the music of Tallis, Wamisley and Blow. The church and her worship is glorious, diverse, surprising – ‘how many are your works, O Lord, in wisdom you made them all.’ (Psalm 104:24)

So, if you were on my selection panel all those years ago, a quick word. I lied.

Giants' Footsteps

The recent BBC2 series Reverse Missionaries saw three Christians from Jamaica, Malawi and Mumbai visit the home communities of missionaries that had first brought the gospel to their nation. For us in Wiltshire, seeing Jamaican Baptist Pastor Franklin Small preaching just up the road in King’s Stanley felt very local indeed given that his host, Nigel Price, is married to a Lay Minister at the Abbey, Catherine Price. That Pastor Franklin didn’t find it at all easy in the Cotswolds is a bit of a relief frankly. If people were to fly into the UK and convert towns and cities across the nation overnight it would be joyous, of course, but our own ineptness over the last century would be all too plain to see. But his sadness, that a country of 19^th century missional fire could become a country of 21^st century spiritual tepidity, is a lament we can share with our Jamaican brother.

For me, visiting the Diocese of Kigezi in Uganda in 2010 (see above, where Canon Stanley Byomugabe is graciously correcting my preaching, or translating as he called it) was to walk in the footsteps of giants like evangelist Bishop Festo Kivengere, who was radically converted to a spirit-filled Christian life, worked with Billy Graham, challenged Idi Amin, and ordained women before we did over here. But he wasn't the first giant. I was aware that there were deeper footsteps still of missionaries like Leonard and Esther Sharp who, at great personal cost, brought health care, sanitation, education, justice, the gospel of Jesus Christ and a lot of Victorian hymns to Kabale, as the Holy Spirit birthed the church in Uganda and transformed a nation. 

So another journey is reversed this week as Peter Kasamba arrives here from Kampala with the singers and musicians of Uganda Fire, treading in the footsteps of those earlier missionary journeys, bringing the fire back. You can find out more about the musicians and their time in the UK at http://www.bristol.anglican.org/churches/uganda/ and you can join them in the Abbey for a free concert at 7.30pm on Saturday 12^th May and for an all-age service at 4pm on Sunday 13^th May. 

Small Communities

As a small choirboy I used to enjoy lettuce. Not when it was served on a plate, I was, and remain, very suspicious of all types of salad, but when lettuce appeared in the Nunc Dimittis at Evensong:  ‘Lord now lettuce thou thy servant depart in peas,’ (snigger!) This then should make Hebrews 10:19-25 my all time favourite bit of the Bible as it is an astonishing four lettuce passage, perhaps a bit like a Michelin 4-star restaurant. Let us draw near to God, let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, let us spur one another on towards love and let us not give up meeting together. That fourth lettuce is the perennial head-banging-against-the-wall challenge to all Christian leaders - how on earth do we configure our churches in such a way as to actually encourage the process of meeting together so that followers of Christ worship together, remain faithful and build up one another (the first three lettuces.) Often our genuine, thoughtful efforts seem to achieve quite the opposite.

Regardless of any potential catastrophe, Revd Lee Barnes and myself will be working together over the next six months to help us get much better at meeting outside our Abbey services. The Abbey picture is a mixed one. Many are growing in small communities, groups of all shapes and sizes, but many aren’t. Many are hosting, leading or pastoring a small group, but many aren’t. Some groups are growing, others are closing. Some see the point of meeting, some don’t. So can you help us in these three ways?

1.      If you currently lead a small group would you send the details of your current membership, and what happens, to Sandie in the parish office

2.      If you would like to be part of a small community but you aren’t, would you contact Sandie in the parish office with your details

3.      If you would like to be trained as a small community leader and grow in a new Christian ministry would you please contact Neill or Lee

Please be patient with us as we grasp the lettuce and develop a Small Communities leadership team to oversee this discipleship dimension of church, and also provide new small groups for those enquiring about the Christian faith. We’ll be providing resources and different models of small community for those who want to meet weekly, fortnightly, monthly or annually (the last isn’t a genuine option), during the day, in the evening, in a pub, on a boat, by Skype etc.

Finally, for those of you leading a group already who would like to know where the Abbey teaching series are going in 2012 and prepare accordingly, in May we have a four-week series on Money; from June to August we will be looking at the Life of Moses; and from September through to Advent we will be studying Jesus’ one-to-one encounters in John’s gospel. Then we all sing ‘O come lettuce adore him, O come lettuce adore…’