PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

DIOCESAN CONFERENCE

SEPTEMBER 2016

Although I had shared it with no one except Hilary, when I

gave last year’s presidential address, I intended it to be my last

one. This year is definitely my last one as you now all know. To

be honest, I had no intention of going on much beyond my 65th

birthday but partly for personal and partly provincial reasons, I

am still here – “Yma o hyd” as the Dafydd Iwan folk song has it.

And as I look back, as all old men are prone to do, I want

to say thank you to you as a diocese for all the changes and

challenges you have been willing to embrace. The diocese is a

very different diocese today, simply because of you. It almost

seems like a different era. When I came, there were very few

diocesan officers and they were treated with suspicion because

clergy felt that to ask them in to help was an admission of

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failure. Now we have many officers, all with their own

expertise, who are in and out of parishes the whole time,

helping not just with buildings and finance but with church

growth, discipleship, youth and children’s work, collaborative

ministry as well as the personal development of clergy in their

own ministries. That is as it should be – we depend on one

another. That is what it means to belong to the Body of Christ -

a body with many limbs and members, all working together for

the common good.

Any individual and any institution if they are to flourish

and grow have to be willing to accept change and we have

done so in terms of our structures, our finances, our

committees and our willingness to take seriously the need for

ministry areas. As one of the clergy in a ministerial

development comment put it “We are beginning to change

from the expectation that the vicar is the chaplain to a gathered

community, to being a resource for equipping and enabling all

God’s people in their own ministries”. Of course, we have a

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long way to go - we will always have a long way to go – that is

the nature of Christian discipleship and cultural change takes a

long time to bed in.

Seven Sacred Spaces has helped us all to deepen our own

understanding of the faith, enabling us to engage with and

serve our communities in new and imaginative ways and

helped us to grow the church so that others may be drawn in to

the life of faith. 7SS built on the course “Exploring Faith” in

which hundreds if not thousands were involved. The diocese

offers many courses on a whole host of things - bereavement,

parenting, safeguarding and prayer to name but a few.

Ministry areas are being set up across the diocese. Each

one will be different, depending on the particular locality and

particular circumstances of each community but not setting one

up is not an option since the Governing Body has passed

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resolutions to that effect. I have been asking each deanery

questions such as:

1. Identify groupings for working as potential Ministry Areas

within your Deanery – what rationale did you use for

this?

2. What characteristics did you identify for Ministry Areas in

your Deanery? (e.g. lay and ordained leadership, ministry

finance, resources, collaboration, mission, community

development etc.)

3. What will be different in terms of mission and ministry?

4. What do you see as the role at the Diocese in the

formation of Ministry Areas?

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The united parish of Pontypridd summed up the definition of a

ministry area perfectly. It said:

“A Ministry Area will encompass those communities which form

part of an area where the responsibility for leading, growing,

encouraging and enabling mission and ministry is shared by a

Ministry Team.

Sharing mission and ministry amongst all God’s people is at the

heart of our diocesan vision. We have inherited a culture and

model of ministry which is individualistic. “Going into ministry”

meant only one thing – ordination and a career as a Parish

Priest. It’s a bit like an engine at the front, pulling a train of

carriages. There are only so many carriages that you can hitch

to the back before the train stops completely!

So models of leadership need to change with:

Clergy being both facilitators and leaders of teams, which

include lay and ordained members.

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All members of the team offering and sharing their God

given gifts together, supporting, encouraging and learning

from each other.

Ministry teams having a shared responsibility for mission

and ministry, between lay and ordained.

The role of the leader is to make working together happen.

Teams working together release gifts, creativity, energy and

make a difference for the good of the community and the

church.

What of our rich tradition of ordained ministry for some people

fear that a strategy of collaboration will undermine past ideals

and weaken pastoral care. This is not so. The sharing of

ministry, with lay and ordained working together, will

strengthen church life and witness in the community.”

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Bishops by the very nature of their ministry can see what is

happening across the diocese. Between us, Bishop David and I

are probably in around at least six parishes a week for one

reason or another – taking confirmations, licensing new

ministries, preaching for special events, and filling in when

parishes need an incumbent, apart from visits to organisations

or parish centres.

We conduct ministerial reviews with others, of all the

clergy, and therefore have an overview of the whole Church.

Many organisations in our society would collapse were it not

for the involvement of Christians and it is wonderful to see the

diocese involved in messy church, food banks, dementia cafes,

community gardens, helping and offering advice on issues

around debt, helping people to complete job applications and

setting up credit unions and community shops.

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Some may ask what has all this to do with the Gospel?

Quite simply, the Gospel challenges us to be involved whenever

there is human need of any kind and at the hurting points of

our society. And out of all this, a new church is beginning to

emerge, a church that is willing to take risks, willing to

experiment, willing to fail and willing to engage with all kinds of

people and organisations so that the values of the Gospel are

lived out. In many places, churches too are experimenting with

different forms of worship.

