house of bishops Archives - Bishop Steven's Blog

On 9 February 2023, the General Synod approved the motion brought by the House of Bishops as the next step in the Living in Love and Faith process.

As you will have seen the motion laments our failure as a church to welcome LGBTQI+ people; welcomes the decision of the House of Bishops to draw up new pastoral guidance to replace Issues in Human Sexuality and looks forward to the House of Bishops further refining, commending and issuing the Prayers of Love and Faith. You can find the full text of the amended motion here.

The Synod debate was demanding. Many of our Oxford representatives spoke at different points and reflected different points of view. All spoke graciously and clearly. My own contribution to the debate came near the beginning.

I welcome Synod’s decision as will many across the diocese. Some will be disappointed that the proposals were not able to go further than offering Prayers of Love and Faith and new guidance. Others will believe that the Bishops and the Synod have gone too far.

It is clear from the voting in the Houses of Clergy and Laity that whilst a majority are in favour of moving forward in this way, there remains a substantial minority opposed to change for a variety of reasons, and this is reflected in our own diocese.

The debate in the Synod chamber was both passionate and respectful. Synod rose to the occasion. It was also an emotional debate. People laid themselves bare. There were tears afterwards on all sides.

Please hold in love and prayer those from our own diocese who took part and those who led on the debate nationally. You may want to express your appreciation for this task undertaken on behalf of the whole Church to the Synod representatives who are linked to your own deanery.

Most of the Oxford representatives met together two weeks before Synod in person, and we spent four hours together working through the agenda. I know everyone took their responsibilities extremely seriously. We were thankful for your prayers.

The House of Bishops were present in the Synod to listen, especially in the group work. In March we will return to the task of refining and developing the Prayers of Love and Faith and to developing new Pastoral Guidance.

At present we expect both texts to be ready in some form by the July meeting of the General Synod. It’s important to stress, for the moment, that nothing has changed in the Church of England’s pastoral practice, although we do now have a clear direction of travel from the Bishops and affirmed by the General Synod.

Locally and nationally we will continue to listen carefully as this process continues, including of course to LGBTQI+ people and their families. There will be mixed feelings: for many a sense of welcome progress combined with a weariness that the debate will need to continue and disappointment that the Church has not been able to offer the celebration of equal marriage.

As bishops we will also be listening carefully to clergy and churches which are not able in conscience to affirm same sex relationships. We are already in dialogue with a range of individuals and groups across the Diocese of Oxford on this. As I said in my speech to the General Synod:

“My vision for the Diocese of Oxford is that we will be a diocese where all are affirmed and cherished, where same sex relationships can be celebrated and those who hold the traditional view are honoured and respected”.

This will be a demanding vision to realise and each of us has a part to play. I think all of us will need space for some prayer and reflection after the sometimes intense conversation of the last few weeks.

I would encourage taking good time for this in every place locally – but also encourage everyone to wait for the eventual outcomes of the national process before making local decisions which might flow from these debates. The four bishops and all the senior team are very willing to be in dialogue.

Finally, I’ve been drawn more and more over recent weeks into the parable of the two sons in Luke 15. All of us, I am sure, want the whole Church to reflect the radical, inclusive love of the father for the younger son in that powerful moment of welcome caught in Rembrandt’s painting.

The father sees him coming from afar and runs to meet him. He puts his arms around him and kisses him. He calls for the best robe, for a ring for his finger and sandals for his feet. There is the most wonderful party.

But my own focus has been on the father at the end of Jesus’ story. The older brother stays outside the celebration. What does the father do? He humbles himself and goes outside to where his other son sits, hurting. He listens to him and urges him to come in.

There is no easy identification here of one group in the debate with the younger son and the other with the older. There are sisters and brothers in each part of this conversation who are bruised and hurt. Each of us might feel at any time as though we have left the party.

But those of us who are called to pastor the Church in this time are called to be like the father at this moment in the story: to go out to them and listen to the pain and, always, to offer the invitation to come and join the celebration. The father’s extraordinary humility and love should be our pattern.

We do not always know how to do this. We do not know the outcome of this part of the story in the gospel. But our calling to love beyond measure is absolutely clear. The Son who tells the story gave his life to draw us and all the world into a single new humanity.

With love in Christ in testing times,

+Steven
10 February, 2023

Image: Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn – Return of the Prodigal Son – Google Art Project

This text was first published as a letter to people in the Diocese of Oxford

A Presentation to the College of Bishops

13^th September, 2016.

The College of Bishops is the gathering of all the bishops of the Church of England. We met last week for two days with the Scottish, Welsh and Irish bishops. Each church presented something of their common life. I was asked to speak about Renewal and Reform from the perspective of the Church of England. My reflection is based on the story of Moses and Jethro told in Exodus 18.

