All Change

Having just said farewell to Lee and Mary Barnes, as they left for the Diocese of Liverpool in July, and now preparing to welcome (Revds) John and Alice Monaghan as they join us in June 2013, it’s sadly now time for the Abbey to bid farewell to Paul Tilley as he leaves us for the University of Bristol at the October half-term.

Paul is about to take a new direction in life as he studies full-time for an M.A. in Educational Psychology and then undertakes a paid Ph.D. in Educational Psychology. This is really great news for Paul and it will be sad to see him go after he’s become such an important part of us over the last three years; but after a pretty rough 2011/12 I’m pleased for Paul that his life and learning is being refreshed and that he faces new challenges and opportunities in Bristol.

Pipeline, Trax, and the Friday Night Thing will be losing a good teacher and friend at half term and we will say goodbye to Paul at our 4pm service on October 21^st.

What next for our Youth department at the Abbey? Well, myself and the PCC have decided not to rush to answer that question but to listen to the needs and insights of the leadership teams for both Abbey youth and children's departments. We’ll also want to look at our 2013/2014 budgets and plan wisely and sustainably before we make staff appointments, if any.

Our first task is volunteer personnel. Sarah McGrory continues with us on placement during her final year studying for a B.A. in youth and community work. Sarah will continue to oversee Trax (11-14) and SiB (at Malmesbury School) and serve on the leadership of Malmesbury Abbey Skate 2013 with myself. We are immediately looking to recruit, from our congregations, volunteers with a passion for God and young people to serve as leaders and assistants for Pipeline and the Friday Night Thing, who will be supported and trained by myself and the youth leadership. Initially we’re asking people to commit from early-November through to next summer and particularly asking mature Christians with teaching experience to step forward. But we also are looking for people, who want to grow in a new area of ministry, who love young people and who are considerably cooler than the vicar, to commit to serving once or twice a month. Our Youth department is a great place to grow in your own faith, to help shape the lives of young people, and to go insane.

Please e-mail neill@malmesburyabbey.com to explore this, and pray for Paul, Eloise, Isaac & Reuben as an exciting new chapter begins in Bristol.

The Monaghans are coming

We have a real passion for encouraging new ministry and leadership at the Abbey, so it is great to announce that John Monaghan is joining us in June 2013 as a full-time curate for the next three to four years. Some of you will have met John and the family as they joined us at the Abbey for worship at the end of August, albeit slightly undercover; but here is a brief intro from John and Alice:

John is from Dublin where he grew up and trained as a sports physio.  His father is an evangelical, charismatic Catholic who co-ordinates the Alpha course in Ireland, and his mother is a Pentecostal minister and clinical psychologist – so he’s enjoyed a wonderfully ecumenical upbringing!  John’s middle name is Emanuel – ‘God with us’, and he remembers making his first personal commitment to follow Christ at the age of seven, when he really wanted, (and then experienced) the assurance of God with him.  From the age of sixteen, he became more involved in his mother’s church – an Assemblies of God, Pentecostal church in Dublin.  His faith continued to grow as he stepped out in service (as it often does!) as a youth leader and worship leader in that church.

John met Alice in 2001 at a Christian conference in Ireland where John was leading the worship.  Alice’s parents are also Christians, and her commitment to Christ really came alive in a new way through an Alpha course her friend invited her to while she was studying architecture at Edinburgh University.  John subsequently moved to the UK, where Alice had just started training for ordination at Ridley Hall, Cambridge.  They got married in 2003.  Alice served her curacy at St James Church, Gerrards Cross, Bucks, under Paul Williams (currently bishop of Kensington).  Having been a clergy spouse for several years, John decided to return the favour (as well of course feeling deeply called in that direction!) and trained for ordained ministry at Trinity College, Bristol.

John and Alice have three adorable(ish) children – Philip (6), Toby (4) and Clara (2).  Alice currently works part-time as Assistant Vicar of Christ Church, Clifton, and when they are not doing churchy things they love having friends over for supper, family picnics and walks in the countryside, jumping on their trampoline (with the kids of course), running and mountain biking (okay – only John likes doing that!).  The Monaghan’s (silent ‘g’ by the way!) are really excited about being part of the community at Malmesbury from June 2013, and would value your prayers as our time in Bristol draws to a happy conclusion over the next year, and as we prepare to move next June.