I know that numbers in terms of electoral rolls, average

attendees and Easter and Christmas communicants are down in

this diocese as well as the rest of the province, and we are

trying to address these issues in lots of ways. But people are

engaging with the Church and the Church is engaging with the

world in different ways from our predecessors, and you can

never tell what a single act of kindness or the effect of a

sympathetic word can have. Not one of us needs to look for a

ministry – it is available to us in front of our eyes.

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As I have said, there is a gap between our average

attendees and electoral roll numbers. We need to bridge that

gap so that we are not starting cold or from scratch but with

people who say they want to belong but actually do not. The

way we engage with people during important and critical

moments of their lives can make a huge difference to them and

to us and the way we deal with organisations who want to use

our buildings and facilities can make an impression for good or

ill.

Of course we need intentional evangelism where we invite

people to come and worship and Bishop David will talk about

that later and we need to talk about our faith but we also need

to realise, as those of us who went to the Clergy School at

Oxford earlier in the year were told, (one of the best if not the

best school we have had) that not everything can be quantified

and assessed. How can you gauge the effect of a bereavement

visit or time spent visiting an old people’s home or time spent 9

with a mother and toddler’s group? And here I am talking

about all our ministries, not just those of the clergy. The

answer is you cannot. The Kingdom of God grows like a seed in

the ground, initially in a small way and very often all we can do

is plant such seeds and leave the harvest to others and to God.

Quick results are not always possible and it is also a fact that we

who do the ministering are very often those who are

ministered to.

You can see what I mean in encounters with children. We

think we are their teachers. They very often teach us. When I

once asked a class of children why I wore a slate cross,

expecting the answer that since I had once been a bishop of a

diocese with slate mines that was why, one little boy said that

the thing with slate is that you could wipe it clean every

morning and start again as you could in your relationship with

God. Totally unprompted my three grandchildren, after a

service one Sunday morning in August in the Cathedral said that

before they went to have squash and biscuits, they wanted to

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go and light a candle for granny because she was with God.

Having done so, Izzy aged six said in a serious voice “Now that

we are here, we might as well light another candle.” For

whom?” I asked. “For my three dead fish” she replied solemnly

and that’s what we did. And Bishop David tells the story of a

young child who said that prayer was being kissed by God.

And as you will know from the GB in September, and as

you will read in my letter in Croeso next month, the Church in

Wales has decided that baptism is the full and complete rite of

initiation and that nothing else is necessary for them to receive

communion. Anyone who is therefore baptised, whatever their

age, can receive the sacrament if they so wish, without the

prior need for confirmation, instruction or full understanding,

for which one of us fully understands what it means to receive

the Body and Blood of Christ?

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Why has this been decided and what happens to

confirmation? There is no doubt that in the early Church,

baptism, Eucharist and first communion happened at the same

time. From about the fifth century, the Church in West (but not

the Church in the East) separated the sacrament of baptism (in

which a person becomes a member of the Body of Christ) from

the ceremony of confirmation, when the bishop as chief pastor

welcomed the newly baptised, laid hands upon them

(confirmation) and gave them communion for the first time.

From the thirteenth century it became the custom for no-

one to be allowed to receive communion without first having

been confirmed. So the three ceremonies which the early

Church had held together, were separated and so the pattern

with which we are familiar was established, namely baptism in

infancy, confirmation at puberty with people being enabled at

that point to receive communion. The fact is however that

theologically speaking, once a person is baptised, he or she is a

member of the Body of Christ, incorporated into Him and

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logically what that means is the privilege of being able to

receive communion. In other words, nothing except baptism is

required to become a communicant.

In the light of all this, the Bishops have decided that from

this Advent Sunday, we are giving permission for all who are

baptised to receive Holy Communion, except of course that no-

one should be obliged to receive if they do not wish to do so.

That is a personal decision for each individual but no barrier

should be erected to prevent anyone who is baptised from

receiving communion. Confirmation then becomes not the

gateway to communion but the response of those baptised, if

they wish to do so, to affirm their faith as members of the

Church and as a commissioning for serving God’s Church and

world.

This is not such a huge change as some people may think.

Since 2002, we have admitted children to Holy Communion, on

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an experimental basis, without first confirming them. We are

now recognising that since baptism is biblically and

theologically complete in itself as initiation into the Body of

Christ, we ought not to deny communion to all who are

baptised.