In the story of the Exodus, after the crossing of the Red Sea, Moses leads the people of Israel through the desert to Sinai. His father in law Jethro comes to meet him. Jethro watches Moses at work as he struggles with the never-ending demands of leadership. The people stand around him from morning until evening bringing their disputes.

The Israelites have come out of Egypt and crossed the Red Sea. Moses is forming them into the people of God. But Moses is overwhelmed daily by the complexity and difficulty of his calling.

Jethro watches carefully and asks a very reasonable question: “What is this that you are doing for the people?” What exactly are you trying to achieve? Moses explains as best he can.

Jethro replies: “What you are doing is not good. You will surely wear yourself out both you and this people with you. For the task is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone”.

It’s good to have the opportunity to reflect together on Renewal and Reform as part of the Church of England’s contribution to this College of Bishops.

Renewal and Reform is a body of work which builds on 3 goals articulated by General Synod in 2010. To contribute as the national church to the common good, to facilitate the growth of the church in numbers and depth of discipleship and reimagine the church’s ministry. These goals emerged from a great deal of reflection on the mission of God over many years.

Renewal and Reform is grounded in hope in God’s purposes for the Church and the Kingdom. Our shared vision is

Helping enable the church to move to a place where:

Followers of Jesus are faithful witnesses to the transforming love of God
Churches are equipped to make and sustain disciples across all generations
All forms of church are able to have the ministry and leadership they need
Senior leadership is more representative and better equipped
The whole church can confidently communicate our faith in a digital age
The whole church is focussing greater energy on God’s mission

To help us get from here to there the Church has birthed around 7 different and related streams of work.

Resourcing the Future
Renewing Discipleship and Ministry
Lay Leadership
Evangelism
Discerning and Nurturing Future Leaders
Simplification
How the NCIs Work

Each of them has several streams within it. Scores of people are involved in each. Any one of them could occupy us for the whole time. I’m not proposing to explore them one by one this afternoon though feel free to raise questions about any of them.

Instead I want to take Jethro’s visit to Moses as a starting point and framework for what is happening now. In particular, I want to begin with the strains and demands and complexity of episcopal leadership. I identify very much with Moses’ dilemma in this passage. I am often overwhelmed by the complexity and difficulty of my calling. I sense that’s true of other bishops I meet across the United Kingdom though we don’t always find it easy to say that to each other. We are called to leadership in a moment of great cultural change.

We need wisdom from one another, from Scripture and from the world around us. The Fathers of the Church make a great deal of Jethro. Moses is receiving advice here from someone outside the people of God, from a priest of Midian. Truth is found and recognized outside as well as within the life of the Church.

Here the truth is that things are not working as they should. “What you are doing is not good”.

Renewal and Reform has been from the beginning a listening process. Those involved have tried to gather the perspectives of every diocese, to commission research, to gather data, to learn lessons from those outside the Church, to listen to different voices. We have especially tried to listen the voices of our senior lay leaders nationally and in dioceses.

Whilst there is a huge amount of good in the life of the Church and whilst we are deeply hopeful about the future, we also need to acknowledge:

significant and continuing decline and ageing in church attendance
significant decline in the number of available clergy
unsustainability of certain patterns of ministry
lack of strategic capacity in some dioceses
lack of leadership capacity to respond effectively to challenges
legal and cultural constraints and institutional inertias

The different elements in Renewal and Reform have been shaped to address exactly these concerns and build the foundations for a growing church in every region of England and for every generation.

Jethro watches and listens and offers Moses some advice. It would of course be simplistic to read across from Exodus 18 to our own situation. But there is an immense amount of wisdom to be drawn from this very short text. Jethro’s priorities are somewhere near the heart of what we are seeking to do, by the grace of God, in Renewal and Reform.

“Now listen to me. I will give you counsel and God be with you. You should represent the people before God, and you should bring their case before God” (19).

Jethro’s starting point is senior leadership. What are we trying to do? How are we trained, equipped and supported in our roles? What is our distinctive and necessary contribution? How can we better learn from one another and from others within our dioceses? How can we best be agents of grace and change and renewal? How do we invest in our senior leadership in the present and develop new leaders for the future.

To meet this need the Church of England has developed a new Senior Leadership programme for bishops and deans. We have developed a new way of identifying and preparing senior leaders for the future through a new learning community. We have run one inter diocesan learning community for senior teams in dioceses to reflect together and will run more over the coming years. We are developing a peer review process to build greater strategic capacity in dioceses and to support mutual learning. We have recognized the need to have a more diverse senior leadership in terms of ethnicity and we are taking steps to address this.