Audacity

Last year, after eating Sushi for the first time, yes pretty pathetic I know,  I talked with the Dean of Singapore Cathedral, Kuan Kim Seng, as he outlined two developments that were particularly exciting him in the life of the Cathedral. These were not something mundane and straightforward for his church, like church planting in Vietnam or providing schools across his city, but something really big. The first of these was taking five youth pastors and sending them to train for six months with Bill Wilson and Metro Ministries in New York City; on their return they were to start a new Saturday morning ‘Sunday School’ for 1000 young people. At the same time he was taking 400 people from the largest of his nine Sunday congregations and starting a brand new Saturday evening congregation. As he described these huge projects I knew I was talking with a man who believed the future belonged to God and for whom to believe audacious things for God’s kingdom was nothing particularly remarkable. I asked him if these two significant developments appeared in any of the Cathedral’s recent strategic planning and he replied ‘no, God sometimes surprises us!’ And you might think that sometimes Singapore Cathedral surprises God.

In the early chapters of John’s gospel you see Jesus, while he still can, attempting to go under the radar: humbly being baptised by John with the rest, trying to avoid a miracle with water at a wedding, talking one on one with the Samaritan woman and Nicodemus, gathering a few disciples. But soon the highly visible and audacious starts breaking in – a healing in Jerusalem, 5000 fed, Lazarus looking pretty well for a dead man, and perhaps most unsubtle of all, turning over the tables of the bureau de change in the Temple. Audacity is a Jesus characteristic. In Dean Kim Seng it has also become a kingdom priority and a leadership characteristic.

At the Willow Creek leadership conference in 2011, Stephen Furtick, senior pastor of Elevation Church, Charlotte NC, talked about daring to believe God for the impossible and the audacity it takes to get started. Then he delivered to assembled pastors an enormous kick up the backside: ‘if the size of your vision isn’t intimidating there’s a good chance that it’s insulting to God.’ The boldness of these two leaders has remained with me since, a holy nudge, so that when the task ahead seems immense I simply need to ask ‘is God scared yet?’

Morph-ing

Morph didn't use to be a verb, it was just a noun, but then it slowly changed into something else. Our small groups have had different names and branding - house groups, bible studies, home groups, cells, missional communities, the brotherhood of darkness (we didn't use that one in the end.) Our even smaller groups have morphed similarly - prayer triplets, prayer partners, life transformation groups, accountability groups. But my passion for small community life in the church is not that it conforms to one model, or has a particular name, or meets on the same night of the week, but simply that it happens.

Hopefully you are starting to notice that a priority this autumn at the Abbey is to strengthen our small community life and broaden its range. Change is already well under way; we are morphing in the light of God (apologies, yes I know that was really, really bad.) Three groups have already emerged with a fresh focus on theology, marriage and the creative arts. There are new welcome and discipleship groups at our 4pm service and our new 10.30am daytime home group is growing well. Some groups are meeting monthly, others fortnightly and some weekly. Some are studying John's gospel to accompany our autumn series, others aren't. Some groups will last for ever; others will last for a season. We don't want a utopian conformity in how we meet together but a realistic diversity. In the midst of this flexibility we are seeing new life emerge and already 50-60 people have reconnected to small community life. 

And when we disagree with someone, or don't like the carpet of our homegroup host, or get bored with X saying the same thing every week and Y doing their irritating prayers, we would do well to think on these words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer from his Life Together:

Christian community means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. There is no Christian community that is more than this, and none that is less than this. Whether it be a brief single encounter or the daily community of many years, Christian community is solely this. We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ.

There is a profound and liberating simplicity to what Bonhoeffer says, community life is at the foot of the cross. Life together, it seems, is unchanging, profoundly uninfluenced by culture, chemistry, tradition and dynamics; life together is founded simply on Christ. But life together does change as it grows, and it grows as we join in and grow up together.

You can find more information at abbeysmallcommunities.blogspot.co.uk , where you will also find discussion starters from our Sunday talks on John’s gospel. Please contact Sandie in the Parish Office if you'd like to get involved in any way.

Usain Bolt at Malmesbury Abbey

I'm sure he was there somewhere?!

P.S. This was to illustrate a sermon about John the Baptist pointing to Christ, not just mindless frivolity (like most weeks.)

