From the Registers

Funerals

0th October. St. Wilfrid, Kirby Knowle. Ethel Harker, 91, lately of Boltby. With so many years of life, there is much history in the background with Upsall and Boltby, and a large spread of family to whom we pass our best wishes.

November 2001 - Our good wishes to Toddy and Liz on the birth of their baby boy!

On Working Practice: should Deaneries operate as a Minster based on the Market Town Churches? This Minster Model is not new - my predecessor at Felixkirk advocated it 25 years ago. However, it is seriously flawed - clergy are not trained to it, nor indeed called to it. Holy huddles exist by vocation - monasteries, convents, communities etc. Beyond them, how much harmony exists in the cathedral close, the team ministry etc., and will participants actually turn up for morning and evening offices? It is hard to instil such a discipline at theological college! 

The paper provokes thought but provokes also the real question - Who are the clergy serving! We are there to serve - literally as deacons - not pursue grandiose ideas of our own convenience. Some ministering may be possible in Middlesbrough but in rural areas it is essential that clergy live their faith amongst people. Anglicanism is still conservative with a big C: maybe folk do not want to travel on Sundays. To get people to church once a fortnight is quite an achievement. More especially people need a continuity of a relationship for ministry to work. Some services may only be irregular or once a month.

Units of cover by clergy should be of such a size that they can cover it well and thoroughly. When familiar perhaps then they can stretch more widely elsewhere. There should be sufficient to be busy but not overstretched or rushed - three services on a Sunday is more than enough. Thus a group may be a Market Town, or Town + 1 or a group of four churches. This will leave some parishes fallow c/o churchwardens and what little others can regularly do, i.e. a parish priest may find it possible to do one service on a regular Sunday per month outside his parish. In due course a clergyman may buy a house or retire to a fallow village to give priestly cover. Often those fallow months encourage church growth and leadership. We may reach the time soon when clergy will be buying their own houses anyway and market forces, tempered by vocation, will dictate where ministry happens in future. If a team is to delegate pastoral care of a cluster of villages to one person then he/she might as well live there.

The clergy house needs to be private enough for callers, and peaceful and large enough for the meetings necessary to parish life. For most communities the town or village church is their focal point of identity, even though they may only refer to it through rites of passage. There is an irony in that the legal requirement is to maintain the fabric not pay the vicar. Many churches will gently continue, and using them as much as possible will ensure this. Where 2 or 3 gather together can be more valuable than the effort of trekking off to join a holy huddle in town. Besides, historically the clergy have often been the voice of rural England - and the more so now with FMD. To remove rural parish clergy is to leave the countryside mute, yet rural ministry is often nearer the Biblical idiom of parables and country life. Yes, the towns may have high profile schemes for homelessness and drug centres and unmarried mothers, but we do need to remain "earthed" as well. In rural areas clergy have to visibly live their faith and this is what people want to see.

Place is important in the Bible and the Gospels as it roots events to the reality of our idiom. Indeed nothing was more helpful to me during ordination training than having seen the place some years previously, in the early 70s, on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Yet Jesus did not root our Christian faith in an earthly place: he was born here, worked there, lived elsewhere and died somewhere else. The only Kingdom he preached, integral to the Lord's Prayer, was the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven. However, as earthly people we need roots. My Holy Land pilgrimage was not possible without a spiritual home at the time - St Bride's, Fleet Street. Thus, despite upheaval, change and chance we need to relate to a place in order "to be". Whatever suggestions are in the air, the parish church offers that earthing with faith through festivals and rites of passage. The challenge is: How much more can we find in our lives for which to be thankful, for which to pray, or which to recognise as a need for for the cleansing of Confession? If Christ is our true reference point in one sense we don't need any other place, but we do need a focal point for gathering and expressing our faith. If our churches were that vibrant we would not need alternative suggestion of pattern of ministry ....

Think on, as they say. Having finished our round of Harvest Festivals we begin to consider the festival of Christmas beyond the simplicity of Advent. In such a material world, where Christmas may get lost in the wrapping paper, there is a simple earthly beauty in the harvest gifts which expresses so much of our life and dependence upon God. If we streamline out of our church life the rural touch - and contact with our earthly roots - the town church will never find it. How much poorer we would be then! The richness of the Church of England is in its widespread embrace of the whole of life and all places .............. Floreat our local church!

T H

Women Doing Excellently:

Speaking to Influence the Powerful Catherine of Siena, 1347 - 1380

Catherine, daughter of a local Siena dyer, is known to have dedicated her life to Christ at a very early age. But for another ten years she was not able to make any public pledge or vow. When she was 15, the question of her marriage came up - from her family's point of view a desirable handing over of the responsibility for her well-being and her keep. She refused to consider this, and her father did not press it.

Two years later she was given the opportunity, as a lay-woman, to join the Third Order of Dominicans. In that Order she learned to read and write - a very great asset not widely available to girls, and specially rare for girls of humble origin. But this was not the climax of her story. At 21 she was convinced that she must leave the solitary life. She was a literate, mature woman, and her first urgent ministry was when Siena was afflicted in 1374 by the Black Death. In this crisis she was listened to, for she knew her people: she identified with them: she was one of them. Not only the humble folk listened. She found the Church in Siena, and beyond, in a state of internal division with faction right at the highest echelon of leadership. Two Popes contended for the highest office, each with a powerful supporter in the secular world. Since 1309 the Popes had found Avignon a far pleasanter place to live in than Rome. Catherine urged Gregory XI to return to Rome, but she found him a man lacking in the firm and convincing qualities that she herself so plainly possessed.

At his death began the Great Schism (this only ended in 1417, by which date Catherine had long since passed into history). She wrote also to those who waged the war - Charles V of France - in terms of rebuke, words which in her letters to Gregory are softened into encouragement. MIRIAM HANSON

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