I’ve been part of a large cohort of 28 diocesan bishops on the senior leadership programme this year. It’s been a very positive learning experience. We have been exposed to the best of current thinking on leadership from the Jethro’s of their day. We have begun a conversation about how to apply all of this to the role of a bishop and we are resolved to continue that conversation.

Jethro’s second point is the critical role played by the communication of faith and teaching in the formation of the people of God.

“….teach them the statutes and instructions and make known to them the way they are to go and the things they are to do”.

Forming and sustaining disciples is key to the growth and life and health of the Church and the contribution we are able to make to society and to God’s world. As bishops and senior leaders we have an absolutely critical role to play as evangelists and teachers of the faith. The Bishops of the Northern Province are with us this week after sharing faith together over four days in the Diocese of Blackburn as part of the second Crossroads Mission there.

A major strand of Renewal and Reform is focussed on evangelism through the evangelism task group, through a new focus on digital evangelism and a new intiative on students and evangelism.

It is very clear that we need further research and reflection and action to encourage the renewal of discipleship: that we need to become more of a teaching and learning church in parishes and dioceses and nationally.

One strand of that work continues to be focussed on Pilgrim, the new resource for catechesis launched three years ago at this College.

There is some information about Pilgrim on the handout you were given as you came into the room. Over 130,000 copies of Pilgrim have now been sold. We know that at least one third of all Church of England clergy have used or are planning to use Pilgrim. Over 95% of users who responded to a recent survey a year go said they would run a second course and recommend it to others.

An American version of Pilgrim was published in April. We are now developing Youth Pilgrim.

We are also about to launch the new Pilgrim Catechism: a user friendly resource to help churches form disciples, developed by the four core authors of Pilgrim. We are aiming to produce this in digital and print form by Easter 2017 with all new interactive and video elements available free on line and in app form. This is a priority project for our new digital evangelism team.

We are hoping to bring together the best thinking and reflection about catechesis with the best digital communications thinking and invest to the right scale to make a lasting impact in our nation.

Jethro has a third strand to his Renewal and Reform initiative. He focuses first on senior leadership and then on the ministry of teaching and formation. His third strand is the renewal of discipleship and ministry. He says, remember, “You cannot do it alone”.

Jesus says “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the Harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field”.

“You should also look for able men among the people, men who fear God, are trustworthy and hate dishonest gain; set such men over them as officers over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens”.

In the present day, of course, we include women as well as men among those offering leadership. Jethro advocates a massive renewal and expansion of ministry within the people of God to enable their formation and equip them to live the life God intends, to be a blessing to God’s world.

Renewing Discipleship and Ministry is a major strand of renewal and reform. The emphasis is on lay leadership and ministry as well as the ministry of the ordained. There are task groups focusing on lay leadership and lay ecclesial ministries which are due to report in the next six months.

We know we need a different mix of gifts in our ordained ministry over the coming decades. Dioceses have told us they need clergy who will be missional, collaborative and adaptable.

We have begun a significant review of our selection criteria which is now in progress, engaging with all bishops through correspondence and regional meetings. You have on your chairs two handouts which are the latest step in that process. We asked bishops to tell us about priests who inspired them – there are six vignettes on the first handout. We asked bishops about what criteria they want to highlight for us. The second handout offers an initial summary. We are hoping the new criteria can be agreed in May of next year.

Every diocese is seeking to be a growing church with a growing ministry. Because of projected clergy retirements, that will not be possible on current trends.

We are therefore embarking on a major vocations initiative, seeking to raise the number of vocations to ordained ministry by 50% throughout the 2020’s. We want to see far greater numbers of candidates from minority ethnic backgrounds and far greater numbers of younger candidates, especially younger women.

We have carried out extensive research into effective practice in vocations and we are now beginning to make that known. Dioceses are increasing their investment in vocations teams. The initial signs are encouraging.

Following Jethro’s lead, I’ve focussed on resourcing senior leadership, on evangelism and discipleship and on renewing discipleship and ministry. Those are three strands only of Renewal and Reform.

Time would fail me to tell of work done to redistribute resources to areas of poverty and to mission development; of the excellent work being done to simplify our structures; of reshaping the funding of ministerial education; of the review of our national church institutions and so much more. By all means ask or comment on any of that.

We don’t believe we have everything sorted. There is an ongoing debate around most of these areas. We do understand that the outcome of it all is in God’s hands. We do understand that we are privileged to be living in a moment of change and opportunity for God’s mission.

Many others in the room are involved in these various strands of work and I hope that they will feel able to respond to questions and comments. We in the Church of England would greatly value the wisdom of colleagues elsewhere and your prayers as we seek to enable the Church to be a blessing to the nation and the world in the coming years.

Posts

A letter to the Diocese of Oxford

Listening to Jethro