Moderately Important

"One must keep on pointing out that Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important."  CS Lewis

I bumped into this quotation from Christian Apologetics at the back end of the summer and I must confess I didn’t like it very much at all. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with it, I agree with CS Lewis as a default setting – the sum of my life’s thinking wouldn’t be a fair exchange for a half-decent paragraph of Lewis. What I didn’t like was it’s diagnosis of my spiritual condition, a soul drifting in the summer sun and allowing the crucial to become the peripheral and vice versa. There is nothing particularly wrong with Test Match Special and a glass of Rioja, but perhaps they shouldn’t be allowed to define us.

But having put on my hair shirt and thwacked myself a few times as penance, I noticed the first six words of the quotation above which are often omitted when repeated elsewhere – ‘one must keep on pointing out’. At some time in my past, and possibly yours, there was a season when my innermost being realised that to follow Christ was of infinite importance, life was (gloriously) different from that moment on. There have been various dark times since, and undoubtedly there will be in the future, but at no point have I concluded that Christianity was of no importance, I think that would be too recognisable as a dimension of the spiritual battle. But if I’m honest, living at times as if following Christ was of moderate importance is something I can be fairly accused of. Cranmer, in the Book of Common Prayer, would have us confess our sins of negligence, weakness and deliberate fault. We tend to put our hands up to the deliberate fault stuff – sorry, O Lord, that I kickest the cat verily–  but it’s harder to recognise that subtle negligence and weakness, and it is in this we reduce Jesus Christ to moderate importance. CS Lewis identifies this not as a one-off problem, but as a condition of the church that frequently needs pointing out.

So I point it out to myself again, and I point it out to my brothers and sisters at Malmesbury Abbey, that this isn’t and never was moderately important. And it crucially matters that we make very effort to stay spiritually alive and well this autumn. How vicar? I’m not sure that there is anything new under the sun really: simply engaging each week in corporate worship, serving together in ministry and mission, and allowing some space in our (daily) lives to meet with God, will go a long way to rescue us from moderation. And also not kidding ourselves that spiritual consistency and growth will happen between now and Yule unless we actually make changes to effect it.

‘Who do you say I am?’

Leadership 101: Height

It’s hard to oversee something when you’re crawling underneath it.

In the autumn of 2011 I was granted a three month sabbatical by my Bishop, Extended Study Leave to step back from the relentlessness of ordained ministry, to refresh my thinking on leadership, and to count the grains of sand on an Australian beach. Returning in January 2012 one of the surprising benefits of this disengagement was height. I understand leadership in the church (or anywhere really) to involve the overseeing of people and their life together, both their well-being and their direction - seeing both over and beyond, pastoral and prophetic. But it’s really hard to oversee something when you’re crawling underneath it, and over months and years the organisational dimensions of the pastoral and prophetic can gradually drag you in, making the over-seeing harder and eventually impossible to achieve – effectively ministering as an underseer. (I think I just invented a word.)

I was reminded of this as I crawled over the line this summer, a bit like the injured Olympian I’d seen on the BBC who bravely chose to finish the race even though one of her leg muscles was clearly shot to bits. Breaks from work this year had been curtailed because of significant pastoral matters and early-August was an oasis that couldn’t come soon enough. I was beginning to think that in the Kingdom of Heaven the out of office reply is always on and the answer machine whispers soothingly ‘leave that call to me, you go back to that nice dark room, vicar.’

But two weeks later I have height again. Was it the day on the beach, the lengths in the local pool, the new instalment in the Batman trilogy, or even the theology I enjoyed reading on a sunny, peaceful afternoon? All really, I guess. I think this regained height is a form of the practical, prophetic wisdom which the monk Thomas Merton references:

Frenzy destroys our inner capacity for peace,

it destroys the fruitfulness of our work

because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

Although we don’t really do ‘frenzy’ in Wiltshire I like his point. His 'root' is my 'height'. I feel taller, I can see differently and I remember two bits of advice which I pass on. First, Bill Hybels saying that the best gift a leader can give to their church is a fully rested and energised self. And secondly, Jason Bourne in Robert Ludlum’s the Bourne Supremacy who points out helpfully to those of us engaged in a spiritual battle that ‘Rest is a weapon.’