The Rev’d Dr Jeremy Duff, the Principal of St Padarn’s

wrote to me after I said all this at the GB saying “A great joy in

my last parish was sharing communion with children and seeing

children growing in faith from their earliest years. It was also a

joy seeing children receiving and over following months

bringing their parents and siblings to the church and those

parents finding faith. The Kingdom of God does not just belong

to children – they are key to the advancing of the kingdom and

are evangelists by nature.” Amen to that I say and we know

that Jesus said that “unless we become as children, we cannot

enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

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You will also have read comments about my presidential

address to the GB. The aim there was not so much to speak

about same sex relationships but the wider question of how do

we read the Bible and how do we discover God’s will by paying

serious attention to Scripture. In other words, what is Scripture

and how do we handle it in looking at various issues that

confront us?

You will be pleased to know that I am not going to repeat

anything I said in that speech. I only want to say something I

did not say and which as Christians we take for granted but

sometimes fail to realise its significance. We do not worship

the Scriptures but God and Jesus, to whom the Scriptures bear

witness. For us, Jesus is the Word of God – the one in whom

God is made supremely manifest and the Bible, especially the

New Testament, bears witness to that truth.

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Bishop Rowan puts it all very succinctly: “God through the

Bible is saying “This is how people heard me, saw me,

responded to me; this is the gift I gave them; this is the response

they made ……. ” He went on to say “If in that story we find

accounts of the responses of Israel to God that are shocking or

hard to accept, we do not have to work on the assumption that

God likes those responses. For example, many of the early

Israelites in the Old Testament clearly thought it was God’s will

that they should engage in ethnic cleansing, that they should

slaughter without mercy the inhabitants of the Promised Land.

Does that mean God approves of genocide? If God does, that is

hideously at odds with what the biblical story as a whole seems

to say about God and the teaching of Jesus.”

We read the Bible in the light of the life, death and

resurrection of Jesus and, says Bishop Rowan, “reading the

Bible involves coming to recognise patterns of faithful and

unfaithful responses to God in the light of Jesus. In Jesus we see

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the terrifying compassion of God breaking through”. Anything

less than that will not do.

Which is why I have said what I have said about refugees.

The Christian faith compels us to affirm the dignity of every

human being and to offer help to anyone in need. Britain has

always in the past shown generosity, kindness, solidarity and

decency to those facing persecution, even at times of greater

deprivation and difficulty than the present time. In May this

year, in a survey by Amnesty International, 83% of Britons said

they would welcome refugees into their neighbourhoods and

households. Under the present immigration rules, a British

doctor of Syrian origin could not bring her parents from a

refugee camp in Lebanon even though they were refugees and

she could support and house them. A Syrian child who arrived

alone in the UK could not bring his parents from a refugee

camp in Jordan even if the child was a recognised refugee and

his parents were also refugees. Families in these situations can

currently be reunited only by resorting to desperately unsafe

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irregular journeys, sometimes ending in avoidable tragedies.

All the main humanitarian aid and refugee agencies have

adopted four refugee principles:

1. That the UK should take a fair and proportionate

share of refugees – those within Europe and those

outside it.

2. Safe and legal routes to the UK and Europe need to

be established.

3. Safe and legal routes within Europe should be

established.

4. There needs to be access to fair and thorough

procedures to determine eligibility for international

protection wherever it is sought.

We have to remember that refugees are people fleeing for

their lives, without any means of support. Countries around

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Syria have taken in vast number of refugees – Turkey 1.9

million, Lebanon 1.1 million and Jordan 630,000 – countries

that are far less prosperous than ours and we are discussing

whether 20,000 is too many, and we are certainly not on track

even to meet the Government’s commitment to resettle 20,000

Syrians by 2020. The United Nations estimates that at the end

of 2015, 65 million people were refugees or asylum seekers –

that is more than the total population of the UK. We, as a

church, have a crucial role to play in trying to eliminate

expressions of hatred and xenophobia which seem to be on the

increase.

What of European migration? After the vote to leave the

European Union, many European nationals already living and

working in this country have become fearful of what might

happen to them and that has not been helped again by hateful

comments against immigrants. Many who have lived and

worked in this country for years have said that they have

suddenly felt unwelcome.

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The Prime Minister has said that the Brexit vote means

that Britain does not want the free movement of labour to

continue in the way that it has done in the past and that there

must be controls of movement of people coming in from the

European Union. In fact, of the 270,000 EU migrants who came

to the UK in 2015, 200,000 came with a job offer and in 2013-

14 paid £3.1billion in tax – five times more than they received

in benefits. They are, in other words, net contributors to the

British economy and our Health Service would be in a parlous

state without them both in terms of not having the more

mundane and menial tasks done but also in terms of fewer

doctors and consultants, many of whom are Europeans.

The Christian faith is about loving God and our neighbours

and it is often in and through our neighbours, be they far or

near, that we encounter God. The face of God comes to us in

many guises but according to the Bible it is encountered

especially in the poor and the strangers within our gates.20

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